Neither high winds nor power failures could throw the Camden International Film Festival far off course this year, as the annual nonfiction showcase executed a nimble pivot to accommodate a late-arriving guest: Hurricane Lee, which had weakened to become a post-tropical storm by the time it reached north coastal Maine halfway through its 19th edition. “We’ve been right in the middle of hurricane season for our very existence, but for a tropical storm to get as far north as it did and make landfall as close as it did was unique,” said Ben Fowlie, CIFF founder and artistic director. The […]
With the opening night of the 61st New York Film Festival upon us, Filmmaker would like to recommend 18 titles to catch during the 17-day engagement, which runs from September 29 through October 15. Over the course of our previous festival coverage from this year—including Sundance, Cannes, Venice and TIFF—many of these films have been featured on our site in critical dispatches and reviews. Below, we share links and edited excerpts from these director interviews and festival dispatches. Anatomy of a Fall Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner is more straightforward and more detour-prone than its courtroom drama premise—even if a […]
Here’s the first full trailer for Todd Haynes’s May December, which Netflix acquired at Cannes this year for a reported $11 million. At that time, contributor Blake Williams wrote that the “campy, provocative and sexy May December was the most fun I’ve had at this year’s festival, and stands as the filmmaker’s strongest work since Far from Heaven (2002), if not Safe (1995).” The film will show this Friday as the opening night selection for this year’s NYFF. May December will receive a limited release on November 17 prior to joining the streaming platform on December 1.
The inaugural edition of FILM FEST KNOX, set to take place in Knoxville this year from November 9 to 12, has announced the six titles that will be featured in its American Regional Film Competition section, designed to highlight work produced outside of New York and Los Angeles, including the sophomore directorial feature by 25 New Face of Film Graham Swon. From the press release: An Evening Song (for three voices) (Dir. Graham Swon) 86 minutes – Drama In the 1930s a former child-prodigy writer moves to the countryside with her pulp-fiction scribe husband where they become entwined in a love […]
After a few years away, Booker (Barrington Darius) makes a low-key return to his old South Central Los Angeles neighborhood—ducking relatives, reuniting with an old friend on a nondescript residential block, giving a ride to a middle-aged stranger waiting for a bus and running into a friend he hasn’t seen in a while, a possibly romantically charged encounter that closes the film. Throughout Dwayne LeBlanc’s Civic (currently streaming on the Criterion Channel), the camera’s rigorously locked-down gaze is almost exclusively confined to the interior of Booker’s car as he floats down the blocks that were once his home. The area […]
When Sue Ding and Sarah Garrahan began shooting Passersby in March 2019, they were both relatively recent Los Angeles transplants who wanted to explore the city. A nonfiction city portrait without an imposed narrative arc, the film charts its course by the daily lives of its characters, with the camera branching off from one proximate encounter to another. “If this is all based on chance encounters, we shouldn’t be the ones that decide where it starts,” Garrahan explains of the duo’s thinking at the time—so, they outsourced the decision to a geographic coordinate randomizer and ended up downtown, where they […]
Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall begins with no image, just sound: the click of a recording device being turned on and Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) asking, “What do you want to know?” Starting from this clearly symbolic opening line, the ensuing brief exchange foreshadows much. Sandra is an autofiction author whose work has generated controversy (her family objected to her first book, an event she dramatized in her second), so volunteering herself for interrogation by earnest graduate student Zoé (Camille Rutherford) isn’t merely an opportunity to provide biographical context but a risky invitation for moral scrutiny. Their conversation turns […]
On a hot July afternoon, a friend sent a video, a TikTok livestream, to a group chat, followed by a question: “What is this genre called?” A young man in a Spider-Man suit and hoodie was rhythmically swaying back and forth in a parking garage as he stared into the camera. He frequently broke his silence when he received a “gift” sent by one of the stream’s 2,000 viewers. Depending on the gift type, he repeated one of a few phrases, each with the same delivery: “Hey, thanks for the rose”; “Too much ice cream makes me cold”; “Nothing like […]
When the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) announced in spring 2020 that they would shutter, many in the independent film community were shocked. For 17 years, TFI had supported hundreds of filmmakers and projects, including underrepresented artists, through its Tribeca All Access program, as well as Latin American filmmakers and VR visionaries. At the time, TFI’s closure appeared to be the result of a unique case of pandemic skittishness combined with its parent organization’s increasingly for-profit ambitions. Rather than an outlier, it may have been a sign of things to come. Given the lingering effects of the COVID era and the […]
Set in Oregon, John Rosman’s debut feature New Life initially keeps its cards close to its chest. The opening shot of a bloodied, frantic woman looking for a place to hide implies someone dangerous is hot on her trail—but is she a victim or a wanted fugitive? Retrieving keys from the front steps of an empty house, the woman enters and finds an engagement ring that may or may not be hers. Within minutes, law enforcement arrives, and she’s back on the run, befriending anyone who will get her closer to the United States/Canadian border. A tale of two women—one […]