The Overlook Film Festival announces today the films that won both Jury and Audience Awards during the 2023 edition. The seventh iteration of the horror-fueled festival took place from March 30 through April 2 in New Orleans, featuring over 50 films from 12 countries. This was an especially vital year for the festival, boasting 45 sold out screenings, 110 filmmaker guests appearing in-person and approximately 5,000 audience members in attendance. Two feature films were granted Audience Awards this year: first place went to Australian filmmakers Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes ’70s TV talkshow spoof Late Night with the Devil. The […]
Another trailer drops today for a film featured in our most recent issue, this time for the docu-fiction hybrid Dry Ground Burning from directors Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós. This is the first film that Pimenta and Queirós have co-directed together, but the duo previously collaborated on Queirós’s 2017 film Once There Was Brasilia, which employed Pimenta as the cinematographer. Vadim Rizov wrote about the film during TIFF back in September: The plot revolves around two half-sisters who get involved in manufacturing and distributing gas illegally, and its title is a description, not a metaphor—the fuel’s potency is demonstrated to […]
If there’s one thing pandemic shutdowns have proven over these past few years, it’s that (far too) many film festivals can just as easily be covered online. (Do I really need to hop on a plane and into a faraway cinema to view the latest Netflix Original?) That, thankfully, is not the case when it comes to the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, now in its 20th year and still one of the most punk rock rebellious events around, as evidenced by e.g. the fest’s decision this edition (March 15-26) to team up with Kunsthal Charlottenborg, the palatial contemporary art […]
Featured in our recent Spring Issue, Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest now has an official trailer. The film premiered last year during Berlinale’s Encounters section, where Schäublin won Best Director. It went on to screen at TIFF, the New York Film Festival and the Viennale, among several other international festivals. Unrest will open via KimStim on May 5 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York City and May 19 at Laemmle Monica Film Center in Los Angeles. An official synopsis for the film reads: New technologies are transforming a 19th-century watchmaking town in Switzerland. Josephine (Clara Gostynski), a young […]
After a whole assortment of Barbies (and the actors who’ll play them) were announced earlier today, a full-length trailer has landed for Barbie. Directed by Greta Gerwig (her follow-up to 2019’s Little Women) and co-written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (partners and frequent collaborators, most recently on Baumbach’s White Noise), the film will hit theaters this summer. Margot Robbie stars as the titular Mattel toy icon, with Ryan Gosling embodying her long-term boyfriend, Ken. While Robbie and Gosling appear as the Barbie and Ken blueprints, an ensemble cast will portray several different iterations of Barbie—like a mermaid (Dua Lipa), Nobel […]
On this special episode, we’re talking all about voice! Neda Lahidji is an actor, singer, vocal health coach, voice teacher and a certified vocal health first aider. She specializes in the voices and vocal health of actors, VO actors, and singers, including any vocal athletes in the film industry as well as directors who use their voice tremendously throughout production. She talks about the different factors that affect the voice, gives us techniques to help maintain a vocal athlete’s optimal vocal health, shares her own stories of various vocal ups and downs, explains why it’s almost all mental, and much […]
The tongue-in-cheek title card for The Doom Generation—“a heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki”—isn’t merely an enduring “fuck you” to homophobes. Amid a sexless and puritanical American film landscape, coupled with an equally regressive online discourse on whether sex scenes in films are ever truly necessary, the emphasis on a sexual movie by Gregg Araki, regardless of orientation, transmits a much-needed erotic jolt. Newly restored in a 4K director’s cut, with grisly moments previously nixed for an Araki-unapproved R-rated cut now restored, The Doom Generation follows a trio of heartthrobs on a road trip from hell. After a night out clubbing, teen […]
Agnès Godard films the opening sequence of her fifth collaboration (following four features and a short) with writer-director Ursula Meier, The Line (La Ligne), in static slow motion: Margaret (Stéphanie Blanchoud) hits her mother (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), who falls and collides against the keys of her own piano, rendering her deaf in the impacted ear. A restraining order charges the eldest daughter not to come within 200 meters of her mother—an invisible boundary she immediately ignores with abrasive attempts to make amends until her younger sister paints a literal perimeter around the house. Margaret hovers at a little hill at one end […]
New Directors/New Films, the annual showcase of work by emerging directors co-presented by the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, began this week in New York City and runs through April 9. The 2023 slate features 27 features and 11 shorts, most of them culled from top-tier festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, and Rotterdam. As always, ND/NF’s offerings are global in scope, with over 30 countries represented, and the programmers remain admirably committed to arthouse aesthetics: conventional genre films and commercially minded crowd-pleasers are thin on the ground here. This is a festival for audiences willing […]
Today, NEON exclusively premieres a nearly 14-minute featurette with Filmmaker on the making of Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin’s experimental folk horror film Enys Men. Jenkin and the film’s star, Mary Woodvine, take viewers behind the scenes of the shoot and detail their individual processes while making the film. In his review out of Cannes, Blake Williams summarized the film’s loose plot and stylistic leanings: Set in 1973, Enys Men (Cornish for “Stone Island” and is pronounced—if I recall correctly—AYN-is Mayn) is an image-forward movie drenched in the kind of dense, thick film grain you can find in e.g. the work of Ben Rivers or […]