From robot-inflicted deaths (2018’s The Truth About Killer Robots) to the rise of Donald Trump through Russian state-sponsored media (2018’s Our New President), Maxim Pozdorovkin recently has taken some unconventional routes down the darkest of rabbit holes. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the Russian-American filmmaker’s latest, The Conspiracy, closing this year’s DOC NYC, is both artistically inventive (featuring evocative animation seamlessly wed with archival imagery) and downright chilling. With a powerful score and big names such as Liev Schreiber (Trotsky) and Jason Alexander (Max Warburg) added to the mix, Pozdorovkin weaves together the interwar stories of three prominent Jewish families: […]
[Tel Aviv, Israel, November 15, 2022] – Artlist, the industry-leading creative technology company, announced the consolidation of its services under one ultimate creative bundle that provides creators with music, sound effects, stock footage, templates, plugins and editing software. Since its founding in 2016 as a music licensing company, Artlist has continuously worked to expand its catalogs and services. The first expansion move was to launch the stock footage site Artgrid in the spring of 2019. In 2020, they released a vast catalog of high-quality sound effects. The third move was the acquisition of digital assets marketplace Motion Array, and the […]
The title of the new film Causeway refers to the 24-mile strip of road that cuts over Lake Pontchartrain to connect the New Orleans suburbs of Mandeville and Metairie, a thoroughfare holding the honor of the world’s longest bridge over water. It’s the site of a formative trauma for James (Brian Tyree Henry), one of two rudderless souls drifting through Lila Neugebauer’s low-key drama; convalescing Afghanistan vet Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) is the other. They tentatively come together for the sort of downbeat healing not uncommon in the American indie, the process’s credibility bolstered by a lucid, precise awareness of the […]
Longtime AD Gregory Jacobs took over the director’s chair for Magic Mike XXL, but Steven Soderbergh is back to hammer home Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the third (and final, all involved swear) part of the Magic Mike series. The film is out February 10, 2023—”just in time for Valentine’s Day,” the advertising copy notes.
One of the more unusual projects to play this year’s DOC NYC (also concurrently screening at IDFA in the Best of Fests section), Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski’s The Hamlet Syndrome follows five young men and women as they develop an experimental stage piece based on Shakespeare’s tragedy—as well as their own. The quintet questioning “to be or not to be” are all Ukrainians who have been engaged, to varying degrees, in the war Russia launched back in 2014. (This theater-as-therapy session even predated Putin’s full-scale invasion by several months.) Soldiers Slavik and Katya, along with paramedic Roman, all saw […]
Forget social and political issues—in documentaries, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the volcano. There was Sara Dosa’s exquisite Fire of Love (which I fell in love with back at CPH:DOX in March, also screening at DOC NYC), in which a pair of lovestruck vulcanologists are quite literally consumed by their passion. Now we have not one, but two volcano-centric films debuting at this year’s DOC NYC. While I’ve not seen Herzog’s (pre-festival premiering) The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, its title naming Dosa’s aforementioned protagonists, I’m guessing it’s likely the polar opposite of […]
You may know Grace Van Patten from Nine Perfect Strangers, Under The Silver Lake, or Tramps. I first took note of her in The Meyerowitz Stories, where her youth belied a seemingly effortless command of her character among the likes of Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Dustin Hoffman. In her latest, the hit Hulu series Tell Me Lies, she stars as Lucy Albright, and now she commands the screen with the same effortlessness, mixed with a complexity and nuance that is compelling viewers who are begging for a second season. On this episode, she breaks down one important scene from […]
Diana Bustamante’s Our Movie (Nuestra película) feels like both a departure and a homecoming for the Latin American producer credited on numerous Cannes winners, most recently Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Jury Prize-awarded (and Tilda Swinton-starring) Memoria. Comprised entirely of news footage from the Medellín-born Bustamante’s childhood—who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s when kidnappings, political assassinations and blood-soaked streets were as common as choir practice—the “essay documentary” is, as the producer/director puts it, “a collage of images, repetitions and memories, built through the intervention of the Colombian news archive.” And what a visceral collage it is—from closeups of bullet holes to a […]
Despite their dissimilar filmographies, I have great affection for both the arthouse friendly A24 and the drive-in exploitation of American International Pictures. That’s why I’m such a sucker for the story behind the making of A24’s Pearl, which follows AIP’s old philosophy that if you’re going to go to the trouble of hauling a cast and crew out to a remote location, you might as well make two pictures while you’re there. Pearl began life in a New Zealand hotel room in October of 2020. While in a government-mandated two-week quarantine ahead of making the 1970s-set horror film X, writer/director […]
Cinema Eye Honors, a leading awards body that celebrates nonfiction filmmaking, announced today its full list of nominees for 2022. Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love (Filmmaker’s summer issue cover) and Alex Pritz’s The Territory both lead with seven nominations each across several categories, including editing, cinematography, sound design, direction and Outstanding Nonfiction Feature. Other films with multiple nominations are Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (our recent fall issue cover), Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes and Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream, among others. Women are particularly well-represented among this year’s nominees, including five out of six filmmakers highlighted in […]