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Rotterdam 2024 Critic’s Notebook: A Spoiling Rain, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, Under a Blue Sun and 102 Narra
The International Film Festival Rotterdam has always been something of a grab bag. This year, at the 53rd edition, the Dutch festival showed 424 films across its various programmes — a reduction from past years due to widespread budget cuts. Still, 424 films (including 183 world premieres) is a mammoth undertaking for any one film critic at a major festival lacking an intuitive method of whittling down a schedule. This is especially true for international press less interested in the trickle-down from Cannes or Venice — Agniezka Holland’s audience award-winner Green Border, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, and Alice Rohrwacher’s La […]
by Beatrice Loayza on Feb 19, 2024 -
“That Kid Running from the Fire”: Director Reinaldo Marcus Green on Destiny, Devotion and Bob Marley: One Love
On your way up. Take me up. On your way down. I won’t let you down. — Robert Nesta Marley As a form, the biopic and even more specifically the musical biopic, is an often fraught endeavor, one whose pursuit brings its makers along well-worn paths of pitfalls and dead ends. With his fourth feature, Bob Marley: One Love, Reinaldo Marcus Green meets this challenge head on, capturing a vision of Marley in a time of great upheaval. In the 1970s, Jamaica was embroiled in turmoil — a result of staggering levels of poverty and political rivalries. In ‘76, through gang […]
by Evan Louison on Feb 15, 2024 -
(Redband) Trailer Watch: The Zellner Brothers’s Sasquatch Sunset
“You know animals are hairy?,” sang the Talking Heads David Byrne. “They say animals don’t worry…” Well, in David and Nathan Zellner’s Sasquatch Sunset, forthcoming from Bleecker Street Pictures, the latter statement is definitely not correct as the filmmakers — Filmmaker 25 New Faces from back in 2008 — wring wonder and joy but also anxiety and fear of encroaching humankind in their story of a family of Sasquatch living undetected in the wilds of Colorado. Bleecker Street’s redband trailer leans hard into Sasquatch sex while cleverly underlining that there’s name talent (Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough) in this movie. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2024 -
Trailer Watch: Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast
The U.S. trailer for Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast has arrived. The latest film from Bonello (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) marks his third collaboration with Léa Seydoux, who gives not one but three great performances across three different timelines. The Beast enters release on April 5, and our next issue will feature an interview with Bonello conducted by Michael Almereyda.
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 13, 2024 -
“Once in a While You Go, ‘My Vision is Enough’”: Scrambled‘s Leah McKendrick, Back To One, Episode 278
Leah McKendrick wrote, directed, and stars in the hilarious, super smart, and intensely personal new film Scrambled. It’s about a perpetual bridesmaid who, realizing she isn’t quite willing or able to settle down, decides to freeze her eggs. McKendrick doesn’t shy away from depicting her character’s sex life, the frustrations involving family and friends, and the true loneliness that enveloped her when she decided to do the same procedure in real life. It’s that rare film that will have you belly laughing one minute and crying hard the next. On this episode, we find out what elements were at play […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Feb 13, 2024 -
Robert M. Young, 1924-2024: A True Giant of American Independent Filmmaking
Robert M. “Bob” Young, often described in the film era of the 1980s as the godfather of American independent filmmaking, has died. His son Andy, himself an award-winning filmmaker, announced Young’s death on February 7th in a Facebook post: “He was a rebel in the industry, who made the films he dreamed of and lived the life he wanted, whether it was trekking through the Congo, swimming with sharks, or plumbing the depths of the human experience. He was 99 years old, and while the final years were sometimes tough for a guy who lived to do it all, he […]
by David Leitner on Feb 10, 2024 -
Doc (and Art-Film) Blocking: How Algorithmic Content Moderation is Hurting Indie Films
You have to look hard to find a trailer for the recent release of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, Estonia’s entry for this year’s Best International Feature Film category, on Facebook and Instagram — and forget about clips. Even though the lyrical documentary about women in an Estonian sauna has won numerous top prizes around the world—Best Directing at Sundance 2023; Best Documentary at San Francisco International; Best Documentary at the 2023 European Film Awards; Best Cinematography at IDFA 2024—many of the film’s artful moving images of women’s bodies were banned by Meta’s algorithms, and the U.S. distributor Greenwich Entertainment had to […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Feb 9, 2024 -
Karin Chien, Amy Hobby and Tabitha Jackson Are New Documentary Fellows at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center
Harvard’s Shorenstein Center announced today the three film professionals who comprise their Spring 2024 cohort of documentary film fellows. Producer and distributor Karin Chien, producer and former executive Amy Hobby, and former director of the Sundance Film Festival as well as Sundance’s Documentary Film Program Tabitha Jackson will, according to a press release, “join the Center under the auspices of the newly-established Documentary Film in the Public Interest research initiative and will spend the semester conducting research and engaging with the Harvard Kennedy School community about the challenges facing the field and its impact on civic life.” “The Documentary Film […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 9, 2024 -
Revisiting Silk Stalkings: Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn on IFFR 2024 Premiere Dream Team
Dream Team, the third feature by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, is another in the writer-director duo’s run of genre pastiches that double as sociopolitical parables. Here, the influence of ’90s basic cable TV thrillers is channeled into an episodic story about a pair of Interpol agents (Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai) who travel to Mexico to investigate the mysterious death of a corral smuggler. Shot by Horn in characteristically textured 16mm, the film unfolds between a variety of West Coast locales stretching from Baja California to Vancouver. As the body count rises and rumors of a physic coral […]
by Jordan Cronk on Feb 9, 2024 -
SXSW Announces 50 New Projects for Its 2024 Program, Including Films from Michael Mohan, Nicole Riegel and Alice Lowe
The SXSW Film Festival announced today 50 new films, XR projects and television programs that complete the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival lineup. Among the world premieres are the latest from The Voyeurs director Michael Mohan, who reunites with star Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate; Dev Patel’s action thriller Monkey Man; Alice Lowe’s followup to her Prevenge, Timestalker; and a new film from The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby director Ned Benson, The Greatest Hits. Festival favorites traveling from Park City to Austin include Didi, Black Box Diaries, Love Machina, Ghostlight and I Saw the TV Glow. Of particular interest to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 7, 2024
