During his day job as a Spanish criminal interpreter in a small town in California, filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes met a young man named Sansón, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who was sentenced to life in prison without parole. With no permission to interview him, Sansón and Reyes worked together over a decade, using hundreds of letters as inspiration for recreations of Sansón’s childhood—featuring members of Sansón’s own family. The resulting film, Sansón and Me, captures the developing friendship between filmmaker and subject as they navigate both the immigration and criminal justice systems. Sansón and Me opened the new season of […]
Eigil Bryld must be feeling funny lately. After a career peppered with reality-based dramas (You Don’t Know Jack and The Report), thrillers (Deep Water) and romantic period pieces (Tulip Fever and Becoming Jane), the Danish cinematographer has lightened up with a trio of comedies out this year—The Machine, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers and No Hard Feelings. In the latter, Jennifer Lawrence plays a Montauk Uber driver who agrees to seduce the son (Andrew Barth Feldman) of a wealthy couple summering in the quaint Long Island enclave in exchange for a used Buick Regal. Bryld spoke to Filmmaker about lensing the […]
Opening today in 20 markets across the United States is Tracy Droz Tragos’s Plan C, a documentary about social scientist Francine Coeytaux and her team’s work on expanding access to abortion pills online. With Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul opening today, and New York’s IFC Center run beginning October 13, we are reposting the director’s answer to our annual Sundance Question about the various challenges she faced while making the film. — Editor Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, […]
With its digital restoration world premiering at the 61st New York Film Festival tomorrow, we are publishing online for the first time Noam Christopher’s interview with writer/director Nancy Savoca about her Household Saints from our Fall, 1993 edition. Originally released by Fine Line Features, the new restoration is a Milestone Films release. — Editor Nancy Savoca made her directorial debut with True Love, an unsentimental, widely acclaimed look at love and marriage in the Bronx. The winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1989 United States Film Festival, the film not only launched Savoca’s career, but the career of […]
On big budget spectacles, the tail of VFX often wags the dog of principal photography. With The Creator—an $80 million sci-fi epic about a war between mankind and humanoid AI starring John David Washington—director Gareth Edwards sought to reverse that arrangement. The Monsters and Rogue One filmmaker has described the process of meticulously recreating previs on set as painting a target on the wall and trying to fire an arrow into the bullseye. With The Creator, Edwards wanted to fire the arrow first, then paint the target around it, with VFX ideation occurring later in the pipeline after being inspired by […]
Full of what can only be described as “lovingly filmed food porn,” Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things won best director at this year’s Cannes. Here’s the first trailer for the film (originally titled The Pot-au-Feu in English), which stars Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche. The Taste of Things opens from IFC Films on February 9, 2024 in limited release, with expansion to follow on February 14.
Dogleg is one of the best films of the year. A unique and hilarious feat of cinematic inventiveness, it follows amateur director Alan, played by Al Warren, after he loses his fiancé’s dog at a gender reveal party on the day of an important shoot. Warren also wrote and directed the film, which took more than half a decade to finish. On this episode, he tells us why he was in no hurry to complete the film, and why he has taken a much more intentional and meaningful approach toward bringing it to the audience. He takes us back to […]
There’s something fittingly appropriate about the way that The Spirit Of The Beehive director Victor Erice became the first Basque director to receive a lifetime achievement Donostia Award at the 71st San Sebastian Festival, while the Golden Shell for Best Film also went to San Sebastian-born Jaione Camborda for The Rye Horn, which is scripted in Galician and Portuguese. It encapsulates not just the way that the old meets the new at the festival but how, under José Luis Rebordinos’s directorship since 2011, it has continued to champion home-grown voices and non-hegemonic languages. Erice brought Close Your Eyes, his first film […]
At a small gathering recently at New York’s Posterati in honor of Jeremy Thomas, the legendary producer sat surrounded by international posters of the classic films he’s made over the course of his nearly 60-year career. Nodding at one for David Cronenberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, I tell him how much I love the film, whose Criterion re-release Joanne McNeil recently wrote about for Filmmaker. “You couldn’t make it today,” Thomas leans over to say to me. I know he’s right, but why exactly? Business reasons, cultural ones, or a confluence of the two? “Every reason,” he tells me […]
With October upon us—and specifically the spooky season, with all the “Shocktober” viewing plans that come with it—we’re drawing upon our deep well of festival dispatches and interviews with indie horror creators. Here’s 13 (mostly) recent indie horror films we’ve written about, all currently available to stream on widely-beloved ad-supported streamer service TUBI. All Jacked Up and Full of Worms The psychedelic potency of fictional invertebrates is pure nightmare fuel in Alex Phillips’s feature debut All Jacked Up and Full of Worms. Yet worms alone don’t drive the film’s deviant characters past the brink of sanity. Rather, the creature’s hallucinogenic […]