Paul Walter Hauser is that rare character actor who has made a name for himself as a stellar talent in both comedy and drama equally. He established himself in films like BlacKkKlansman and I, Tanya, but playing Richard Jewell in Clint Eastwood’s film put him on the map. Now he’s wowing audiences and critics alike with his incredible performance as serial killer Larry Hall in the Apple+ limited series Black Bird. On this episode, he lifts the hood and lets us peek in on his acting process. He explains why his first step is all about self amusement, how mundane details help to […]
Today, the Gotham Film & Media Institute announced that director/writer/producer Gina Prince-Bythewood will receive the Filmmaker Tribute while Audible, Inc. founder and executive chairman Don Katz will receive the Innovator Tribute during this year’s Gotham Awards. The 32nd edition of the ceremony will take place live and in-person on Monday, November 28 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. You can find our previous coverage on the Gotham Awards nominees here. Prince-Bythewood recently directed the historical epic The Woman King, which hit U.S. theaters in September via Sony’s TriStar Pictures. The film centers on the Agojie, an all-woman military […]
Moderated by Darrien Gipson, Executive Director of SAGindie, this year’s Wonder Women: Producers discussion at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival was a must-catch, mostly for two glaringly obvious reasons, with the first being the wide diversity of the participants. Alongside white Brits Alison Owen (Elizabeth, Saving Mr. Banks, perennial panelist and SCAD Savannah Film Festival Advisory Board member) and manager/producer Laura Berwick (Belfast, All is True, and Sir Kenneth’s longtime rep), there was the English-Jamaican writer/actress/producer Nicôle Lecky (Mood, The Moor Girl) and American actress/producer Jurnee Smollett (Lovecraft Country, Birds of Prey). Then there was the second reason—the presence of “grande dame” of indie […]
The first trailer has arrived for Darren Aronofsky‘s dark drama The Whale, which stars Brendan Fraser in a highly-anticipated comeback role for the actor. The film had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in September before screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and London Film Festival. A24 will distribute the film stateside. Based on the 2012 play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter (who wrote the screenplay), The Whale follows a 600-pound man named Charlie (Fraser), a reclusive former English teacher who attempts to re-connect with his estranged 17-year-old daughter (Sadie Sink). Hong Chau […]
DOC NYC, the largest documentary film festival in the U.S., kicks off this Wednesday, November 9. Featuring more than 200 films among this year’s roster, the fest will run in-person and online from the 9th to the 17th, with New York City screenings and events taking place at IFC Center, SVA Theater and Cinépolis Chelsea. Additional virtual screenings will be streamable for audiences across the U.S. until November 27. Whether you plan on attending locally or from afar, we’ve compiled a list of 13 films to catch at this year’s 13th edition of DOC NYC, sourcing from our own previous […]
With You Resemble Me currently playing at the Angelika Film Center, Filmmaker presents two guest posts about the film’s self-distribution, one by the film’s writer and director, Dina Amer, and, below, one by producer Elizabeth Woodward. After a beautiful premiere in Venice, 30 festival awards from over 70 festivals around the world, our special film You Resemble Me did not have any meaningful distribution offers on the table. We could not believe that our only option was to take a deal that not only would place the film in a catalog of films that we didn’t feel were of the […]
It’s been nearly seven years since I embarked on the journey of my directorial debut, You Resemble Me. It has been a thorny and steep hill to climb. My film is about a woman caught in the center of a terrorist attack, notorious after being named the first female suicide bomber in Europe. I’m a Muslim Egyptian American–not a fluent French speaker–and yet I found myself drawn to a story, at once delicate and destructive, one with roots buried deep in French soil, layers of history — of, for many, injury — that are still raw. The decision to make the […]
Conventional wisdom says not to start with anything particularly difficult on the first few set ups of a new project. Start simple and let the crew acclimate to each other as they begin the process of finding the rhythm that will carry them through the long days and nights ahead. However, schedules don’t always allow you to ease into things. Sometimes, as cinematographer Alex Disenhof discovered on Amazon Studios’s The Rings of Power, you spend day one on a 14,000-foot mountaintop accessible only by helicopter. “Our first two days of shooting were on Mount Kidd, which is on [New Zealand’s] […]
Watch the trailer for Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas’s The Box (La caja) ahead of the film’s stateside release via Mubi. The film focuses on an adolescent boy named Hatzín (non-professional, first-time actor Hatzín Navarrete) from Mexico City, whose father’s corpse was recently discovered amid a mass grave in the country’s vast northern territory. On his way back to the capital after identifying the remains, he is shocked when he comes across a man who bears a striking resemblance to his dad. The boy quickly enmeshes himself in the man’s life—who denies any possible paternal relation—increasingly convinced that the body in […]
One of the funniest movies of 2022 is Quentin Dupieux’s Incredible But True. On November 8, it’s available on streaming and Blu-ray from Arrow, but as far as I know, it has no American distributor since its world premiere in Berlin last February. One has to wonder whether Dupieux is now only considered to be a French local delicacy, even after the perverse joys and glorious idiocies of Mandibles and Deerskin (starring Academy Award winner Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haenel). Or maybe we’ve all been too cagey in describing Incredible But True and its Philip K. Slapstick premise. So here […]