The 2022 edition of the Indie Memphis Film Festival kicks off this Wednesday, October 19, with a robust lineup that features buzzy festival titles, local gems and an exciting assortment of repertory programming. More specifically, the opening night film is Phil Bertelsen’s The Picture Taker, serving as the centerpiece selection is Indie Memphis alum Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection and closing out this year’s fest is Elvis Mitchell’s documentary Is That Black Enough For You??? Other program highlights are Alice Diop‘s recently-added Saint Omer, Nikyatu Jusu‘s Nanny (featured in our Fall 2022 Issue, along with fellow Indie Memphis selections Aftersun and […]
Britt Rentschler is the star of Pretty Problems, a smart and hilarious new indie adult comedy which she also produced and helped write with screenwriter and co-star Michael Tennant. In this episode, she talks about their lengthy commitment to making the story work, building their characters with depth, and the risky but triumphant decision to cast their talented friends in supporting roles rather than famous actors who might have secured more money. She describes how her apprehension toward playing the lead role of Lindsay actually benefited her performance, the ways director Kestrin Pantera brought the best out of everyone, plus […]
After premiering at Sundance earlier this year, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead‘s Something in the Dirt now has a trailer ahead of its theatrical release. It’s the fifth feature from the filmmaking duo, who previously helmed Resolution (2012), Spring (2014), The Endless (2017) and Synchronic (2019). Like much of their filmography, Something in the Dirt features a strong sci-fi slant, this time focusing on a man named Levi (Benson) who moves into a shady no-lease apartment in the Hollywood Hills. He quickly befriends his neighbor John (Moorhead), and the two begin investigating a seemingly paranormal presence that has manifested in […]
Currently on view at the Swiss Institute, multidisciplinary artist Karen Lamassonne’s exhibition “Ruido / Noise” is one of the season’s essential gallery shows. In addition to a life-spanning survey of paintings, photography and sculpture by the Colombian-American artist, the show details Lamassonne’s work as an art director, perhaps most famously on Luis Ospina’s pitch-black 1982 vampire parable Pura Sangre (Pure Blood). Lamassonne was a key figure in the storied Grupo de Cali, a posse of artists, writers and filmmakers based in the city of same name, notorious both for their hard-partying lifestyle and their bottomless appetite for the macabre. Ospina […]
DOC NYC, the largest documentary film festival in the U.S., has announced its main programming slate. The festival will run in-person from November 9-17 at the IFC Center, SVA Theatre and Cinépolis Chelsea. The festival will continue online through November 27 after the in-person portion concludes. The 2022 lineup features 101 feature-length documentaries, including 15 Short List titles that have yet to be announced. The thirteenth edition of the festival features more than 200 films in total—29 world premieres at 27 U.S. premieres among them —as well as several events, with filmmakers regularly in attendance. Many popular competition categories and […]
Scott Adkins is a proselytizer for the art of Hong Kong action films, receiving his baptism as a bit player on Jackie Chan’s The Accidental Spy in 2001. He has been trying to bring Chan’s level of craft and creativity to English-language action ever since, climbing the ranks of the direct-to-video market with gravity-defying kicks until his picture on the box could sell units alongside those featuring Van Damme and Lundgren. Though he has made memorable spin-kicking turns on big Hollywood productions like Doctor Strange and Day Shift—even landing a role in next year’s John Wick: Chapter 4—his bread-and-butter remains […]
You have a killer idea. A great script. Actors or producers that love it. You get it budgeted… then get realistic and drop that number down to something more reasonable. You open an LLC, a bank account, and now you own 100% of nothing but a great idea. If you have representation, you send out your materials to potential financiers in hopes that just one of them tells you an astounding, “Yes!”. But as an emerging feature filmmaker, the odds are not in your favor, especially in an industry that’s relying more and more on pre-vetted IP, in-house development and […]
Nan Goldin’s prolific career as an artist and photographer as well as her recent anti-Sackler activism is the focus of Laura Poitras’s latest documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which just released its first trailer today. The film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, where it earned the Golden Lion, making it only the second documentary in the festival’s history to win the top prize after 2013’s Sacro GRA. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is Filmmaker‘s most recent Fall Issue cover story, with an interview between Poitras and critic Amy Taubin currently available for digital subscribers. Physical […]
The lynching of Emmett Till—a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was murdered in 1955 after having an “inappropriate” encounter with a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi—has long served as a testament to the odious racism endemic in American culture. As such, Emmett Till has been posthumously considered an icon of the then-burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, but director and co-writer Chinonye Chukwu’s biopic Till is particularly invested in documenting the aftermath of Till’s murder as experienced by his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (played by Danielle Deadwlyer). In Chukwu’s sophomore film, the audience follows her journey after this life-altering tragedy […]
Slaughterhouses of Modernity, the latest film by Heinz Emigholz, has arrived in New York. The filmmaker refers to it in passing as a work of propaganda, which means, he reminds me, that it is a film designed to advance an agenda. To this end, Emigholz has adopted a mode of direct address. With John Erdman, Stefan Kolosko and Arno Brandlhuber acting intermittently as chorus, Slaughterhouses of Modernity castigates the works of art, architecture and philosophy—collected post-hoc under the banner of Modernism—nourished by the conditions of genocidal, colonialist, “Western values.” For Emigholz, the century that seemed to place the individual at […]