Represent Justice, the organization that began as an impact campaign for Destin Daniel Cretton’s wrongful-conviction drama, Just Mercy, announced today via press release a three-year strategic plan, “a roadmap for building narrative power and infrastructure around people impacted by incarceration and creating a justice system that is focused on healing, rather than punishment.” New this year is the Speakers Bureau, which will represent “the extraordinary ecosystem of system-impacted movement leaders, exonerees, artists, campaign leaders, filmmakers, and film participants who work in partnership with Represent Justice to transform the legal system. The Represent Justice Speakers Bureau will be a full-service bureau […]
The Tribeca Film Festival, which runs from June 5 – 16 in New York City, announced today its 2024 feature film lineup. As always there are many buzzy celebrity-focused films, from Trish Dalton and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s opening night doc, Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge to LIZA: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story, directed by Bruce David Klein, to music docs featuring Sting, Prince, Linda Perry, Avicii and Detroit techno pioneer Carl Craig. And then there’s BRATS, Andrew McCarthy’s road trip doc as he reconnects with fellow members of the ’80s Brat Pack, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy and Emilio […]
Dylan Baker is the definition of a consummate actor. For over three decades he has delivered so many incredible performances in series like The Good Wife, Damages, Hunters, films like Happiness, Selma, Spider-Man 2, and his latest, LaRoy, Texas, where he plays a professional killer. He talks about his approach toward playing despicable people, some who other actor’s wouldn’t touch. He takes us back to his beginnings, and the acting instruction that changed his work and which he still uses today. He tells a story about how the legendary theater director Nikos Psacharopoulos had a big impact on his early […]
Currently unspooling across four episodes on HBO and continuing to stream on Max is The Synanon Fix, the latest true-crime catnip from the cable channel that’s not a juggernaut of the genre. And while the Sundance-debuting docuseries does involve the usual “suspects” (a cult, a cache of weapons, attempted murder via a venomous snake), it’s also the latest HBO Original from director Rory Kennedy and writer Mark Bailey (Ethel, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing). Which means it’s less interested in lurid details and more focused on actual individuals with an optimistic vision who are drawn into — and failed by […]
Accompanying his debut article in Filmmaker’s print edition, “Did You See (and Hear) That?),” Devan Scott posts today a video essay, “Why Are Movies So Dark?”, that provides visual backup for his points. “Contemporary visuals are commonly diagnosed as dark,’ ‘underexposed’ or ‘underlit’. In actuality, they describe an array of phenomena, many of them widely misunderstood,” he writes. “The most common charge, dim,’ is often used interchangeably with ‘underlit.’ Tools are frequently blamed; ‘the digital look’ is as much an accusation of modern equipment as an assessment of its apparent effects.” Watch Scott’s new video above.
Amsterdam-based, Bosnian-born filmmaker Ena Sendijarević’s two features to date, Take Me Somewhere Nice and Sweet Dreams, hone the filmmaker’s personal cinematic language while expanding the parameters of her own perspective. The former, her 2019 debut feature, follows a Dutch teen as she journeys to visit her ailing Bosnian father in the hospital. The latter, which will screen at NYC’s Metrograph beginning today, chronicles the decline of a wealthy Dutch family’s Indonesian sugar plantation at the turn of the 20th century. While her first feature explores the contours of Eastern and Western European relations—a subject Sendijarević is familiar with as a […]
I typically have two problems with found footage horror movies. First, it’s often hard to believe the characters wouldn’t simply drop their cameras once the body count begins. Just as the haunted house movie must present a sufficiently logical reason for the inhabitants to remain once the voices start whispering “get out,” the found footage horror movie must posit an acceptable rationale for why the cameras keep rolling. Second, the subgenre’s veneer of reality often means some of filmmaking’s most effective tools—score, editing, composition—are sacrificed on the altar of verisimilitude. The premise of Late Night with the Devil alleviates both […]
While the on-the-ground horrors of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have been viewed around the world, often in real time — and even formed the basis of this year’s Best Doc Feature Oscar winner, Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol — Ukrainian-Canadian filmmaker Oksana Karpovych has chosen to take a much different and rather innovative approach to documenting the war. Intercepted premiered this year at the Berlin International Film Festival before traveling to CPH:DOX and now, tomorrow night, New Directors/New Films, and while it contains no shortage of cinematically-framed images of both devastation and defiant rebuilding, it predominantly captures our […]
His work in series like Grey’s Anatomy, 13 Reasons Why, and This Is Us, has established Brandon Scott as a captivatingly talented actor. His latest is the new MAX series The Girls on the Bus, where he plays the jilted ex-lover of Melissa Benoist’s journalist character who now needs his help because he’s the new press secretary to the leading Presidential candidate. He talks about the process of building connection between two people that are supposed to have a past, and how sometimes that can be done in simple ways. He describes the impact Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini had […]
Produced in collaboration with Documentary Campus, this year’s five-day CPH:CONFERENCE featured a wide-ranging series of panels and conversations, diving in to everything from indigenous narratives to climate storytelling to the mind of Alex Gibney. Especially notable were the four mornings, FILM:MAKERS in Dialogue, all moderated by Wendy Mitchell (festival producer of Sundance London as well as a journalist for Screen International). In these sessions audiences were invited to listen in as the directors behind two films chose clips from each other’s work to engage with. One such pairing in particular proved both inspired and inspiring. Brett Story (The Hottest August, The […]