Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux is not good at playing defense. When asked at Monday’s pre-opening day press conference about an open letter published by (retired) actress Adèle Haenel accusing the festival of protecting “its rapist chiefs,” among them Roman Polanski and Gérard Depardieu, Frémaux responded that “if you thought that it’s a festival for rapists, you wouldn’t be here listening to me, you would not be complaining that you can’t get tickets to get into screenings.” “Festival for rapists” is a clunkily phrased self-own for Frémaux and his subsequent leap to ticketing problems is equally ungainly—but the access problems […]
With the Cannes Film Festival underway and Vadim Rizov and Blake Williams readying their first dispatches, here, from our team, are 13 films that we think should be on your radar here on the Croisette. Asteroid City. Following Moonrise Kingdom and The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson’s newest film is his third to premiere at Cannes. Asteroid City boasts a typically sprawling ensemble cast of both returning regulars (Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe) and high-profile new additions (including Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson). While the thematic elements are familiar—dead and disappointing parents, extremely ambitious playwrights and a dedicated elementary school […]
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has ventured into the realm of audio storytelling with “The Art of Documentary,” a six-episode podcast hosted by Jim LeBrecht, who co-directed and co-produced Crip Camp with Nicole Newnham. Each episode will feature LeBrecht engaging in a discussion with a different documentarian about their individual experiences while crafting their films. “I was approached by Randy Haberkamp and Dina Michelle at the Academy if I’d be interested in hosting and developing this podcast,” LeBrecht told Filmmaker. “To be honest, I was honored. I’ve been an Academy member for a few years but my […]
A highlight of this year’s Sundance Film Festival and New Directors/New Films, the trailer arrives for writer-director Savanah Leaf’s debut feature Earth Mama. The film stars Oakland rapper Tia Nomore in her first acting role, playing a pregnant mother in the Bay Area with two children in foster care who she must fight to regain custody of. Earth Mama also stars Erika Alexander, fellow rapper Doechii and Euphoria season two addition Dominic Fike (who’s similarly a musician-turned-actor). In his dispatch from New Directors/New Films, Nelson Kim wrote: Earth Mama is earnest social realism of a kind that may seem familiar on […]
With incredible performances in films like Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home, Deliverance and Runaway Train, Jon Voight has earned himself a spot in the acting Pantheon. At 84, he has never stopped working. Seven seasons of Ray Donovan being a recent highlight. On this episode, he talks about how he “starts slow” when developing an approach to a character, letting “things drop into my psyche.” He pinpoints directorial characteristics of John Schlesinger (director of Midnight Cowboy) that worked well for him, details a scrappy fight scene with Jonathan Rhys Myers on his latest film Mercy, reminisces about working with Cassavetes on Love […]
This year’s 30th anniversary edition of Hot Docs, North America’s largest doc fest, (which ran from April 27 to May 7) was, perhaps unsurprisingly, jam-packed with so many world-premiering films and one-of-a-kind industry events as to be a bit overwhelming. (Fortunately, Hot Docs also boasts one of the smoothest festival apps around to help alleviate all that scheduling stress.) That said, I did manage to make the most of my four days in Toronto, even popping in on the prestigious Hot Docs Forum (which was both impressive and tough to cover with three projects subject to a total media blackout, […]
The trailer arrives today for Reality, the feature debut of writer-director Tina Satter, who was profiled in our annual 25 New Faces of Film series last year. The film stars Sydney Sweeney as the titular Reality Winner, the NSA contractor who in 2017 was accused of and arrested for leaking classified documents about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections to The Intercept. All of the dialogue in Reality is mined from the real-life transcript of her interrogation over the course of a tense afternoon. In his interview with Satter ahead of the film’s premiere at the Berlin International Film […]
The Mantle twins may be extraordinary gynecologists, but their world is descending into chaos. Beverly, the “baby,” can’t persuade an opioid billionaire to fund her revolutionary “birthing center” in Manhattan. Elliot has fallen so far into substance abuse that she may be hallucinating murders. Dead Ringers, streaming now on Amazon, builds a six-episode miniseries filled with clammy dread on the bones of David Cronenberg’s 1988 movie. Created for television by Alice Birch, and starring Rachel Weisz as Beverly and Elliot Mantle, the story explores identity and psychosis with bloody intimacy. The series is also a marvel of technology. Playing two […]
After world premiering at Sundance earlier this year, a teaser trailer has dropped for director Ira Sachs’s Passages. Co-written by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, the film will arrive in theaters later this summer. An official synopsis reads: After completing his latest project, filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) impulsively begins a heated love affair with a young schoolteacher, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). For Tomas, the novelty of being with a woman is an exciting experience that he is eager to explore despite his marriage to Martin (Ben Whishaw). But when Martin begins his own affair, the mercurial Tomas refocuses his attentions on his […]
Featuring LA Times head of audio Jazmín Aguilera and CBC Podcasts director Arif Noorani (and moderated by Lindsay Michael, Senior Podcast Manager for Amazon Music in Canada), “Non-Fiction Without Borders: A Co-Production Case Study with The LA Times and CBC Podcasts” covered an impressive amount of ground for an hour-long panel. Part of the Hot Docs Podcast Festival Showcase (a mini audio-storytelling fest nestled within this year’s 30th anniversary edition, April 27-May 7), the discussion began, ironically enough, with a high-adrenaline video teaser for Outlaw Oceans, the case study at hand. It starred both Somali pirates and Ian Urbina, the […]