I had asked myself Could I make another movie? Saint Laurent Productions has just posted a teaser “trailer of a movie that will never exist” for the late director’s Phony Wars, a new 20-minute work that will premiere at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. From the festival’s website: Jean-Luc Godard often transformed his synopses into aesthetic programs. Drôles de guerres follows in this tradition and will remain as the ultimate gesture of cinema, which he accompanies with the following text: “No longer trusting the billions of diktats of the alphabet to give back their freedom to the incessant metamorphoses and […]
Celebrating its 26th edition, The American Pavilion announces the 2023 Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival. 38 short films comprise this year’s Showcase, with 22 projects featuring women filmmakers. The selected films are divided into the following categories: Student Short Films, Student Documentaries, Emerging Filmmaker Short Films, Emerging Filmmaker Documentaries, Emerging Filmmaker LGBTQ Showcase Films and an Alumni Showcase. Films from the U.S., Australia, Canada, Nigeria and Sweden are represented among the lineup this year. All screenings with filmmakers in attendance will be followed by a live Q&A. “As we celebrate the Emerging Film Showcase’s 15th year […]
A trailer has arrived for the 4K restoration of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s 2000 film Werckmeister Harmonies from Janus Films. Based on the 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, the film will be re-released in New York later this month with more cities to follow. An official synopsis reads: One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown […]
The New York City-based independent film non-profit Rooftop Films announces today the lineup for their annual Summer Series (presented by AMC Networks), the outdoor film festival that showcases new indie titles all summer long across all five boroughs. The 27th edition will kick off on Thursday, May 25th at Green-Wood Cemetery, and per tradition, will feature a night of live music and short film screenings. Each subsequent screening during Summer Series 2023 will include filmmaker Q&As, live performances and/or free after parties. This year’s festival will run from May 25 through August 24 with a total of 45 events. Highlights […]
Filmmaker is happy to share an exclusive clip of writer-director Laurel Parmet’s feature debut The Starling Girl ahead of its limited release next week. In the two-minute long film excerpt, 17-year-old Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) interacts with her father Paul (Jimmi Simpson). As he leaves the room after their chat, he says, “Do not tell your mama,” exiting with an emphatic “Shh.” Jem then checks a mug he was using out of curiosity. As a teenage girl living in a Christian fundamentalist community in rural Kentucky, Jem has never felt that she truly fit in. Through an escalating bond with […]
New York state’s just-passed fiscal year 2024 budget includes an expansion of the New York Film Tax Credit, Governor Kathy Hochul announced yesterday. The amount allocated to the program has been raised substantially, from $420 million per year to $700 million. Additionally, the base credit, which was reduced to 25% in 2020, has been raised to its prior level of 30%. And within the details are other significant changes. For the first time, the New York credit will apply to above-the-line costs. Salaries of writers, directors, “specific producers,” actors, and composers will be eligible for the credit, capped at $500,000 […]
Though it hasn’t reached the fever pitch of absurdity of The Fast and the Furious franchise just yet—a series that began as a Point Break riff but now includes nuclear submarines and Pontiac Fieros in space —the John Wick saga has certainly expanded from its humble beginnings. Produced independently and shot in New York on a budget in the mid-$20 million range, the original film found its titular assassin (played by Keanu Reeves) emerging from retirement to avenge the death of his dog. Four chapters later, Reeves is hopping between New York City, Osaka, Berlin, Paris and the Wadi Rum […]
Dune: Part Two will hit theaters just over two years after Dune, director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 landmark sci-fi novel. The first trailer arrives six months before the second and final installment of Villeneuve’s saga is set for release. The story will continue to follow characters from the first film (save for Oscar Isaac, whose Duke Leto Atreides perishes during the first half of the story), with roles reprised by Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, Stellan Skarsgård, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Charlotte Rampling and Javier Bardem. Yet there’s a considerable amount of buzz surrounding […]
Visions du Réel is so punctilious about its nonfiction festival identity that the program booklet explicitly labels the few titles not fitting that (honestly very broad) categorization as “Fiction,” a tag only deployed this year for sidebar retrospectives of Alice Rohrwacher and Lucrecia Martel. For myself, I wanted to attend less because of any particular predilection for nonfiction and more because VdR seems full of stronger iterations of a type of movie I tend to enjoy, roughly categorizable as “relatively well-financed art-leaning European (co)productions”—i.e., I was primarily interested for aesthetic reasons, with the filmmakers chosen for this year’s sidebars illustrative […]
Canadian actress Charlotte Le Bon steps behind the camera for the spectral love story Falcon Lake, her directorial debut. Written by Le Bon in collaboration with François Choquet, the film is loosely based on the 2017 graphic novel A Sister by Bastien Vivès. After premiering at Cannes last year during Directors’ Fortnight, Falcon Lake now receives an official trailer ahead of its theatrical and digital release later this summer. The French-language film follows an aloof teenage boy on summer vacation who fosters an unlikely relationship with an older girl, experiencing a plethora of extreme emotions while they stay on what’s […]