22 years after the release of their debut album, the Baltimore-bred quartet Animal Collective is as prolific as ever. Members Avey Tare (Dave Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deakin (Josh Dibb) and Geologist (Brian Weitz) released their 11th studio album this year—the delectably jammy Time Skiffs—to a wave of acclaim the band arguably hasn’t received since their indie-tronica staple Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009. On the heels of Time Skiffs’ success, the band has already hit the studio to record their forthcoming release, rumored to hit shelves and streamers from the band’s longtime label Domino Records in 2023. This year has […]
Dances With Films (DWF), the Los Angeles-based independent film festival, continues to celebrate its 25th anniversary by expanding to New York City. While the LA edition of the festival took place in June, today marks the beginning of DWF’s inaugural NYC iteration, with festival screenings to be hosted at Regal Union Square from December 1 through 4. The lineup features over 70 feature, documentary and short film premieres. “Dances With Films champions independent voices throughout the world, so it was a natural fit to bring our unique brand of festival to the cultural capital of the United States,” festival founders […]
When choosing a project, cinematographer Matthew Libatique says, “My first priority is that whatever I’m doing next is different than what I did last.” That guiding principle is how one bounces from Requiem for a Dream to Josie and the Pussycats, Noah to Straight Outta Compton. The two-time Oscar nominee’s quest for variety found him wrapping the Netflix musical The Prom, the Stepford Wives-esque thriller Don’t Worry Darling and the Darren Aronofsky-directed drama The Whale in the span of a calendar year. In Darling, Florence Pugh and Harry Styles star as a young couple that relocates to an almost too […]
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 “Halloweekend” upon us, Filmmaker recommends 13 horror films perfectly catered to the season. As the site’s newly-minted Web Editor, I wanted to infuse the list with long-time personal favorites of my own and recent genre standouts. It also felt important to highlight our existing coverage of these films/filmmakers, while also ensuring that each title is readily available to stream for all those who’re interested in checking them out. Due to these self-imposed restrictions, a number of horror highlights (at least in this writer’s opinion) were regretfully omitted in the end: Álex de la Iglesia’s Day of the Beast (1999), […]
Nominations for the 2022 Gotham Awards were announced this morning, with Todd Fields’s TÁR topping the list with five nominations, including Best Picture, Outstanding Lead Performance (Cate Blanchett) and two Outstanding Performer noms (Noémie Merlant and Nina Hoss). But perhaps the biggest surprise is in the composition of the Best Feature category, which omitted a number of presumed awards-season heavyweights in favor of a trio of excellent, smaller-budgeted, pure independent films acquired at festivals. Along with TÁR and the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once, Best Feature nominees are Charlotte Wells’s delicately allusive memory piece, Aftersun, an A24 acquisition out […]
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 […]
Today, the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference and Festivals announced that Janet Pierson, long-time VP, Director of the SXSW Film & TV Festival will shift to the role of Director Emeritus. Film Festival Programming Director Claudette Godfrey will now assume leadership of the SXSW Film & TV Festival. The 2022 edition of the SXSW Film & TV Festival marked Pierson’s 15th year as Festival Director. Her 45-year career has included various roles in the independent film landscape, notably as exhibitor, producer’s rep, executive producer and segment producer and segment director of IFC-Criterion’s Split Screen. According to a press release announcing […]
Queens of the Qing Dynasty, the second feature from Nova Scotia’s Ashley McKenzie, is a unique work of independently produced Canadian cinema. Both a stark about-face from the hardscrabble realism of her 2016 debut Werewolf—about a pair of strung-out young lovers living hand-to-mouth on the margins of Cape Breton—and a decisive break from the docufiction trends of art cinema at large, Queens is rigorously composed and austerely dramatized, an artful fable pitched somewhere between comedy and tragedy. Starring newcomer Sarah Walker as Star, a neurodivergent teen who develops a deep connection with her caregiver An (Ziyin Zheng, also making their […]