A repeat David Fincher collaborator after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gone Girl (2014), multi-award winning costume designer Trish Summerville has been signing her name onto numerous challenging film and TV projects throughout her storied, genre-spanning career, including the likes of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Red Sparrow. But Mank—Fincher’s meticulous creation of the Golden Age of Hollywood through the story of Herman J. Mankiewicz’s writing of Citizen Kane—and working in black-and-white presented a new challenge for the artisan, who had only done small projects in monochrome previously. “We were lucky; we were able to do […]
From Apocalypse Now Redux to The Cotton Club Encore, Francis Coppola has never been reticent about reworking past directorial efforts, so it was probably inevitable that he would get around to revisiting The Godfather Part III. Although by any normal standard Godfather III was a respectable success – conceptually bold, rich in visual and emotional textures and literary depth, and a financial hit with seven Oscar nominations – the fact that it wasn’t a flat-out masterpiece like its predecessors left the film with a lingering reputation as a disappointment, and Coppola was always unhappy with the manner in which it […]
Conflicts keep Mayor Musa Hadid, mayor of the Palestinian city of Ramallah since 2012, on the move. A modest man who delights in meeting his fellow citizens and problem-solving ways to make their daily existence easier, he’s a walking, talking human “customer service department.” Hadid is less the head of municipality than a crisis manager, listening patiently to every complaint and request that comes his way. Consistently reminded that his power is limited by the unwanted presence of Israeli military and government interference, Hadid’s running of a city in occupation is often frustratingly restricted. In director David Osit’s new documentary, […]
The Sundance Institute announced details of its 2021 edition — plans that will see Sundance offer titles to home audiences via a custom-designed online platform while socially-distanced live events (continent upon local health and safety guidelines at the time of the screenings) will occur in Park City, Utah as well as at a number of “satellite screens” across the country. Running January 28 – February 3, 2021, the Sundance Film Festival will stream its more than 70 features in three-hour blocks throughout the day, with films beginning simultaneously “to preserve the energy of a Festival,” according to the press release. […]
The Slamdance Film Festival announced today the 132 features, shorts and episodic programs that will comprise its hybrid 2021 edition. Running February 12-25, the festival is billing the program “its most accessible festival ever,” and with good reason. All films, Q&A’s and panels will be available on Slamdance.com, AppleTV, Roku, Firestick and YouTube; “early adopter” passes will be free until December 31; and regular passes are only $10. Additionally, there’s a new section, Unstoppable, showcasing creators with disabilities. The festival’s live component will consist of a two-night drive-in presentation in Joshua Tree open to the public on February 13th and […]
With Waikiki opening in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, Oct. 27, 2023 (official site here), we’re reposting Jason Sanders’s 2020 interview with Christopher Kahunahana. A film with “a seventeen-day shoot and two+ years of post-production,” Christopher Kahunahana’s long-awaited feature debut Waikiki marks a coming of age for the emerging Hawaiian filmmaking scene. The first completed narrative feature film by a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) filmmaker, Waikiki follows a young indigenous woman, Kea (a mesmerizing Danielle Zalopany), working multiple jobs—hula dancer for tourists, karaoke hostess for drunks, Hawaiian-language schoolteacher for kids—just in order to hold on, but slowly starting to […]
One of the more interesting periods in the history of Italian cinema is the era of international co-productions that followed neorealism; kicked off by the massive success of MGM’s 1951 extravaganza Quo Vadis, the Italian film industry entered a boom age in which the location shooting, social consciousness, and limited resources of neorealism gave way to spectacular sets, glamorous Hollywood stars, and lavish budgets thanks to the country’s abundance of breathtaking scenery and attractive production incentives. One of the most expensive and entertaining of the 1950s historical epics was Ulysses (1954), a gorgeously photographed and cleverly written adaptation of Homer’s […]
If there’s any film festival that could possibly benefit from this pandemic era’s new virtual normal, consider the one in the most remote major city in the world, Honolulu. (The city’s closest neighbor with a population over 500k is San Francisco, a mere 2386 miles away). The launch pad for Hawaiian filmmakers, a cultural centerpiece for cinematic voices across the Pacific Islands and Polynesia, and a proven showcase for East Asian genre and arthouse cinema, the Hawai’i International Film Festival has always spread its proverbial audience net far and wide, with theaters filled with high-school surfers one moment, and the […]
Claudia Weill is a director whose work meant so much to me at such a formative age that I was almost hesitant to interview her; the two features she directed, Girlfriends (1978) and It’s My Turn (1980) spoke to me on such a profoundly personal level that I feared speaking with her could only be a disappointing experience—either because she wouldn’t live up to my image of her or because I would be so intimidated that I’d turn into a blabbering idiot. One of Weill’s many talents is to create work so intimate and precise that it always feels like […]
Opening in theaters and on demand January 15, 2021 from Magnolia Pictures is the debut feature from documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, Some Kind of Heaven. Featured in Filmmaker‘s 2019 25 New Faces, Oppenheim makes documentaries that are as attuned to their subjects’ interior lives — their fears, dreams, insecurities and aspirations — as to their physical surroundings. “How fantasy informs the way people live their lives, the camera has to do the same,” he told me when I interviewed him. “The only way to get into these people’s lives and their stories is to accurately depict the headspace they are […]