Renny Harlin is closing in on 40 years in the movie business and still committed to his craft. He has worked all over the world on films at the top and bottom of the box office charts, but still gets a twinkle in his eye when discussing how a score can tweak the tension of a scene. He dreamed of being a Hollywood action movie director since childhood, and is best known for his bombastic 1990s blockbusters like Die Hard 2 (1990) and Cliffhanger (1993). But after Hollywood ejected him for younger models, he maintained a furious productivity elsewhere, working […]
Set shortly before 9/11, Trương Minh Quý’s Viêt and Nam begins underground with two coal miners, their bodies soaked in sweat and caked in dirt. As they wait for instructions, they talk about a dream — one concerning water, plastic bags, and drowning. In the silence, they comfort each other by caressing each other’s faces. Suddenly, a bell rings. They rebutton their clothes. Moments later, a bomb can be heard exploding in the distance. Only above ground do the details surface: Viêt and Nam are lovers who are on the brink of separation as Nam, influenced by Vietnam’s migrant boom […]
The deficiencies of George Miller’s Fury Road prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga—many of which have, unsurprisingly, been given a pass—echo my broader sentiments towards this year’s Cannes, at least from where we sit just past the halfway point. In Furiosa’s opening minutes, we’re informed via voiceover of the great struggles facing its world: pandemics, famine, climate catastrophe. Offering a supplementary narrative of broader relevance, it’s a table setting of topicality that’s wholly unnecessary to the film’s primary, surface pleasures. Many of this year’s Palme d’Or contenders, too, have felt like showcases for Contemporary Issue X rather than works of […]
When Filmmaker featured the startup film collective Omnes Films in our 2021 25 New Faces list, the L.A. outfit’s first two microbudget features — Jonathan Davies’ Topology of Sirens and Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye — had both premiered at festivals and received U.S. releases from Factory 25, its members had produced shorts and music videos, and new features were in the works. One of the few companies or collectives to land on our list over its history, Omnes impressed us with not only the quality of the films but the ambition — and optimism — evinced by a group […]
Now that Megalopolis has premiered, nothing has actually changed. The film is a self-consciously impractical act that few would care nearly as much about if it weren’t very publicly known to have cost $120 million of Francis Ford Coppola’s personal money. That’s the kind of extravagant gesture you don’t get to ever see on this scale, and hence destined to be praised for being willed into existence amidst a sea of algorithimically conceived risk-aversion—or, alternately, decried as a hubristic folly in the trades with a palpable subtext of “how dare he?” Megalopolis is praiseworthy for mostly predictable reasons: lavish eccentricity, […]
“Last year, as you know, we had a few polemics,” admitted Cannes General Delegate Thierry Fremaux at the opening of the 77th edition on Tuesday. “This year we decided to host a festival without polemics to make sure that the main interest for us all to be here is cinema.” With ignorance this willful, you have to laugh. Cannes has gotten so used to sweeping its problems under the rug that no one seems to know when, how, or if the Sous les Écrans la Dèche strike–-which would affect some 200 projectionists, programmers, floor managers, and press officers working the […]
In The Damned, Roberto Minervini embeds us with Union Army soldiers ranging across the Western front in 1862, far from the battlegrounds in the East but no less at risk. But when you direct a Civil War movie in 2020s America, it can be hard for audiences to view it as solely a fictional matter, especially when you’ve previously directed two of the most revealing documentary cross-sections of the United States in the last decade, The Other Side (2015) and What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire (2018). It’s possible to watch The Damned as a rugged journey […]
At dinner my first night at this year’s Cannes, a friend asked our waiter if this was his restaurant’s busiest time of year. Not even close; that would be MIPIM, “the world’s leading real estate market event,” taking place in March and drawing 26,000+ people—a number handily dwarfing the 13,000+ market attendees, plus assorted press and filmmakers, at last year’s festival. It was a useful perspective check: if Cannes is roundly conceded the status of world’s biggest film festival when all components are accounted for, that doesn’t mean too much in the global scheme of things, where cinema, as we […]
Since he was last on the podcast (Ep. 112), Tom Pelphrey has been nominated for an Emmy for his work on Ozark, he’s had juicy roles on Outer Range and David E. Kelly’s Love and Death, and now Kelly has given Pelphrey perhaps his most exciting role to date in the character of Raymond Peepgrass in Netflix’s A Man In Full. On this episode, Pelphrey takes us deep into his work on that limited series. He talks about why a good costumer designer is an actor’s best friend, what made him feel free to go “full weird” with Regina King, […]
Amidst wi-fi and cellular outages, a threatened workers’ strike, and dialogue around the #MeToo movement in France, the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival is underway. For Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov and Blake Williams are both back with on-the-ground reports and Critics Notebooks, and we begin with this list of 15 films that might be sliding under your radar. You don’t need us to recommend Coppola’s Megalopolis, Schrader’s Oh Canada, Cronenberg’s The Shrouds or any of the other titles from the higher-profile auteurs. Instead, we’ve focused here on debuting directors, U.S. independents, and arthouse auteurs who have dazzled us with […]