Following on last week’s announcement of its feature slate for the 2018 edition, the Sundance Film Festival has announced the selections for its indie episodic, shorts and special events selections. In that middle category Filmmaker readers will spot two of this year’s 25 New Faces of film, Robin Comisar and Alexa Lim Haas. INDIE EPISODIC America To Me / U.S.A. (Director: Steve James, Segment Directors: Bing Liu, Rebecca Parrish, Kevin Shaw) — This limited series captures a year-long look at one of Chicago’s most progressive and diverse public schools, located in suburban Oak Park. Unprecedented in scope, the series is both […]
Last month Discovery Communications, Google, and Here Be Dragons released one of the most ambitious virtual reality documentary series yet produced, Discovery TRVLR. Writer-director Addison O’Dea and his team created 38 episodes on all seven continents, going to as remote locations as possible and focusing on the universality of the people who live there. Available on DiscoveryVR.com, the Discovery VR app, and YouTube, the series marks the next step, after works like Felix & Paul Studios’ Nomads series, to push VR into the field of ethnographic nonfiction. But as O’Dea emphasizes in our conversation below, TRVLR is first and foremost a travel show, not an anthropological […]
Critic David Ehrlich’s 25 Best Films of 2017 supercut, dropped today, is an expected pleasure. Through the luxuriousness of its 12-and-a-half minutes, it produces, as it always does, the affect of, “Hey, this was a decent year for movies!” There a quite a few personal favorites on his list — Personal Shopper, Phantom Shopper, Good Time, A Ghost Story, to name a few — as well as a spirited soundtrack flecked with a number of ’70s and ’80s pop hits and disco anthems. Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” is the bold opener, and particularly amazing needle drops include Chaka Kahn’s “I’m […]
One of the most celebrated street artists of the 1980s, Richard Hambleton created a collection of equally eccentric and harrowing work that decorated the walls, alleyways and sidewalks of New York City. Along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hambleton was an unrivaled challenging artist and, as his contemporaries tragically died before middle age, one of its remaining beacons of inspiration. While known for his “murder art” — chalk outlines of fictitious crime scenes splattered with red paint resembling blood — and his Marlboro Man paintings crafted from a thick tar-like substance, Hambleton’s most iconic pieces serve as the namesake of Oren Jacoby’s new documentary in theaters this week. Debuting […]
If Guillermo Del Toro hasn’t already cemented his place as one of the great storytellers of today, he certainly has with his latest film The Shape of Water, a Cold War-era twisted fairy tale opening today. Sally Hawkins stars as a mute cleaning lady, Elisa, working at a government agency, whose only friends are her co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and her gay neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins). An imposing government agent Strickland (Michael Shannon) arrives with a mysterious amphibious creature in tow, played by Doug Jones. While Strickland is intent on studying the creature for whatever military value this research might […]
With character driven films such as Journey to Planet X and We are Wizards, duo Josh Koury and Myles Kane have carved out a reputation as observational filmmakers. Their Voyeur — which premiered at NYFF and is now streaming on Netflix — explores the unique relationship between famed writer Gay Talese and former motel owner/self declared voyeur Gerald Foos. Foos, who claims to have secretly watched guests having sex at his Colorado motel for several decades, sent Talese an anonymous handwritten letter detailing his “secret life” back in 1980. Intrigued by the subject matter, the writer agreed to fly up to […]
In years past, Sundance has unveiled its feature film lineup a few slates at a time; this year, we get all of the features scheduled to date in one fell swoop. The lineup — 110 strong over 10 categories — includes no less than 15 projects that are alumni of IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent magazine, including 306 Hollywood, the debut feature from Elan and Jonathan Bogarín, profiled in this year’s 25 New Faces of Film. It’s a heady line-up; dive in. The festival runs from January 18 through 28; look for our coverage starting then. U.S. DRAMATIC COMPETITION American Animals / U.S.A. (Director and […]
Sixteen premieres — including 10 world premieres — are part of the 2017 Slamdance Film Festival, whose Narrative and Documentary Competition films were announced today. A punk rock romance, surrogacy drama, documentary about the Polaroid age and a non-fiction tale of a woman who withdraws from the fashion world to become a hermit are just four of the films to be presented January 19 – 25, 2018, in Park City, Utah. Notably, Slamdance submissions are selected from blind submissions by festival alumni and “are programmed democratically.” In addition to the films, Slamdance also announced a new prize. From the press […]
Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and Yance Ford’s Strong Island topped the 2017 IFP Gotham Awards, winning Best Feature and Best Documentary last night at a ceremony held at downtown New York’s Cipriani. And Jordan Peele’s Get Out made a very strong showing, winning the Audience Award, the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award and the Best Screenplay. The Gotham Awards, presented by Filmmaker‘s parent organization, IFP, is the first awards show of the Oscar season, and in the past it’s been a harbinger of future success for its awarded films. (Previous Gotham Best Pictures include the last three […]
For my final home video column of the year, I’d like to round up the most interesting and enjoyable Blu-ray and DVD titles I’ve encountered in recent months — not necessarily a “ten best” list, but a compendium of highly recommended releases that rank among 2017’s home viewing highlights (and that make great gifts for cinephiles as the holiday shopping season approaches). Here goes: Desert Hearts. Director Donna Deitch embarked on her narrative feature debut with a simple goal — to tell a love story between two women that didn’t end with either of them dying or in a bisexual […]