6302 Results for “Open ”
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Critic’s Notebook NYFF: Call Me By Your Name, The Square, Western, Wonderstruck, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
For film writers who, like myself, remain chained to New York, NYFF marks the time of year when the much-hyped (or -hated) titles from the festival circuit finally pay us a visit. NYFF represents the last stop for many of the reliable sampler of films from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, and elsewhere before they enter theaters and launch their awards season runs. At last, we get to see the films the more important writers have already grown tired of debating on Twitter. From Sundance this year comes Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a coming-of-age queer romance set in 1980s Italy. A […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Oct 13, 2017 -
Inequality and Systemic Racism in St. Louis: Landon Von Soest and Jeremy Levine on For Akheem
The St. Louis-set For Ahkeem’s central character, Daje Shelton, is on a path to avoid a life of poverty and disappointment. Having been suspended from her local high school for a number of petty offenses, Daje’s opportunities are narrowing by the season. Enlisting in a school for troubled youth as a last resort, her future is up in the air. While the documentary is centered around Daja, African-American teenage men are always present. Daja speaks of her many male friends who have been lost to gun violence, and her boyfriend Antonio (and their eventual son, the title character Ahkeem) will have […]
by Erik Luers on Oct 13, 2017 -
Director Lana Wilson Talks Gaining Trust, Valuing Life and Her Wise, Empathetic Suicide Prevention Doc, The Departure
One of the major discoveries of the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, Lana Wilson’s The Departure is a beautiful, wise and deeply empathetic immersion into one fascinating character’s unique approach to suicide prevention. Ittetsu Nemoto is a former punk rocker turned Buddhist priest who, in quietly wrenching group sessions, counsels the suicidal while facing down his own demons. Working in a small, remote temple in Japan, he constructs spare, philosophical rituals for his patients and then, separately, bonds with them in more personal, emotionally intimate ways. Following Nemoto both within his practice and outside of it, The Departure initially grabs hold […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 13, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Mindhunter (Episodes 1-2), Good Streamable Chronological Narrative Content
The first two episodes of Netflix’s Mindhunter, directed by David Fincher, are slightly stylistically diluted but still distinctively his. Fincher also directed the last two episodes of the ten-episode first season, which has already been renewed for a second prior to dropping this Friday — whether I make it to his bookending episodes I have no idea, but fans should at least take a look at this starting point. “Peak TV,” or at least the limited-run series, has increasingly accommodated one director who wants to do it all: this year has seen airings of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Big Little […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 12, 2017 -
John Cameron Mitchell to Host 2017 IFP Gotham Awards
Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today that John Cameron Mitchell will host the 2017 IFP Gotham Awards. The first awards show of the season, the IFP Gotham Awards is one of the leading honors for independent film and media, providing critical early recognition to groundbreaking independent films and their writers, directors, producers, and actors with ten competitive awards categories. The IFP Gotham Awards also honors selected film industry icons as tributes each year. The ceremony will be held on Monday, November 27, 2017, at Cipriani Wall Street, New York City. “We eagerly anticipate a fun, exciting and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 11, 2017 -
Hawaii International Film Festival Announces its 2017 Lineup
We covered last year’s Hawaii International Film Festival — its 35th edition — and now the fest is back for another year. Asian box-office sensations, Cannes art-house favorites, and a particularly strong lineup of indigenous Pacific filmmaking highlight this year’s edition, which runs November 2-12 in Oahu. Long a bastion of Pacific Rim and specifically Pacific Islander story-telling, the festival this year brings forth a new competition for films made in Hawaii, highlighted by the Closing Night world premiere of Alexander Bocchieri’s Go For Broke: An Origin Story, a narrative feature based on the famed 442nd Infantry Regiment, a World […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 11, 2017 -
“A Straight Shot into the Vein”: Pitching Documentaries at Points North Pitch at the Camden International Film Festival 2017
Each year, the Points North Institute magnetizes the fog-kissed landscape of coastal Maine to lure the best and brightest of the non-fiction universe to the towns of Camden, Rockport and Rockland. The Camden International Film Festival offers an immersive overlay of screenings, panels, workshops, virtual reality installations, parties and intensive personal encounters that elevate the proceedings far above the standard festival formula of films and frolic. Exhibit A: What other festival turns a pitch session into a kind of centerpiece presentation? Staged under the banner of the Points North Institute, the festival’s umbrella organization, the program invites a group of […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 6, 2017 -
“A Coming of Age Story–with Jump Scares”: Jason Ballantine on Editing It
In horror movies, kids are often exempt from the carnage. It’s a trope of the genre—the cute moppet that any experienced horror viewer knows is in absolutely no peril within the confines of the film. Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of It opens with a grade-schooler in a yellow rain slicker having his arm torn off by a sewer dwelling clown—a creature who then drags the child into the underground bowels of Derry, Maine. The film’s brutal ground rules are immediately established – anyone is fair game and no appendage is safe. “I am very conscious watching any film where the main cast […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Oct 6, 2017 -
Critic’s Notebook NYFF: Faces Places, The Rape of Recy Taylor, Last Flag Flying
Seventeen years ago, Agnès Varda filmed her own hand in horror. The blotches, the wrinkles, the bulging blue veins: These may as well be the hands of a stranger. “My hair and my hands keep telling me that the end is near,” she says in her 2000 film The Gleaners & I. Despite the forebodings of death in Gleaners and 2008’s The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès is still with us; what a gift it is to have her still around. Varda, now 89, has partnered with French artist JR to co-direct another freewheeling, full-of-life documentary. Faces Places overflows with the […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Oct 4, 2017 -
“Making a Hammer Film As If It Was Directed by Scorsese”: John Landis on Innocent Blood and Operating Muppets with Tim Burton
One of the most underrated films by one of America’s most underrated filmmakers just arrived on Blu-ray in the form of Warner Archive’s 25th-anniversary release of John Landis’ Innocent Blood. To call Landis underrated might seem perverse given that he’s directed some of the most successful and enduring movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s – National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, Coming to America – but I still think his body of work has never quite gotten its critical due in this country, partly because his movies are so damn […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 3, 2017
