On the heels of their Time Is Illmatic opening night announcement, Tribeca has released the first 47 of its 89 feature-length titles in the World Narrative and Documentary Competitions, as well as the non-competitive Viewpoints. Gabriel, the debut film from 25 New Face Lou Howe, which I can’t recommend enough, will open the Narrative section, with Dior and I and Onur Turkel’s Summer of Blood kicking off the Docs and Viewpoints, respectively. Other notable titles include Keith Miller’s latest, Five Star; Junebug scribe Angus MacLachlan’s directorial debut Goodbye to All That; d.p. Jody Lee Lipes’s Ballet 422; the Golden Bear-winning Black Coal, Thin Ice; Sundance hit The Overnighters and British prison drama Starred Up. Find the full list below. […]
Final Cut Pro X (FCP X) was announced in April of 2011 and released in June of the same year. In the nearly three years since its release I have slowly increased the amount of work I do with it. As of this writing I am in the early stages of editing a feature-length documentary using Final Cut Pro X. I agree with the post-production masses that say Apple should have handled the launch of FCP X much better than it did. I could go on and on about what I wish they would have done differently. I won’t. That […]
Simple Machine, the online distribution platform connecting filmmakers to non-theatrical venues, is offering quarterly $1,000 grants to new small, innovative film festivals. “How can we more fully explore the possibilities of hyper-local events designed to create an effective context for contemporary cinema?” asks Simple Machine’s creator, Nandan Rao, in a statement. “How can we push the film-festival concept into smaller, more intimate nooks and crannies in our societal fabric? What new terms are needed to describe the formats of communal movie watching that resonate with us today? These are the questions we’re hoping our grant-winners will help to answer.” The […]
Four films that played at the Berlin Film Festival highlighted how directors are using modern technology to completely change the way in which productions are being put together and scheduled. Both 52 Tuesdays and Boyhood were shot intermittently over a long period of time. The Turning had 17 different shoots running concurrently throughout Australia, while the Bollywood film Highway decided where to travel to next and shoot scenes on a day-by-day basis. What marks these productions out from any number of other low-budget independent films is that their directors believed a non-traditional production schedule would result in a better end-product. Rather […]
Nymphomaniac arrives on the back of one of the best marketing campaigns in years. The first “() Opening Soon” poster was on its own pretty special, but it was trumped by the series of posters introducing all the characters with their “bedroom” faces on (even if some of these characters, such as the waiter played by Udo Kier, have less screen time than most sexual encounters). With this advertising, Lars von Trier has seemingly been promising a film that will break the boundary that exists between sex in mainstream cinema and porn. But as is often the case, we shouldn’t believe […]
In David Grovic’s The Bag Man, John Cusack plays the title character, a courier for an underworld figure named Dragna (a genuinely terrific Robert De Niro), who’s charged with fetching a mysterious bag and staying put in a fleabag motel until the silver-suited and -haired criminal overlord can come to pick up the goods. It’s the type of movie that has no business being good and not just because the constituent parts feel, well, worn out — the motel that the movie takes place in bears an eerily resemblance to the one Cusack spent most of the forgettable 2003 thriller […]
There’s a case to be made for viewing any old film in the theater, but few seem to demand the widescreen format like the work of Michelangelo Antonioni. Every frame of L’Avventura, the first entry in his monumental early 60s trilogy, is unusual and breathtaking in its construction. In the above video, fellow filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet (screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad) discusses how Antonioni’s rejection of meaning and a closed-circuit narrative defined the Modernist aesthetic. Positioning him against the plot heavy Hitchcock, Robbe-Grillet notes the elusiveness of Antonioni’s intentions: “What you see is very clear, but the meaning of the images in constantly […]
For a second time, Google is attempting to pitch a compression format as the replacement for an H.26X compressor. They tried to do it three years ago for HD video when they pitched VP8 as a replacement for H.264 and had little success. Now they’re back with a new angle: VP9 is the format for 4K, and they are putting it up against H.265, the new 4K compressor that is also referred to as HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding). Should you care? Compression codecs can be fascinating, frustrating and their naming confusing. For example, everyone’s heard of H.264 and AVCHD, […]
Ever wonder what a data visualization of every file transfer bouncing around the internet airwaves might look like? The Pirate Cinema, from artist Nicolas Maigret, has rendered something close to it. Described as a “cinematic collage generated by peer-to-peer network activity,” the project is comprised of arbitrary clips from real time BitTorrent file sharing. Users IP addresses and countries are displayed in the upper corners, turning purportedly private transactions public. For Maigret, “this horizontal network architecture…recalls the utopian vision of openness and free appropriation that arose in the early days of the Internet.”
Jamesy Boy, a gritty crime drama starring newcomer Spencer LoFranco plus Ving Rhames, Mary-Louise Parker and James Woods, comes out today on DVD and Blu-ray. Thanks to the good folks at Phase 4 Films, we have to give away a DVD copy of the movie, plus a poster signed by cast members Taboo (from the Black Eyed Peas) and Ben Rosenfield, Michael Trotter, director Trevor White, writer Lane Shadgett, and James Burns (the real-life Jamesy Boy on whom the film is based). To win, all you have to do is be the first person to email nick AT filmmakermagazine DOT com with the correct answer to the following question: Which film previously […]