The Sundance Institute announced today the 2024 Sundance Film Festival short film lineup and the 40th Edition Celebration Screenings and Events — programming featuring alumni artists looking back on the festival’s four-decade history. The 40th Edition events will take place the second half of the festival (January 23 – 26) and will include brand-new 4K restorations of Napoleon Dynamite (20th anniversary) Go Fish (30th anniversary), Three Seasons (25th anniversary), and an extended version of DIG! (20th anniversary), featuring over 30 minutes of additional footage, titled DIG! XX. Also showing will be The Babadook and Pariah, and restorations of Mississippi Masala […]
Melora Hardin is best known for playing Jan on the American version of The Office. She was nominated for an Emmy for her work on the series Transparent. Recently she stepped back into the role of Trudy Monk for Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie, which is streaming now on Peacock. On this episode she talks about bringing the character Mabel Montgomery-Mayflower to life in the new independent film Golden Vanity, and how the perfect combination of director’s vision and true collaboration helped her deliver that tour-de-force performance. She takes us back to her early days as a child […]
The Sundance Institute today announced the 91 feature films, episodic and New Frontier works that comprise the 2024 40th edition of the Sundance Film Festival. Premieres by Steven Soderbergh, Lana Wilson, Nathan Silver and the Zellner Bros. join debuting filmmakers such as Jazmin Renée Jones, Haley Elizabeth Anderson and River Gallo at the festival, which runs January 18 – 28, 2024 in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah. A selection of the film’s programming will also be available online from January 25 – 28. Sundance received a record 17,435 submissions this year from 153 countries, with 4,410 being feature […]
Celebrating its 30th anniversary next month, the Slamdance Film Festival has announced the full lineup for its 2024 edition, unspooling in Park City and Salt Lake Utah from January 19 – 25. The selection consists of 32 features, of which 17 are World Premieres, 75 shorts, and five episodic series. Oscar-winning filmmaker Carol Dysinger’s One Bullet is the opening night film, and the closing is Vanessa Hope’s Invisible Nation. “Our 2024 Slamdance lineup is a testament to filmmakers who dare to push their stories to the very edge of filmmaking, making it deeply personal yet globally resonant,” said Festival Director […]
You might know Robbie Tann from Preacher, The Deuce, or when he played Billy on Mare of Easttown, or Whitty in the “Mazey Day” episode of the latest season of Black Mirror. Currently he plays Shipley in this year’s most exciting and original sci-fi film, The Creator. On this episode, he tells how the run-and-gun style of shooting on that production, combined with the cast and crew’s infectious passion for the project, helped with all aspects of his work. He explains why he now bypasses a straightforward “roadmap” of preparation, focusing instead on letting the role seep into his unconscious. […]
It’s the year of book fairs featuring the collections of voracious cinephiles. Summer’s end saw the Tom Verlaine Book Sale, where several friends and colleagues picked up movie-related editions. And this weekend sees another collection hit the market, this time at New York’s Metrograph Theater. As part of their Holiday Book Fair, Metrograph today and December 16 will be selling the personal collection of books, magazines and journals collected by critic Tony Pipolo, who passed away this past Spring. From the announcement: A passionate moviegoer, intellectual polymath, writer of great acclaim, and Professor Emeritus of film and literature at CUNY, […]
In 1951, a volcano erupted on Fogo, one of the Cape Verde islands. That incident is the starting point for The Daughters of Fire, an experimental short by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Costa splits the screen into panels portraying three women—Adelaide, Clotilde, and Irodina—singing over an arrangement of Biagio Marini’s “Passacaglia (Opus 22).” The film ends with footage from A Erupcao do vulcao da ilha do Fogo, a 1951 documentary by ethnologist Orlando Ribeiro. The films are part of Canción de Pedro Costa, a museum exhibition currently touring Europe. In museums the films are projected separately in three different […]
You know Olli Haaskivi from his work in series such as Winning Time, Manifest, and The Sinner, and films like Motherless Brooklyn, Nancy and of course, this Summer’s blockbuster Oppenheimer, where he played scientist Edward Condon. On this episode he shares his experience of working with Christopher Nolan on that film (which he says seemed less sprawling than some student films he’s worked on!), why he felt the freedom to bring his ideas and “all of himself” (spoiler: Nolan is not afraid of actors!), and how all this affected the work in the moment. Plus he talks about his “this […]
Brit Marling is an inspiration. The talented multi-hypenate became an indie darling in 2011 with Another Earth and Sound of My Voice—collaborations with Mike Cahill and Zal Batmanglij respectively. She avoided various vapid roles and unfulfilling career paths and instead went on to star in (and co-create with Batmanglii) the hit Netflix series The OA, which was bafflingly cancelled after two seasons, despite a rabid and large fan base. The two are back with another series, FX’s A Murder At The End of The World—a cool Zoomer detective whodunit set in a remote super-hotel in Iceland. On this episode, she […]
Terra Long’s exquisite debut feature film, Feet in Water, Head on Fire, is at once cine-essay, landscape film and sensory investigation into the production of space. The space in question is the Coachella Valley of Southern California, on traditional Cahuilla territory, a place produced and transformed over multiple eras by overlapping mythologies, migrations and capital accumulation strategies. Arid, hot and prone to tectonic trauma, the landscape is challenging to many kinds of harvest, save the tenacious date palm, a species widely cultivated across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia with roots in Arabia stretching back millennia. That the […]