With the full Venice Immersive slate announced yesterday, the Venice Classics lineup has now been revealed ahead of the 80th edition of the Venice International Film Festival. Curated by Alberto Barbera in collaboration with Federico Gironi, this year’s Venice Classics slate features newly restored versions of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Agnès Varda’s The Creatures and much more. Alongside recent restorations, several films in the lineup boast new “Director’s Cut” labels, including Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Andrei Rublev, which, according to the curators, “will be presented in the reconstruction of the complete original version, which was censored […]
The full Venice Immersive lineup, the XR (Extended Reality) section of the 80th Venice International Film Festival, has been announced today. Described as being “entirely devoted to immersive media” and encompassing “all XR means of creative expression,” the program will be held just a short distance from the Lido on the island Lazzaretto Vecchio (dubbed Immersive Island for the fest). Press previews will be held on August 29 before opening exclusively for press and industry on August 30. The public and all other festival accredited visitors will be able to see the program between August 31 and September 9. Per […]
Jennifer Reeder’s follow-up as a writer-director to her 2019 feature debut Knives and Skin, the first trailer arrives today for Perpetrator. The film had its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale before having its North American premiere at Tribeca Festival earlier this summer. In my interview with Reeder ahead of Berlinale ’23, I briefly elaborate on the film’s premise: Precocious 17-year-old Jonny (Kiah McKirnan) has a no-frills home life with her deadbeat father, supported by her after school hustle as a petty thief. Her mother has long been out of the picture, only exacerbating her feeling of isolation when she […]
The trailer arrives today for Mutt, the feature debut of writer-director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz. The film premiered at Sundance in January (where star Lío Mehiel received the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Acting, becoming the first trans actor to do so), before subsequently screening at Berlinale (winning the Generation 14plus—Best Film award) and closing out this year’s New Directors/New Films. The trans coming-of-age film will open at New York City’s Film Forum later this summer. Here’s the official synopsis: Feña (Mehiel), a young trans guy bustling through life in New York City, is afflicted with an incessantly challenging day that […]
Watch the trailer for Our Body, the latest from acclaimed French documentarian Claire Simon, director of God’s Offices, The Competition, I Want to Talk About Duras and others. The doc had its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale before screening at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight and True/False stateside. Per an official synopsis: French documentary titan Claire Simon observes the everyday operations of the gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris. In the process, she questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the diversity, singularity and beauty of patients in all stages of life. Through these many […]
Normally on shoots, veteran documentary maker Kim Longinotto films far away from her native England, often capturing the lives of women in desperate situations over the course of a few weeks. With her latest film, Dalton’s Dream, things ran rather differently. Having watched his victory on the British X Factor in 2018, Longinotto reached out to Dalton Harris, interested in documenting his life in a new country with a new record contract. An initial three-month shoot morphed into more than four years, held up by both the pandemic and the turbulence of Harris’s life as he found himself persecuted for […]
There’s a moment early in director Brian Vincent and producer Heather Spore’s documentary Make Me Famous when the ’80s downtown New York artist Edward Brezinski is described by the late artist Duncan Hannah as the guy with the flyers. Brezinski would show up at openings, drink the cheap wine and press flyers for group shows at the Magic Gallery (his own barren apartment on East 3rd Street) into as many palms as possible. In a world where the most successful artists managed to self-promote while simultaneously adopting a pose of understated remove, Brezinski’s old-school hucksterism was memorably uncool. As the […]
With only 24 days to capture nearly 30 sketches, the average I Think You Should Leave bit is shot in roughly six to eight hours. That might be for the best. When you’re slopping up steaks or shooting body after body busting out of cheap wood and hitting pavement, probably wise not to linger at a location for too long. Cinematographer Markus Mentzer, who has been behind the camera for all three seasons of the Netflix show, breaks down the newest crop of sketches for Filmmaker. Filmmaker: Your first three camera department credits on IMDB are Out of Time, In […]
Fantasia International Film Festival announces today the third wave of titles for its 2023 lineup, with first and second wave titles revealed earlier this spring. The 27th edition of the festival will run from July 20 through August 9 at Montreal’s Concordia Hall Cinema, with additional screenings to be held at the J.A. DeSève Cinema, Cinémathèque québécoise, and Cinéma du Musée. Pre-sale tickets will be available on Saturday, July 15 at 1pm EST. In the meantime, check out the full list of additional titles, panels, events and jurors at this year’s Fantasia, and visit the festival’s official website for more […]
Chris Messina is that rare character actor leading man who is the go-to supporting actor in seemingly everything. From The Mindy Project and Newsroom, to She Dies Tomorrow and I Care A Lot, he handles ultra-serious roles (like in Blame, which I loved) or uproarious ones (such as in this year’s hit Air) with what seems like effortlessness, and now he’s starring in the new series Based on a True Story with Kaley Cuoco. In this hour, he generously takes us on an extended tour of his process. He talks about learning to “experience” rather than “act,” why the thought […]