A trailer has arrived for the 4K restoration of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s 2000 film Werckmeister Harmonies from Janus Films. Based on the 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, the film will be re-released in New York later this month with more cities to follow. An official synopsis reads: One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown […]
The New York City-based independent film non-profit Rooftop Films announces today the lineup for their annual Summer Series (presented by AMC Networks), the outdoor film festival that showcases new indie titles all summer long across all five boroughs. The 27th edition will kick off on Thursday, May 25th at Green-Wood Cemetery, and per tradition, will feature a night of live music and short film screenings. Each subsequent screening during Summer Series 2023 will include filmmaker Q&As, live performances and/or free after parties. This year’s festival will run from May 25 through August 24 with a total of 45 events. Highlights […]
Though it hasn’t reached the fever pitch of absurdity of The Fast and the Furious franchise just yet—a series that began as a Point Break riff but now includes nuclear submarines and Pontiac Fieros in space —the John Wick saga has certainly expanded from its humble beginnings. Produced independently and shot in New York on a budget in the mid-$20 million range, the original film found its titular assassin (played by Keanu Reeves) emerging from retirement to avenge the death of his dog. Four chapters later, Reeves is hopping between New York City, Osaka, Berlin, Paris and the Wadi Rum […]
Visions du Réel is so punctilious about its nonfiction festival identity that the program booklet explicitly labels the few titles not fitting that (honestly very broad) categorization as “Fiction,” a tag only deployed this year for sidebar retrospectives of Alice Rohrwacher and Lucrecia Martel. For myself, I wanted to attend less because of any particular predilection for nonfiction and more because VdR seems full of stronger iterations of a type of movie I tend to enjoy, roughly categorizable as “relatively well-financed art-leaning European (co)productions”—i.e., I was primarily interested for aesthetic reasons, with the filmmakers chosen for this year’s sidebars illustrative […]
Prismatic Ground, the New York-based film festival that showcases experimental documentary and avant-garde works, kicks off this week. Spanning five days and six theaters, the festival will run from May 3-7 with screenings at the Museum of the Moving Image, Maysles Documentary Center, BAM Cinematheque, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, Light Industry and Anthology Film Archives. Now in its third year, Prismatic Ground’s 2023 slate features approximately 60 films, including both recent films from contemporary artists and new restorations of work from essential filmmakers. During a recent chat with Prismatic Ground’s founder and director Inney Prakash, he emphasized that the festival’s lineup […]
In the new Amazon series Swarm, a fanatical devotee of a Beyoncé-esque pop star embarks on a quest to meet the singer, with a few stops along the way to dispose of those who have disparaged her idol online. Created by Donald Glover and Janine Nabers, the show hops around between Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Seattle and L.A., but was shot largely in Atlanta by Drew Daniels. The Red Rocket and Krisha DP spoke to Filmmaker about the influence of Michael Haneke, the beauty of imperfect camera moves and Swarm’s extremely last-minute switch to 35mm film. Filmmaker: Let’s start with some […]
When it came time to title his 2018 documentary about The Kronos Quartet, director Sam Green chose A Thousand Thoughts. Referring to an older Kronos composition, the title also spoke to the film’s approach, which was to use the music and biography of the Bay Area classical group to summon up a range of allusive meditations on ephemerality, culture, legacy and death. For his latest documentary, ostensibly about the much larger and more amorphous topic of “sound,” Green has gone in the numerically opposite direction. 32 Sounds, which opens today at New York’s Film Forum, announces itself as a sort […]
Trenque Lauquen opens with a mystery. Laura, a biologist cataloging plant species in the eponymous town, has gone missing and her husband and a driver she used to work with team up to track her down. The two men share stories and tour the doldrums of the Las Pampas area while beginning to unravel the mystery behind Laura’s disappearance, discoveries that lead to other discoveries and even more questions. Told over the course of 12 chapters and screening in two parts, Trenque Lauquen unfolds like a large map—sprouting stories within stories in a labyrinth of genres, characters and vivid flashbacks. […]
The two big product updates from Adobe at NAB were text-based editing in Premiere and still photo support in Camera to Cloud (you can read our coverage on Frame.io updates here). But in chatting with Michael Cioni, Adobe’s Senior Director of Global Innovation, things took a fascinating turn when discussing Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI model, and the future of AI in media production. Our conversation explored the integration of AI tools in Adobe’s products, as well as the broader implications of AI-driven technologies on the creative process. Michael shared his insights on how the shift towards generative AI solutions could significantly […]
Winner of the Cinema Vision 14Plus Award and Generation Special Mention for Best Film at last year’s Berlinale, Jamie Sisley’s debut feature Stay Awake finally gets a trailer and a limited US theatrical release date. The addiction drama will open at Film Forum in New York City on May 19 and the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles on May 25. An official synopsis reads: A fictionalized account of the filmmaker’s coming of age as he struggles to get out from under the yoke of a prescription-drug-addicted mother in small-town Virginia. Life in the last, lame-duck months of high school, with […]