New films by American independents Benny and Josh Safdie, Todd Haynes, Sofia Coppola and Noah Baumbach will all premiere in Competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The official selection’s full slate includes the Safdie brothers’s Robert Pattinson-starring Good Time, Haynes’s Amazon-financed childrens picture Wonderstruck, and the latest from Baumbach, the Netflix-acquired, Adam Sander-starring The Meyerowitz Stories. International auteurs include Lynne Ramsay’s collaboration with Joaquin Phoenix, You Were Never Really Here; Michael Haneke’s Happy End, dealing with the European refugee crisis; and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, one of four festival films featuring Nicole Kidman. Also noteworthy […]
The 2017 Sundance Film Festival is just a few days away, and with it begins a new cycle of stressing out about all of the movies that I haven’t been able to see yet. Hollywood operates on a very fixed theatrical schedule — leftovers dumped wholesale at the beginning of the year (I’m looking at you, Bye Bye Man), CGI franchises dominating the summer calendar, and Oscar bait rolling out from October on. Meanwhile, the landscape for smaller-budget but more adventurous films here in the States has developed its own windowing: the majority of American art films will premiere at […]
“I want to make films on the other side of fashion, on the other side of taste,” whispers a melancholic starlet into a velvety black void. It’s the 1930s, and the alluring actress — known in Europe as “La Divina” — has been brought to Hollywood to vamp in commercial confections alongside an American matinee idol. She doesn’t fit in. She wants to play real roles, like Dorian Gray or Christ. Her nervy agent is bewildered. “That’s art!” he scoffs. “Who’s gonna to pay for that?” Brooke Dammkoehler’s 45-minute La Divina (1989), a buoyant pastiche of Golden Age melodrama by way […]
What does the term “independent film” mean to you? To me, it’s my profession. It’s the field I’ve always worked in. I try not to talk about this much but when I was young(er) I took a brief gig in reality TV. It took me two months to realize that I’d choose low pay and long hours any day if it meant I got to work on projects that I loved. To others, “independent film” is a genre. Back in the ’80s, when the term was first coming into popular use, “independent film” was a signifier of a certain type […]
A surreal and entirely original coming-of-age tale, Closet Monster tells the story of Oscar, a gay, cinephilic high school senior who has been grappling with the implications of his parents’ divorce — and a witnessed act of gay bashing — by, among other things, conversing with his “spirit animal”: Buffy, a pet hamster voiced by Isabella Rossellini. The feature debut of Canadian writer/director Stephen Dunn, the film has drawn comparisons to the work of countrymen David Cronenberg and Xavier Dolan, but it pulses to its own unexpectedly sincere wavelength. Below, we asked Dunn about that Cronenberg connection, star Connor Jessup […]
Jake Perlin opened the IFP Film Week panel on shooting 16mm or Super16mm by saying that, as Artistic and Programming Director at Metrograph Cinema, he wants to see films in the way filmmakers want to make them: true to their vision. When it came time to shoot her second feature, director Eliza Hittman went back and forth as to what to what format to shoot on. When she was in grad school, she shot three short films on 16mm and fell in love with the format’s look as well as the shooting process. She learned to shoot in an organized […]
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today that Ethan Hawke and Amy Adams will be presented with Actor and Actress Tributes, and Oliver Stone will receive the Director Tribute at the 2016 IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards set for Monday, November 28th at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. “We are honored to have Amy Adams, Ethan Hawke, and Oliver Stone as our Actress, Actor, and Director Tribute honorees at this year’s Gotham Awards,” said Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP and the Made in NY Media Center. “Each with a remarkable body of work that […]
Available today on DVD and digital platforms, Jenni Olson’s The Royal Road is a beautifully crafted essay film that ruminates on several histories — the Spanish Colonization of California, film history and, through voiceover monologue, the director’s own personal story — all set against elegantly composed (in 4:3 16mm) landscape shots captured along the El Camino Real. Olson’s form here recalls the durational cinema of James Benning even as she brings in a wealth of information and references through her audio track, including, at one point, the words of playwright Tony Kushner, who offers a critique of the kind of […]
In the early 1980s, the Ghanaian-British artist John Akomfrah became a founder member of the innovative, seven-strong Black Audio Film Collective, who curated programs of avant-garde world cinema and made their own work using slide-tape texts, film, and video. Their serious-minded, multifaceted output, much of which was directed by Akomfrah, alighted on subjects from the causes of race-related inner-city U.K. unrest and its media representation (Handsworth Songs) to the origins of Afrofuturism (The Last Angel of History). The group disbanded in 1998, but Akomfrah has since operated extensively across film, television, and galleries, often in collaboration with former BAFC members. […]
George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, John Turturro, and composer Carter Burwell are among the talking heads who analyze the filmmaking brothers’ oeuvre in VICE Guide to Film‘s recent episode on the Coen Brothers (above). The segment, which amounts to an extended video essay, breaks down scenes from some of their most memorable films and delves into their collaboration process. Discussing the directing duo, Turturro says, “It’s like a two-headed monster.” Previous episodes of the show have focused on the work of Kelly Reichardt, Gus Van Sant, John Carpenter, Todd Haynes, and other directors.