The official trailer has arrived for writer/director Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny, which is set to hit theaters this fall before heading exclusively to Amazon Prime Video. Jusu, a former 25 New Faces of Film, makes her feature debut with Nanny. The film premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, where it picked up the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize—the first time the award has been granted to a horror film, and only the second time it has gone to a feature directed by a Black woman. Nanny follows Aisha (Anna Diop), a Senegalese woman who is hired as a domestic […]

Fresh out of Juilliard, Jeanne Tripplehorn’s first screen role was Basic Instinct. That started a 30+ year run of films like The Firm, Waterworld, Sliding Doors, and series such as Criminal Minds, Big Love, and her latest, The Terminal List for Amazon. In this episode, she talks about her love for extensive research, the most important tools for an actor—confidence, relaxation, and focus; how the happenings off-screen affect what’s on the screen; and why, at this point in her career, she just wants to play. Plus we get the scoop on her preternatural ability to sing classic rock songs in […]

The cinema of scopophilia is given a generational, technological and gender-reversing twist in Michael Mohan’s The Voyeurs, opening today on Amazon Prime. Pippa (Sydney Sweeney, of Euphoria and The White Lotus) and Thomas (Generation‘s Justice Smith) are a young couple who move into a gorgeous Montreal loft apartment sporting one ethically dubious perk: clear sightlines into an even more gorgeous pad occupied by an oversexed fashion photographer, Seb (Ben Hardy), and his striking girlfriend Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo). For the new couple, the action across the road is initially an aphrodisiac, a kickstart to libidos on the early wane. Soon, […]

Lily Rabe is probably best know for inhabiting a half-dozen characters over many seasons on Ryan Murphy’s hugely popular American Horror Story series, and recently her supporting performance in The Undoing had a lot of people talking, but in New York City, she’s theater royalty. I pinpoint my first encounter with her greatness. It was as Portia in The Merchant of Venice for Shakespeare in the Park. The court scene. She details the lengths director Daniel Sullivan went to avoid rehearsing that scene, and the miraculous occurrence when they finally did. She talks about being an “over-packer” when it comes […]

To say that documentarian Tiller Russell has a knack for discovering unconventional characters is an understatement. From NYPD cops running a cocaine ring (2015’s The Seven Five), to a Russian mobster, a Cuban spy and a Miami playboy conspiring to sell a Soviet sub to the Cali cartel (2018’s Operation Odessa), the filmmaker has more than earned his gonzo doc bona fides. And the weird winning streak continues with the director’s four-part docuseries The Last Narc, premiering on Amazon Prime Video today. The story catalyzing Russell’s latest is one familiar to any viewer of the first season of Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico — the 1985 kidnapping […]

After announcing on April 2 that the two companies would partner to bring selections from the cancelled 2020 SXSW Film Festival to home viewers, Amazon Prime Video and SXSW announced today the titles that will comprise the free-to-view “2020 SXSW Film Festival Collection.” A total of 39 works — features, shorts, music videos and episodic titles — opted into the program. Of the 39, only seven are features — five percent of the festival’s feature selection — and the four narrative films are all international titles. For producers and filmmakers, the Amazon/SXSW collaboration was immediately controversial upon announcement, with several […]

One of the more interesting experiments in mid-2000s cable television was Mick Garris’ Masters of Horror anthology for Showtime, a series that lasted only two seasons but yielded terrific work by John Landis, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, John McNaughton, and Garris himself. It’s now streaming free on the advertiser supported platform Tubi, and many of the episodes are well worth revisiting – particularly Joe Dante’s The Screwfly Solution, an entry from season two that presciently taps into current anxieties relating to both the coronavirus and the #MeToo movement. The movie begins with a series of unprovoked assaults on women by […]

Skimming through Amazon Prime the other day, I noticed the recent addition of extreme oddity The Face with Two Left Feet, a 1979 Italian Saturday Night Fever cash-in about a loser who also happens to be a dead ringer for John Travolta, a fact he exploits to pick up his dream girl. I bring this up not merely to recommend the film (although I wholeheartedly do) but to point out that this is decidedly not what one might expect to find on a mainstream streaming service. Not too long ago, this sort of thing would be — if you were […]

Online video’s come a long way in the seven-and-a-half years since the launch of YouTube, but it’s no secret that the landscape’s still constantly changing for filmmakers, both independents and studios. The big question, still, is how to best monetize online viewing, as a few recent developments have illustrated. Karin Chien has a great piece in the current issue of Filmmaker (available for subscribers here) about how some YouTube stars have built up massive audiences that have, in turn, supported them financially and empowered them to deal with Hollywood on favorable terms. But we all know that going viral can […]

As 2011 comes to a close, here, based on Google Analytics, are this site’s top ten posts of the year. 1. 25 New Faces of 2011. I mean, of course — what else would have been our top traffic-getter of the year? As it does every year, the unveiling of our 25 New Faces list outpaced everything else on the site by almost three to one. And one thing I’m especially proud of — at the time we pick them, the people on this list are real discoveries. As I look at lists with similar ambitions on other sites, I’m […]