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 […]

It’s an idea that has been swirling around the Filmmaker Magazine office for quite a while and today it became a reality with the launch of our Video On Demand calendar. Every month we will unveil a curated list of independent film titles that we feel are worth checking out through On Demand cable providers and streaming services. You’ll find some titles we’ve already covered online or in the magazine when they played theatrically, while others are festival favorites that are premiering on VOD. We also give our “VOD Pick of the Month” and note if a title is available […]

EDITOR’S NOTE, May 28, 2012: At the time of this blog post, all the below 25 films were available on Amazon Prime. Now, a year later, we have been informed by our readers that a number of them are no longer listed on the service. We apologize for any inconvenience, but, as we are learning, streaming windows can be short, and films can rotate on and off the various services. It’s thus possible that missing titles could return in the near future. In the meantime, we’ll work on another post with an entirely up-to-date selection of films. Amazon has dipped […]