If you look at the long list of movies opening every weekend, not just in theaters but on digital platforms too, you probably feel like you can’t keep up. We feel the same way here at Filmmaker, with usually more films entering the marketplace then we’re able to devote meaningful editorial to. Invariably, some films slip through the cracks, while others may have been covered by us at their festival premieres months ago, with our coverage now buried in the depths of our CMS. So, we’re starting this “Recommended on a Friday” series of picks designed to help you navigate […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 14, 2016Before the recently-completed IFP Week fades too far from memory, we’ll wrap up our coverage with something new: an IFP Instagram Diary. We’ve already clocked how many times the words “branded,” “followers” and “content” were used at the event, and apparently social media is the future. Who knew? When Refinery29’s CCO Amy Emmerich urged during a panel, “Paramount Pictures should not be above Snapchat,” well, we figured we should hop on the social media bandwagon too. No, we don’t have a Snapchat yet – we will? The tag line for the conference, “Everybody Gets Creative,” acknowledges the way we’re all […]
by Meredith Alloway on Oct 3, 2016The story of Christine Chubbuck, the Florida news reporter who shot herself to death on live TV in 1974, was recounted in two separate films which premiered earlier this year at Sundance. Kate Plays Christine, the performative documentary from Robert Greene, was released last month and now Christine, Antonio Campos’ fictional version, has its first trailer. In addition to Rebecca Hall, who stars as the titular character, the dark drama features Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts, Timothy Simons, J. Smith-Cameron, Maria Dizzia and John Cullum. The Orchard will release Christine on October 14.
by Paula Bernstein on Sep 15, 2016Christine certainly isn’t a coming-out performance for Rebecca Hall, a prominent and regular presence at the multiplex since her breakthrough part in 2006’s The Prestige. But her turn as Christine Chubbuck in Antonio Campos’s Christine (out this October from The Orchard) is a devastating assault on a part of unusual complexity. Chubbuck was a Sarasota, Florida, TV journalist who shot herself live and on-camera in July 1974. In the absence of much biographical information, Craig Shilowich’s script portrays Chubbuck as a vector of dueling, uncontrollable contradictions. Hall nails a number of different personality conflicts: she’s a sometimes-beloved colleague with loyal […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2016Sarasota TV journalist Christine Chubbuck shot herself live on-air in 1974 and died 14 hours later. The suicide footage exists on one two-inch tape, which is inaccessibly locked up in the vault of the former president of the Florida station (now part of ABC) Chubbuck worked at, so there are shades of Grizzly Man in Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine. The premise is that Kate Lyn Sheil’s preparing to play Chubbuck in a movie that will conclude with a recreation of the suicide, and the climactic question is whether the actress can go through with it. Scenes from this ostensible biopic (a fiction Greene uses to instigate the entire film; […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 25, 2016