Spring 2026
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Personal Effects: Boots Riley and His Collaborators on Crafting I Love Boosters
Boots Riley has directed two movies and one TV show over the past decade, but he’s been telling stories through music for more than 30 years. “I usually think about my songs the same way I think about movies,” said Riley, whose Oakland-based hip hop group The Coup started 35 years ago. “Music was a way for me to cheaply make movies.” Now, music fuels his movies in other ways, though he’s still on the lookout for inventive ways to stretch his budget. Riley officially transitioned into filmmaking around 2015, when his time at the Sundance Labs laid the groundwork […]
by Eric Kohn on May 19, 2026 -
Minnesota Fierce: Documentary Filmmaker Joua Lee Grande Reports From Operation Metro Surge
Though Joua Lee Grande studied cinema and media culture in college, she built much of her early career in nonprofits based in the Twin Cities. “I was mentoring young people about how they should follow their dreams, and I was like, I should take my own advice,” says Grande. “You’ve got to walk the walk at some point.” In the years that followed, Grande established herself as a documentarian with a vital foothold in Minnesota’s underrepresented communities. Her films include On All Fronts, a short documentary about a Black-Indonesian family navigating the chaos of living in Minneapolis in 2020, and […]
by Scott Meslow on Apr 30, 2026 -
Slow Your Roll: Can Durational Cinema Save Us?
You know the feeling: the algorithm catches you one lazy afternoon, and hours melt in the blink of an eye. You come to, dehydrated, achy, struggling to focus. Or at night, your couch sucks you in. You bounce from Netflix to Hulu to HBO, trying to find your “next show” or catch up on one that all the memes insist you simply have to watch. Instead, you start 15 minutes of three different series and two mid-’90s movies, then retreat to your phone. Before long, a sickly yellow fog buzzes behind your eyes—the undeniable mental vertigo of brain rot. The […]
by John Lopez on Apr 29, 2026 -
Hooray for…Jerseywood?
In 2006, when Cameron Zonfrilli and John Welsh shifted their film production business, Parlay, to a full-fledged multistage Jersey City studio, their clients mainly consisted of small reality-based cable shows, multicams, and commercial work. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of film production in New Jersey. “A lot of little independent commercials and agency work,” Zonfrilli says. Twenty years later, the film landscape in the Garden State is experiencing a boom. Big state-of-the-art studios are being built, renovated, and expanded all over the state. And top Hollywood players like Lionsgate, Netflix, and Paramount are coming to town, teaming with […]
by Max Cea on Apr 23, 2026 -
Making Sense of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Monumental Life’s Work
Last year, I stumbled on a bootleg copy of Twists in the Cord (1994), an experimental documentary shot on video by Lynn Hershman Leeson. I’ve followed the prolific artist for years, but I had never heard of the piece until it appeared in a search result when I was looking for something else. It’s classic Leeson, depicting technology as a catalyst to subvert identity and authenticity. She was an established—if unsung—artist in the 1970s when she started making films and videos, and her just-published memoir, Private I, reveals this turn was less of a second act than a lifelong pull […]
by Joanne McNeil on Apr 22, 2026 -
Who Wants to Be White Famous?
After covering film and TV for more than 25 years, I’m still surprised at how long it takes some Black artists to become White Famous. What’s White Famous, you ask? It’s the state of being recognized by the mainstream media, something many Black performers experience long after first coming to the attention of Black audiences. Being White Famous has its benefits. Your IMDb ranking goes up, as does your salary quote for your next project. Your agents, managers, and publicists will be thrilled. “You’ve crossed over,” they’ll say, and they’ll mean it as a good thing. But White Fame can […]
by Wilson Morales on Apr 16, 2026 -
Northern Exposure: Chandler Levack and Sophy Romvari Chat Mile End Kicks and Blue Heron
Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks and Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron make time travel feel possible. Levack retreats into the beer-drenched, laissez-faire vibe of Montreal’s indie rock scene circa 2011; Romvari reflects on her Hungarian immigrant family’s domestic struggles on Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. In Mile End Kicks (Sumerian Pictures), 23-year-old Grace (Barbie Ferreira) is an avatar for Levack, a music critic at a Toronto alt-weekly who leaves her bro-dominated publication for a creative summer in Montreal. She’s supposed to write a short book for the 33 ⅓ series about Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Instead, Grace loses herself […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 16, 2026 -
Steven Soderbergh on Making The Christophers With Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen
Twisty as a Hitchcock movie but not a thriller, Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a two-hander for two great actors. Michaela Coel plays Lori Butler, a serious painter with a side gig as an art forger. Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, an art world star in the 1960s and ’70s who hasn’t made any work of note in decades. Julian’s children, who hate him, concoct a scheme in which Lori is smuggled into Julian’s dilapidated five-story house as a temporary assistant. She is tasked with finding “The Christophers,” a series of portraits that Julian began in his prime but never finished. If […]
by Amy Taubin on Apr 7, 2026 -
K. Austin Collins Salutes Frederick Wiseman
I think of the work of Frederick Wiseman, and my mind is drawn, immediately, to the faces. The blank stare of a monkey whose head, stem still attached, has been painstakingly severed from its body, for the sake of science, in Primate (1974). Young Black and Latino students in Harlem parsing the immediate ramifications of the Rodney King beating in High School II (1994). The sinewed despair that confronts us as the working-class people of Titicut Follies (1967), Hospital (1970), Welfare (1975), Public Housing (1997), In Jackson Heights (2015), and so many other of Wiseman’s films navigate the life-and-death intricacies […]
by K. Austin Collins on Apr 6, 2026 -
Dreams Deferred: How Iranian Filmmakers Pursue Liberation Under Unbearable Constraints
The people of Iran find themselves suspended in a historical moment of great uncertainty. On December 28, 2025, in the midst of a major economic crisis exacerbated in part by U.S. sanctions, shopkeepers and vendors in several commercial centers throughout the country went on strike. The protests grew larger in number, culminating in early January as Iran’s largest uprising since the 1979 Revolution. The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) responded by imposing an internet blackout to facilitate the indiscriminate murder of protesters and civilians alike. Thousands were killed in the largest massacre in the nation’s history, and the periodic protests […]
by Nick Kouhi on Apr 2, 2026
