Summer 2024
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The Future Looking Back At Us: Joanne McNeil on Cyberpunk
This year is the 40th anniversary of William Gibson’s classic novel Neuromancer. It’s a work of singular brilliance that arrived as part of a new vanguard. Back in 1984, in the Washington Post, author and editor Gardner Dozois identified Gibson as part of an emerging trend: new science fiction authors who had eschewed formulaic space operas for “bizarre hard-edged, high-tech stuff.” Dozois called these authors the “cyberpunks,” and the label caught on. Key works of cyberpunk like Neuromancer were produced in the ’80s alongside the boom in personal computers, and again in the ’90s as subscriptions to online services and […]
by Joanne McNeil on Sep 18, 2024 -
The Monster You Become: Coralie Fargeat on The Substance
Even for the most callous horror-heads, Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature, Revenge (2017), stunned with its gruesome rape-revenge plot and blunt-force style, announcing the French director as a genre talent on the rise, capable of invoking her cinematic inspirations while departing from them on her own frenzied, feminist terms. The Substance, which won the award for Best Screenplay when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, somehow cranks up the madness even further, unfolding a dark Hollywood fairytale about aging and feminine beauty standards that stands among the most adventurous in the body horror genre. Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a […]
by Beatrice Loayza on Sep 18, 2024 -
Of Mascots and Men: Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickston Cole Tews on Hundreds of Beavers
The phrase “word-of-mouth indie theatrical hit” sounds as outdated in 2024 as “coming soon to LaserDisc.” And yet, the slapstick fur-trapping adventure comedy Hundreds of Beavers has graduated from its lengthy festival run to become that rarest of things, a star-free independent film that has already grossed more than double its $150,000 production budget during its self-distributed gradual cinema rollout (still continuing as of this writing, despite its release on VOD). First-time feature writer-director Mike Cheslik previously teamed with lead actor/producer/co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews on the latter’s feature directorial debut, the black-and-white adventure comedy Lake Michigan Monster. In classic independent […]
by Doug Dillaman on Jun 27, 2024 -
Reality Checks: How Film Schools are Adapting to Entertainment Industry Changes
Scan the entertainment business press and everywhere you’ll see the phrase “the great contraction.” The aftermath of COVID shutdowns, labor strikes, the wind-down of zero-interest-rate policies, the end of peak TV, changes in the competitive streaming landscape, the rise of TikTok—all have conspired to make the ever-perilous path toward a career in feature film and television even more uncertain. The economic laws of supply and demand, as they pertain to the labor market, would indicate, then, that film schools must be feeling an enrollment pinch, but talking to various graduate and undergraduate chairs and professors from across the country, that’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 27, 2024 -
Once Upon a Time on the Lower East Side
In an excerpt from her new memoir, director Susan Seidelman reflects on the beginnings of her breakthrough 1982 feature Smithereens. bad girls (donna summer) I started to notice a certain type of girl hanging around the downtown club scene. I won’t call her a groupie, but she had elements of that. She was someone looking for excitement. Driven by a need to feel special, eager for recognition despite no discernible talent … and inclined to sleep with anyone in a band. Like me, she came from a place she wanted to escape. Bit by bit, I began to draw a […]
by Susan Seidelman on Jun 27, 2024 -
Crosstown Connections: The Cinephilic Community Building of the Tallgrass Film Center
A group of about 20 people trickles back into the green-lit microcinema after intermission smoke breaks to witness burlesque artist Emerald Spectre perform a striptease. Spectre comes out dressed as Halloween’s Michael Myers, complete with a prop knife dipped in red glitter, and dances to Radiohead’s “Creep.” Over the next ten minutes, the killer’s taciturn visage morphs into that of a gorgeous pin-up wearing strappy lingerie whose pasties occasionally fall out of place, prompting demure attempts at modesty. When we return to our regular programming, 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, the audience shouts, “Beat his ass, Busta!” I’ve been to my fair […]
by Jeromiah Taylor on Jun 27, 2024 -
Offscreen Dialogue: India Donaldson on Good One
In writer-director India Donaldson’s feature debut, Good One, 17-year-old Sam (outstanding newcomer Lily Collias) embarks on a weekend camping trip with her father Chris (James LeGros) and his lifelong pal Matt (Danny McCarthy). For Sam, a meek college-bound lesbian, the interactions with the two adult men with whom she treks through the forest fall back on conventional gender dynamics ranging from idly domestic to outright degrading: She cooks dinner, washes utilitarian dishware and fields insensitive comments about her sexuality without protest, demonstrating the extent of her excellent manners, so defining of her character that they’re referenced in the film’s title. […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 27, 2024 -
The Gotham Pages: Mel Sangyi Zhao is Creating Space for More Complex Women Characters
Cinema often shrinks from women’s middle age, a site it seems to find either innately unglamorous or melancholy. Middle-aged women are frequently relegated to supporting figures, particularly in tales of girlhood, but there exist so few accounts of their lives on screen. For this reason (and so many intersecting others), women are primed to dread middle age, for few truly know what to expect of it. Return to Youth, the daring short from ascendant filmmaker and Gotham EDU alum Mel Sangyi Zhao, places itself squarely in this long untapped cinematic space. Perhaps unsurprisingly, women directors generally seem more inclined to […]
by Kelli Weston on Jun 27, 2024 -
Sequential Notes: Angela Schanelec on Music
Since her debut feature, My Sister’s Good Fortune (1995), Angela Schanelec has steadily established herself as one of the Europe’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers. Across nine features, Schanelec’s style has evolved but retained consistent qualities: stark, clean visuals and crisp editing combined with elusive narrative techniques that crescendo into unexpected moments of emotional catharsis. A subject of hardcore cinephile fandom since her 2019 feature I Was at Home, But…, Schanelec seems to be gaining broader acceptance. Still, the peculiarities of her approach can be off-putting for general audiences. I first encountered Schanelec’s work at the Locarno Film Festival, where I was […]
by Graham Swon on Jun 27, 2024 -
AI Is Already Changing Filmmaking: How Filmmakers Are Using These New Tools in Production and Post
When Sora, OpenAI’s video generator model, hit the internet in February, realistic-looking demo videos flooded social media, usually accompanied by some form of “RIP Hollywood” commentary. While Sora still isn’t publicly available, between Runway, Pika and a slew of other video and image generators there have been many questions about what the future of filmmaking will look like—and whether humans will even be the ones making movies in the future. Right now, generative AI is still far away from creating consistent characters and the exact, carefully crafted images that industry professionals require. Maybe a movie will be entirely generated with […]
by Joey Daoud on Jun 27, 2024
