With many viewers struggling with subscription-itis — a costly overload of SVOD memberships that inflate credit card bills at the end of each month — it’s no wonder that the so-called FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) channels are taking off in popularity. For filmmakers, these channels offer a new revenue stream, and for viewers not only no-cost entertainment but the chance to discover many titles that for whatever market-based reasons aren’t streamable on Netflix, Amazon Prime or Criterion. Filmmaker‘s Web Editor, Natalia Keogan, and I took a look through the current offerings of the most well-recognized FAST channel, Tubi, to […]
by Natalia Keogan and Scott Macaulay on Jul 16, 2023Director of photography Thomas Scott Stanton comes to Matt Sobel’s Sundance NEXT button-pusher Take Me to the River from a diverse background. Born in Maine, he spent much of his childhood in Guam and the South Pacific. In Washington D.C. he founded the Green Barrel skate shops, and he still directs skate videos in addition to acting and working as a photographer. When it comes to Sobel’s film, which tells the unsettling story of a gay teenager confronting family secrets at an annual reunion, Stanton connected with the first-time director over Skype and, using the RED Epic M, brought a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 26, 2015Just to remind everyone what a bellwether of LGBT cinema it is — last year’s Sundance Film Festival brought us the U.S. (and often World) premieres of such exciting LGBT films of 2014 as Love Is Strange, Stranger By The Lake, Lilting, To Be Takei, The Skeleton Twins and the Oscar-shortlisted The Case Against 8 just to mention a few. So basically you can expect that many of the films listed below will become the hits of 2015! This year’s festival runs January 22- February 1 in Park City, Utah. Nearly 120 films will be shown (selected from amongst the […]
by Jenni Olson on Jan 21, 2015I first heard the term “southern circuit” while talking to former New York Times film critic, The Treatment radio host and venerated international playboy Elvis Mitchell. Over lunch in Krakow several years ago, he described the series of spring and fall film festivals throughout the American south. After a relatively quiet summer, come late August a festival seems to unfurl almost every week somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line, starting with the Sidewalk Moving Pictures Festival in Birmingham, Alabama. While high-profile southern fests such as SXSW, Atlanta, Oxford, Little Rock and Nashville take place during the spring, an even larger share […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 9, 2014Recently announced as a European Capital of Culture for 2016, the picturesque western Polish city of Wroclaw (actually pronounced Vrotz-wav, thus rendering the title pun sadly unworkable) welcomed an extremely distinguished guest for its fifth annual American Film Festival: none other than flying POTUS Barack Obama. Well, it seemed so for a moment, but appearances can be deceptive. A closer look revealed the man to be Louis Ortiz, top Barack-alike and star of Ryan Murdock’s enjoyable Bronx Obama, which screened as part of the festival’s documentary slate. The personable Ortiz’s social ubiquity made for a pleasingly incongruous addition to a […]
by Ashley Clark on Oct 30, 2014