David Gutnik’s Rule of Two Walls — the title referring to the recommended method of sheltering during a bombing raid — receives its theatrical premiere August 16 at New York’s DCTV Firehouse Cinema before rolling out to selected cities via Monument Releasing. The doc, which depicts the work of Ukrainian artists making defiant work during the current war in Ukraine, is executive produced by Liev Schreiber and is the director’s foll0w-up to his fiction debut, Materna, which, like Rule of Two Walls, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. In an interview with Lauren Wissot timed to that festival premiere, Gutnik […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 8, 2024As I wrote when sharing an exclusive clip from the feature upon its festival premiere, Christina Kallas‘s Paris is in Harlem “takes place the night before New York’s infamous Cabaret Law was repealed. In a historic Harlem jazz bar, a shooting alters the lives of several strangers who have gathered for the final night of ‘no dancing.’” With the film premiering on digital platforms July 4, check out the new trailer above. Comments Kallas, ““As a European filmmaker making films in America, I’m somewhat obsessed with guns ending up in the wrong hands. In Paris is in Harlem, I am […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 2, 2024After the mixed reception given to the first trailer for George Miller’s forthcoming, Cannes-anticipated Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, where Anya Taylor-Joy plays a younger version of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa from Max Max: Fury Road, Warner Bros. has dropped a new trailer today that reveals a lot more of the film’s action, chronological sweep (different actors play Furiosa here) and overall look. Scored, to my ears at least, to an orchestral version of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” the trailer is found above.
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2024Director Vladan Nikolic is currently in post-production on his latest film, Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened, and preparing for a crowdfunding campaign to raise final costs. The filmmakers have shared with Filmmaker a teaser trailer, above, as well as the following statement about the film, which plans to premiere in festivals in 2024 Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened, a very ambitious no budget narrative feature film is in the works. Billed as a “collaborative film,” led by filmmaker and professor Vladan Nikolic, it was made with the help of filmmakers and actors from around the world. […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 7, 2023Michel Franco’s Sundown is unsettling tale of existential drift, one that upends the way in which the concept of family is often thematized in narrative films. It’s now given a suitably eerie trailer by its distributor, Bleecker Street. The story involves a brother (Tim Roth) and sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) vacationing at a Mexican resort when sad news arrives from abroad. The sister leaves, the brother stays, and the film’s mysteries concern the brother’s inscrutable motivations. Spasms of violence are expected in any film by the New Order director; those are hinted at by the trailer’s concluding sequence of flash cuts […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 4, 2022The first trailer just dropped for Nicole Riegel’s Holler, a flinty, tremendously assured debut drama with a powerful lead performance by Jessica Barden. When I interviewed Riegel last fall when her film played in Toronto’s market, she spoke of its development and financing process, during which some financiers asked her if she could make the lead male. “I wanted to tell my story, and I only knew to tell that if it was about a young woman in a very harsh, muscular environment,” Riegel told me. “And then I wanted to tell about how hard it is for young women […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 5, 2021Beth B’s Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over, her doc about the provocative and pummeling musician, writer, multi-media artist, social critic, No Wave pioneer and recent podcast host premieres Saturday night at DOC NYC, and the first trailer is online. Writes B about the film: Voicing the unheard and seeing the unseen are themes that have run through my films with an eye to creating dialogue, community, and a place for self-knowledge and acceptance. My documentary films are social, political and personal investigations; home movies focusing on people I know or have come to know. Lydia Lunch was 19 […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 8, 2019Says Graham Swon — a 2016 Filmmaker 25 New Face — about his debut narrative feature, “I’ve always wondered: is it possible to make a film which represents violence – at it’s most brutal and direct – without glorifying the act or exploiting the suffering of the victim? The World is Full of Secrets is an attempt to answer that question, through the pleasures and casual sadism of adolescence. It’s a love letter to that pain you feel when you first realize there’s a difference between fantasy and reality.” Premiering today is the film’s trailer, which, counter to 98% of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 9, 2019“A fashion photographer gets more than she bargained for when a roll of film in a used camera contains sinister imagery of high-society menace that sends her into a labyrinth of imminent danger,” reads the logline for China Test Girls, the second feature from Filmmaker 25 New Face Frankie Latina. In post-production, and with the final scenes just shot due to Latina’s own finding of an unused, refrigerated roll of Fuji film stock, the film looks to contain the ’60s/’70s exploitation vibe and anarchic underground weirdness that made his previous film, Modus Operandi, a favorite here at the magazine. Latina […]
by Frankie Latina on May 5, 2017In Sophia Takal’s Always Shine, two actress friends (Halt and Catch Fire’s Mackenzie Davis and Masters of Sex’s Caitlin FitzGerald), leave Los Angeles for a weekend getaway in hopes of reconnecting. But as the two women’s suppressed jealousies and deep-seated resentments bubble to the surface, they lose grasp not only of their relationship, but also of their own identities. Check out the trailer to the film, which earned Davis the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival award for Best Actress, above. Always Shine will hit theaters on December 2.
by Paula Bernstein on Oct 19, 2016