Our worst Filmmaker cover was Spring 2003. We decided to break with our tradition of director or actor portraits in favor of an iconic image illustrating that issue’s major article, a piece by Anthony Kaufman on filmmakers embracing DIY distribution. It would be something like a New York Times Magazine cover, we thought — a stark shot that would act as an instantly recognizable visual metaphor for the serious journalism inside. That art, however, was a generic and uninteresting picture of a padlock. (Filmmakers are locked out of the system — get it?) As soon as we sent it to […]

Alicia Van Couvering on the mysteries of VOD reporting.

We are swimming in a sea of data. In 2012, Facebook passed the one billion-user mark, 48 hours worth of new video was uploaded to YouTube every minute and Apple received their one-millionth app submission while the Android store listed more than 600,000 apps with more than 20 billion installs. These stats represent an incredible amount of online activity with a decent percentage attributed to a rise in smartphone and tablet usage. Fame and riches await those who can effectively capture and monetize even a small percentage of this activity. In April, Facebook announced that they were acquiring Instagram, a […]

Long atop the list of the best unfilmed novels, Jack Kerouac’s totemic Beat text On the Road has, after 55 years, made it to the big screen, directed by Walter Salles and with a cast led by Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst. The film’s executive producer, Francis Ford Coppola, originally optioned the book in 1980 and had previously hired such writers as Russell Banks and Michael Herr to adapt it. In 2004, he saw Salles’ biopic about the young Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries — a period road movie about idealistic, politicized young men — and […]

Opening a film festival with Leos Carax’s Holy Motors shows sullen optimism, of which the 53rd Thessaloniki International Film Festival had plenty. The 10-day event in mid-November brimmed with hope and sunshine, but also what felt like bone-weariness from six years of producing both the international and the spring documentary festival with declining resources in a country where bankers and politicians are determined to spiral into further decline. Past parallel events, such as filmmaker master classes and a daily convocation of directors called “Just Talking,” were missed. Neither a first-time festivalgoer nor the crowds would notice: Capacity was reported at […]

Nearly a decade after winning Sundance with his startlingly original Primer, SHANE CARRUTH returns with a haunting and powerful look at love and regeneration, Upstream Color.

ADAM LEON’s graffiti-scrawled debut film Gimme the Loot crackles with young romance and the energy of the streets.

NICHOLAS ROMBES checks in to Room 237 and the underground world of Kubrick obsessives with director RODNEY ASCHER.

HARMONY KORINE goes wild with Spring Breakers, a sun-drenched, candy-colored tale of teen queens on the run.

The world of commercial sea fishing is captured in all its stark and violent beauty in LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR and VÉRÉNA PARAVEL’s Leviathan.