The conclusion of Fantasia International Film Festival’s 27th edition brings the temptation to paint a “big picture overview” of the state of the film industry in general, in particular the genre community. The Montréal-based three-week event has never been about blinding star power (while Nicolas Cage was scheduled to be onhand to receive this year’s Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award, the actor had to cancel due to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes), instead putting directors and audiences front and center. Like last year, a highly anticipated A24 horror release made an appearance just days before opening theatrically (last year Halina Reijn’s […]

Zach Clark is a familiar name on this site for his work as a director; he’s also a full-time editor. In this brief Q&A, Clark discusses his work on Hannah Fiddell’s The Long Dumb Road, a road movie and buddy comedy that winds from Texas to Los Angeles. Click here for more from DP Andrew Droz Palermo on the film’s production. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Clark: Hannah and I have been pals for years. She asked me if […]

In Zach Clark’s Little Sister, Colleen (Addison Timlin), a former goth girl turned nun, returns home to her dysfunctional family for the first time in years after learning that her brother Jacob (Keith Poulson) is back from fighting the war in Iraq. To cope with her passive father, Bill (Peter Hedges), her bipolar, pot-smoking mother, Joani (Ally Sheedy), and her depressed, disfigured brother, Colleen resurrects her goth persona in hopes of livening things up. Set in 2008, against the backdrop of President Obama’s election, the dark family comedy manages to be both tender and pointed. In a review of the film in Filmmaker, Howard Feinstein called Little Sister “an unaffected masterpiece,” […]

If you look at the long list of movies opening every weekend, not just in theaters but on digital platforms too, you probably feel like you can’t keep up. We feel the same way here at Filmmaker, with usually more films entering the marketplace then we’re able to devote meaningful editorial to. Invariably, some films slip through the cracks, while others may have been covered by us at their festival premieres months ago, with our coverage now buried in the depths of our CMS. So, we’re starting this “Recommended on a Friday” series of picks designed to help you navigate […]

In Zach Clark’s Little Sister, which premiered earlier this year at SXSW, Colleen (Addison Timlin), a young nun and former goth, returns to her childhood home in Asheville, North Carolina where she faces her estranged dysfunctional family. During Colleen’s visit, things intensify with a little help from Halloween, pot cupcakes, and GWAR. The ensemble cast features Ally Sheedy, Peter Hedges, Keith Poulson, Barbara Crampton, and Kristin Slaysman. In a review of the film in Filmmaker, Howard Feinstein called Little Sister “an unaffected masterpiece,” writing that “Clark balances the melancholy with outsized bursts of joy.” Little Sister opens at The Metrograph in New York on October 14th and […]

By the time most of the prominent guests, critics and industry hangers-on arrive at the Seattle International Film Festival every year, the show is almost over. The red carpet is rolled out for “gala” screenings during each of its four weekends, but the well-orchestrated influx of movie business types occurs only at the end of the affair. To say, as a visiting film critic — one who might enjoy the luxury of the Kimpton hotel guest lodging, or the effortless springtime beauty of the Emerald City — that you have any handle on the entirety of programming director Beth Barrett’s […]

“I needed structure!” says former goth Colleen Lunsford (Addison Timlin, star-to-be) in a revelatory moment in Little Sister, the latest feature by Brooklyn-based Zach Clark (White Reindeer, Vacation). It is one of two unaffected masterpieces (the other is Ira Sachs’s Little Men, which I’ll review when the increasingly daring Magnolia Pictures releases it) screening at BAMcinemafest (Jun 15-26) that I was fortunate enough to catch early — two for two! Colleen is exasperated trying to explain to her estranged, self-absorbed mom, Joani (Ally Sheedy, better than ever), why she left home to seek out spiritual redemption in a cloistered New […]

In an independent landscape of shaky, handheld cinematography, loose improvisation and bare-bones sets, the precise and punchy dark comedies of Zach Clark stand out. Recalling the days in which low budgets meant inventive art direction, heightened emotions and a rebellion against a default naturalism, Clark’s third movie, White Reindeer modulates the director’s deadpan, quasi-Sirkian camp into something more delicately bittersweet. Anna Margaret Hollyman plays a suburban real estate agent who returns home one holiday season to find her husband murdered. Learning he had a mistress, an African-American stripper, she journeys into a world where kinky fantasy is really just another […]

Zach Clark’s White Reindeer is not your average Christmas tale. Flush with WASPy cheer, real estate agent Suzanne Barrington (the note-perfect Anna Margaret Hollyman) eagerly anticipates the holiday until her meteorologist husband Jeff is whacked in their suburban home. What follows is an earnest and surprising unravelling as Suzanne rides a second wave of grief upon the discovery of Jeff’s affair with a stripper. With a script both original and subversive, Clark and his producers Daryl Pittman and Melodie Sisk went out to finance White Reindeer as the debt crisis hit. Clark was kind enough to reflect upon the process […]

I was very nervous about the experience. The idea was to go upstate, about 80 or 90 miles or so north up the Hudson Valley region, to some bucolic spot and shoot guns. Originally we were supposed to shoot skeet but that equipment wasn’t available so we ended up doing target practice. A longtime gun control advocate, I was a bit at the end of my rope. It was November of 2012 and there had been close to 16 mass shootings in the U.S. up to that point including the Batman shooting and the Texas A&M shooting that summer. The […]