If you’re a filmmaker, it may seem like the city is your playground. It’s not. Everything costs money. Every public space you want to shoot in requires permits and insurance. It all requires planning, hard work, negotiations, or simply lots of pleading. One issue that’s cropped up in multiple talks during IFP Week has been this: What do you do when you want to shoot in a place of business? How do you get a bodega owner or a restauranteur or the owners of a giant mall in Flushing to let you run around with cast and crew, even though […]

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“Film” — what’s in a word? It’s still the first half of Filmmaker, even as our new logo design nods to the ways in which this term’s meaning is continually mutating and no longer fixed in celluloid. But, as Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP (Filmmaker’s publisher) and Made in New York Media Center notes, it’s been dropped this year from the name of IFP’s signature event, which begins today through September 21 in Brooklyn. Over the last several years “Independent Film Week” has shortened to “IFP Film Week” to, now, simply, “IFP Week.” That’s because, as Vicente says, “the […]

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When Dave Kehr reviewed director Joseph Ruben’s The Stepfather in The Chicago Tribune on the occasion of its initial theatrical release, he wrote, “Watching The Stepfather, with its near-perfect command of the entire vocabulary of filmmaking, it’s hard to believe that Joseph Ruben isn’t one of the best-known directors working today.” That was over 30 years ago, and while Kehr’s hope that Ruben would be universally recognized as one of the greats never quite came to pass, it should have — the critic was 100% correct in his assessment of Ruben’s mastery. The Stepfather was an extraordinary film, a low-budget […]

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UK-based Clio Barnard has impressively transitioned from video artist to acclaimed feature filmmaker in the span of just seven years. After making several short films, her feature debut The Arbor, a hybrid documentary about the late playwright Andrea Dunbar, went on to win a bevy of awards, including London Film Festival’s Best British Newcomer award, Tribeca Film Festival’s Jury Award, British Independent Film Awards’ Douglas Hickox Award, and subsequently a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director, or Producer. Her second feature The Selfish Giant, loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s children’s story of the same name, also […]

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James Franco has been annoying a lot of people, myself included, for a variety of reasons, not least his relentless direction of a shocking number of movies, most quite poorly received: if I’m counting the credits on his IMDB page right, The Disaster Artist is his 16th feature since 2005 — not precisely Fred Olen Ray levels of shoddy productivity, but not that far off either. For easily his most mainstream effort (and, full disclosure, the only one I’ve seen), Franco films the saga of the making of Tommy Wiseau’s infamous cult movie The Room. I’m not much of a so-bad-it’s-good consumer, […]

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Porcupine Lake is the sixth feature from pUNK Films founder Ingrid Veninger. It’s also the first from the pUNK Films Femmes Labs, which started as a DIY idea of gathering six Canadian female filmmakers to work on their six screenplays for six months to reality — courtesy of Oscar-winner Melissa Leo, who happened to hear Veninger’s pitch for funding at the Whistler Film Festival and immediately sign on as sponsor. The film itself feels like a throwback to the early heady (not to mention pre-tech, as there’s not a smartphone-glued character in sight!) days of low-key/low-budget independent film. It’s a […]

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A journey both personal and political, Matt Embry’s Living Proof follows the Canadian filmmaker on his quixotic quest to get some answers to a medical mystery. If no one knows the causes or cures for multiple sclerosis, then why are so many MS charities touting drugs (with considerable side effects) that don’t work in the long term? And why does the FDA drag its feet on approving promising non-pharmaceutical cures? And why won’t the powers that be in the MS establishment listen to the director himself, diagnosed with the disease over two decades ago, and who through only strict diet […]

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Martin McDonagh and his brother John Michael started making movies about the same time; I’m inclined to give the latter the edge for The Guard, the most uncomplicatedly funny and successful of the films they’ve both made. They’re very much brothers with a shared sensibility grown more matched over the years living together as adults, writing their separate work while watching the same movies movies: a gift for idiomatically spry humor, often in the insult-directed vein, balancing out an attendant tendency to go heavy on Catholic guilt and a fairly simplistic form of moral “complication.” Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri sets […]

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In its own way, it’s an enlightening experience to attend, at least once, a Big TIFF Premiere, which I didn’t do during my first time attending last year. The Death of Stalin premiered in the Winter Garden, a venue on the seventh floor of a building whose ground level houses the Elgin theater; per Wikipedia — in a phrase which Googling only traces to there, so perhaps there’s a different way to refer to this — they are the world’s only surviving “stacked Edwardian theaters.” The Elgin seats 1,561, the Winter 992, so you can gauge the perceived star value and […]

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It’s customary, when diving into a series of festival dispatches, to include some prefatory, contextualizing stuff up top, which has always been tough for me. This year, though, reality has made it easy: by having me arrive at Sundance a day late thanks to Air Force Two speeding Trump off to the inauguration, and in Canada in the form of a Canadian border security official, one officer Nicoara. I’d remembered last year that Canadian customs is a little more severe than you’d expect: I think I answered about five minutes’ worth of questions about anything and everything relating to my […]

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David Barker is a hard one to put a finger on. He is an American writer and editor who over the past 10 years has gained an international reputation for his analytical ability and open, unconventional approach. Recent collaborations include Deepak Rauniyar’s sensitive exploration of the impact of Nepalese civil war White Sun (opening today at New York’s MOMA and running through September 12) and Josephine Decker’s upcoming feature with Molly Parker, Mirandy July and Helena Howard, Madeline Madeline. Things happen with David differently than you’d expect them to. You walk an entirely other route than you wanted and end […]

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“Making movies is really me feeling like I shouldn’t be writing something on Facebook,” Jim Cummings says. “It’s taking that energy and making a short film that can be a timeless thing.” When Topic commissioned the writer, producer, director, actor to make a short film series for the website’s inaugural launch in July, Cummings knew exactly the ideas he wanted to pitch — all subjects dealing with epidemics happening in America that were “going kind of unnoticed.” Within five weeks after meeting Topic Studio’s Nick Borenstein at his SXSW screening of The Robbery, Cummings had not only sculpted his ideas […]

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I’ve always been mystified by the relative lack of attention and acclaim Orson Welles’ 1946 thriller The Stranger has received compared with the director’s better known efforts, since on just about every level it’s top-tier Welles. Perhaps Welles’ own denigration of the picture, which he saw as an impersonal assignment designed to restore his box-office credibility after The Magnificent Ambersons, is to blame. It’s a genre film, sure, but then so is Touch of Evil, which many Welles enthusiasts (myself included) consider to be every bit as important in the director’s oeuvre as Citizen Kane. The Stranger is actually a […]

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In episode four of Twin Peaks: The Return, an older gentleman has an obscure conversation with Gordon Cole (David Lynch) as he escorts him to the office of FBI Chief of Staff, Denise Bryson (David Duchovny). Their scene together is short but just by his brief appearance Richard Chamberlain evokes a mass of associations in the viewers who recognizes him, maybe as Cannon Films’ Allen Quartermain, maybe as the ambitious priest with impure thoughts of Rachel Ward in The Thornbirds, or maybe as Julie Christie’s husband in Petulia. An icon of classic television thanks to his performance in the prime-time […]

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In an interview in March, Paul Schrader questioned the ongoing usefulness of Slow Cinema. “It had a real interesting moment in the last 10 years, but now the novelty has worn off, and people are not as mesmerized as they were when the slowness was really being used as a new concept of film time,” he said. “It’s a dead end. […] There are still bits of transcendental style. It was a precursor to slow cinema, but it’s not really that slow. A terrific film like Silent Light is closer to transcendental style than slow cinema, but they lump it in […]

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