The 55th edition of New Directors/New Films, the annual showcase of rising cinematic talent co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA, will run April 8-19. Opening the festival is Adrian Chiarella’s queer horror film Leviticus, and other standouts include John Early’s brilliant bulimia comedy Maddie’s Secret, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s hypnotic hybrid Chronovisor, and Giulio Bertelli’s Agon, winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at Venice Critics’ Week. Ahead of this year’s festival, Filmmaker is happy to debut a short clip courtesy of filmmaker Roseanne Pel, whose feature Donkey Days has been selected as this year’s closing night film. “I […]

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Following a fatal car crash in the countryside that leaves her injured and her boyfriend dead, Laura (Paula Beer), a pianist visiting from Berlin, is nursed back to health over several days by Betty (Barbara Auer), a quiet woman who lives near the crash site. Through carefully placed moments of subtle exposition, German filmmaker Christian Petzold slowly reveals to the viewer the extent to which Betty (who seemingly lives alone, but then…not) needs Laura to be a part of her daily life. Much of the fun of Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 then comes in the mysterious yet heartbreaking ways the […]

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It’s the closing night of the 2026 SXSW Film Festival and They Will Kill You director Kirill Sokolov is taking to the stage of the Paramount Theatre in Austin. He has multiple pages in hand listing out all of his collaborators he wants to thank.  Where most filmmakers give a few brief remarks, possibly crack a joke or two, and then make a quick exit stage left, Sokolov, who previously made the films Why Don’t You Just Die! and No Looking Back in Russia, is running down as many people as he can possibly get through. This is all taking […]

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It’s been a whirlwind year for Alice Maio Mackay. Her latest film, The Serpent’s Skin, has been a darling at festivals from London to Montreal, and her next one—her seventh before the age of twenty-two—is already in the can. This one’s a supernatural romance about two queer women, Anna (Alexandra McVicker), innocent and extremely new-in-town, and Jen (filmmaker Avalon Fast), a mysterious goth tattoo artist, who discover they share magical powers and have to fight a demon that’s possessing Danny (Jordan Dulieu), the dreamy alt-boy-next-door who Anna’s recently friend-zoned.  With this sweet, sharply witty romp, the twenty-one-year-old Australian filmmaker, both […]

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“It was important to us not to be a shit post,” says Ricky Camilleri, co-writer and co-producer of Our Hero, Balthazar, thanking me for not describing it as “edge-lordy.” On paper, the film, directed and co-written by Oscar Boyson, sounds like a provocation: a dark comedy about a teen who tries to stop a school shooting—not out of moral clarity, but out of ego. Balthazar Malone (Jaeden Martell) is a wealthy Manhattan private school kid living in a high-rise, performing sensitivity online through teary grief narratives—essentially crying for influence. In a bid to impress his school crush, a girl more […]

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Filmmaker is happy to continue its annual partnership with the Filmfort Film Festival by exclusively hosting six short films from the 2026 edition, which kicks off today. Occurring simultaneously during the Treefort Music Fest in Boise, Idaho, Filmfort highlights emerging indie fare. On the feature film front, this includes The Scout, directed by Paula González-Nasser—who appeared on our 25 New Faces of Film last year— and Joybubbles, Rachel J. Morrison’s Sundance-premiering doc. The following shorts will be available to watch on the site through midnight on March 29, when the festival wraps. Find the embedded films and their synopses below. […]

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There’s a gleeful spirit of subversion that courses through Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillett’s (known as Radio Silence) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. It’s not just that the follow-up to their 2019 chamber piece is bloodier and more vicious, but that anytime you expect the film to narratively zag, it zigs, and that the characters have a striking interiority that stands in contrast with their histrionic antics. At its core, it delivers the cathartic thrill of seeing the wealthy get their devilish comeuppance, but on a deeper level, it celebrates the power of imaginative resistance.  Taking place immediately […]

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UFO announces the fellows that will join the latest cycle of the UFO Short Film Lab. The 18-month program supports early-career filmmakers to develop and direct two original shorts, awarding $20,000 ($10,000 per project) to each participant. Additional resources include complimentary rentals of ZEISS’s newest lenses, seminar-style workshop sessions hosted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and one-on-one creative mentorship from the UFO team and invited guests. UFO received a record 287 applications for three available fellowship slots. The filmmakers selected for Cycle IV, which kicks off next month, are Hana Elias, Katherine Clary, and Edward Nguyen. The latter […]

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Thierry Frémaux wears a lot of hats. The 65-year-old Frenchman oversees the programming and operations of the Cannes Film Festival, which will announce its 79th edition next month. At the same time, he runs the Lumière Institute and its accompanying Lumière Festival in Lyon, both of which are dedicated to screening and studying film history. It’s hard to conceive of another top film leader playing such a vital role in both the past and present state of the medium.  As an extension of his jobs, Frémaux occasionally holds one other title: filmmaker. The newly-released Lumière, Le Cinema! is an essayistic […]

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CPH:DOX’s 2025 edition opened with Facing War, a documentary presenting the Russo-Ukrainian war through the final year of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s tenure. Though some critics found the film overly cautious in its presentation of political lobbying, its premiere proved unexpectedly well-timed amid Trump’s return to power and anxieties surrounding European alliances.  For CPH:DOX today, as one of the world’s leading documentary festivals, the familiar impulse to pair aesthetic ambition with political mediation feels ever more crucial as wars expand and multiply. Continuing the festival’s Ukraine-focused opening-film tradition, Pieter-Jan De Pue’s Mariinka is exactly the kind of work that […]

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