The Settlers simulates several different types of Westerns without committing to one mode. The set-up of Felipe Gálvez’s first feature is classic: Scottish soldier MacLennan (Mark Stanley), American mercenary Bill (Benjamin Westfall) and their Chilean mestizo guide Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), who’s been pressed into service from a chain gang, are sent on a mission by landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro). Making their way on horseback across the Chilean landscape, the three are captured in long zooms and accompanied by the booming tympani of Harry Allouche’s orchestral score. If that music places The Settlers somewhere in the realm of ’50s westerns, […]

The post “Victim Cinema is for People that are Convinced”: Felipe Gálvez on The Settlers first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The SXSW Film Festival has announced its competition selection, opening night TV premiere and other titles for its 2024 edition, which takes place March 8 – 16. From the press release, the titles announced today follow. Opening Night TV Premiere The 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival’s Opening Night TV Premiere is the highly anticipated Netflix series 3 Body Problem created, executive produced and written by Emmy Award winners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss and Emmy Award nominee Alexander Woo. In this must-watch adaptation of the internationally celebrated bestseller, a young woman’s fateful decision in 1960s China reverberates across […]

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Indiewire critic David Ehrlich returns at the top of the year with his characteristically excellent supercut of the past year’s best films. This 2023 edition clocks in at over 18 minutes and includes such films as Past Lives, The Taste of Things, Oppenheimer, The Zone of Interest and, well, 21 others. Music includes cuts from Pet Shop Boys, Radiohead and Bonnie Tyler. If you haven’t seen any of these titles, the overall exuberance of Ehrlich’s presentation will send you to the theaters or their streaming platforms. Every year Ehrlich pairs the supercut with a charity. This year’s, he writes, “is […]

The post Watch: David Ehrlich’s 25 Best Films of 2023 Video Countdown first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

DK and Hugh Welchman are the directors of 2017’s Loving Vincent, a Vincent Van Gogh biopic created entirely from individually painted images. Now they return with the similarly ambitious The Peasants, for which you can watch the trailer above. As the filmmakers write in the press kit of the film’s making: While The Peasants incorporates the same painting animation technique made popular with our previous film Loving Vincent, our approach to the painting animation for The Peasants varied significantly from Vincent. […] The over 100 painting animators who worked on the film did so on specially designed PAWS units (Painting Animation […]

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Those of us who live in New York are treated each fall to a Whitman’s Sampler of world cinema, a curated selection of highlights from some of the year’s most prestigious international festivals. It’s hardly a large sample size, given the annual output of theatrical films worldwide, but it’s a weathervane nonetheless. Which way were the winds blowing this year? Take what I say below with a grain of salt. I saw 27 feature films at NYFF 61, out of the 44 selections programmed in the Main Slate and Spotlight sections. A modest sample within a modest sample, in other […]

The post 2023 in Review: 5 Quick Tech Takeaways from September’s New York Film Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

My annual exercise in what our audience — as well as our “audiences,” the latter term used to refer to the concoction of first and possibly last-time readers driven to our site by algorithmic determinism and SEO “best practices” — is always a mixture of the predictable and the unexpected. Regular features like our 25 New Faces series and Vadim Rizov’s survey of 35mm production always show up, as do articles by our excellent columnist Matt Mulcahey and podcaster Peter Rinaldi. I was particularly happy to see this year on the list two pieces that were especially deeply researched and […]

The post Filmmaker‘s 20 Most Read Posts of 2023 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

You know Spenser Granese from memorable roles on Better Call Saul, Fear of the Walking Dead, Pam & Tommy, and, perhaps most memorably, the character of Bevel in the final season of Barry. On this episode, he talks about landing that role after trying hard to get on the show for three seasons and the incredible working environment he found on set. He opens up about his unique approach to the craft having no formal training, why he keeps the lines barely memorized, avoids expectations, operates on his instinct, and much more! Back To One can be found wherever you […]

The post “I Just Wanna Play the Good Guy, But Not the Boring Good Guy:” Spenser Granese, Back To One, Episode 274 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In The Holdovers, a professor, a student and a grief-stricken cook are stranded together at a New England boarding school over the holidays. The story takes place in the early 1970s, an era whose films are beloved by both Holdovers director Alexander Payne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld. However, they took opposing philosophical perspectives in imbuing their movie with the spirit of that epoch. Though he looked at the work of Hal Ashby for inspiration – particularly The Landlord and The Last Detail – rather than attempt to replicate it, Payne’s approach found him imaging what kind of film he himself […]

The post “If I Had Been Working in the 1970s [But With Today’s Technology], I Would Have Used Digital, I Would Have Used LED Technology”: The Holdovers Cinematographer Eigil Bryld first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In nearly all of his eight narrative features, Mexican director Michel Franco has worn his appetite for the most distressed and tormented of human dramas on his sleeve. His characters have vascillated between acts of abject cruelty and silent, practically stoic indifference to their own behaviors, as well as the rueful consequences of their often misguided choices. With each new entry in Franco’s body of work, his approach displays a deft hand for framing and a keen eye for the subtleties of the human condition. In the case of his new Memory, premiering in U.S. theaters today after bowing at […]

The post “I Don’t Want to Corner You”: Michel Franco on Isolation, the Commonality of Trauma and Memory first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Cinematographer Gregory Oke, whose credits include Charlotte Wells’s astonishing debut Aftersun, recently made his first foray into music video. His clip for Will Epstein’s “Golden” is unexpected, a pulsing, sinuous work of animation in which he hand-scratched film negative as well as shot the singer and then treated the resulting footage in similarly analogue ways. Watch the video above, and read below statements from both Epstein and Oke. “When I met Greg, I could tell right away he was a kindred spirit even though all the points of our shared aesthetic sensibility weren’t immediately known to us. Naturally, I was […]

The post Watch: DP Gregory Oke’s Hand-Scratched Animated Music Video for Will Epstein’s Golden first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.