A feminine coming-of-age film by way of Frankenstein, Yorgos Lanthimos’ gorgeously designed Poor Things follows Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), an unhappy and suicidal woman brought back to life by the enigmatic scientist Baxter (Willem Dafoe), and then embarking on a feminist journey of equality and sexual liberation. Bella’s voracious appetite for all the colors of life and sex (as well as Lanthimos’ signature maximalist touches) infuses Poor Things with boundless exuberance, matched by costume designer Holly Waddington’s extraordinary work—both late-19th-century, and fiercely modern and rule-breaking. “I realized that I would need the clothes to really move with her, not just […]

The post “We’d Have These Practical Conversations About How Sex Would Be Achieved in These Costumes”: Costume Designer Holly Waddington On the Historical Rule-Breaking of Her Work in Poor Things first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The Killer begins with an assassin (Michael Fassbender) in a half-completed WeWork office awaiting the arrival of his latest target. As he waits, he details his vocational mantras for the audience in voiceover: stick to the plan. Don’t improvise. Never yield an advantage. Forbid empathy. Fassbender proceeds to miss his shot and spends the rest of the film breaking each and every one of those tenets in the chaotic aftermath. Many of the pieces written about the film have pointed out perceived similarities between the film’s methodical, detail-oriented titular character and the perfectionist reputation of its director, David Fincher. However, […]

The post “David Initially Said, ‘What if We Do the Whole Movie Handheld?’”: DP Erik Messerschmidt on The Killer first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Make space to think about that which has died,” begins Lydia Lunch at the start of DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown), a new multi-media installation by filmmaker and artist Michelle Handelman up through January 20 at New York’s signs and symbols gallery. Comprising three projections spanning the viewer’s peripheral vision, performances by Lunch as well as the choreographic duo FlucT and dancers, and an electronic score by Jack Dangers and Pharmakon that blends drones, pulses and rhythmic stabs with breath and guttural sounds — “the cacophony of grief,” says Lunch — the work is both a departure for Handelman […]

The post “I Think of My Work as Functioning Like a Virus in the Sense That It Gets Inside Your System”: Michelle Handelman on Her New Installation, DELIRIUM PART ONE: DEATH (The Breakdown) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

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 […]

The post SXSW Announces 2024 Competition Selections, Opening Night 3 Body Problem TV Premiere and More first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

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 […]

The post Trailer Watch: The Peasants first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

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.