Agnès Godard films the opening sequence of her fifth collaboration (following four features and a short) with writer-director Ursula Meier, The Line (La Ligne), in static slow motion: Margaret (Stéphanie Blanchoud) hits her mother (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), who falls and collides against the keys of her own piano, rendering her deaf in the impacted ear. A restraining order charges the eldest daughter to not to come within 200 meters of her mother—an invisible boundary she immediately ignores with abrasive attempts to make amends until her younger sister paints a literal perimeter around the house. Margaret hovers at a little hill at one […]

The post “The Search for Images is a Search That Can Last Forever”: Agnès Godard on The Line and Nenétte et Boni first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

New Directors/New Films, the annual showcase of work by emerging directors co-presented by the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, began this week in New York City and runs through April 9. The 2023 slate features 27 features and 11 shorts, most of them culled from top-tier festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, and Rotterdam. As always, ND/NF’s offerings are global in scope, with over 30 countries represented, and the programmers remain admirably committed to arthouse aesthetics: conventional genre films and commercially minded crowd-pleasers are thin on the ground here. This is a festival for audiences willing […]

The post Five Highlights from the 2023 New Directors/New Films Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Today, NEON exclusively premieres a nearly 14-minute featurette with Filmmaker on the making of Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin’s experimental folk horror film Enys Men. Jenkin and the film’s star, Mary Woodvine, take viewers behind the scenes of the shoot and detail their individual processes while making the film. In his review out of Cannes, Vadim Rizov summarized the film’s loose plot and stylistic leanings: Set in 1973, Enys Men (Cornish for “Stone Island” and is pronounced—if I recall correctly—AYN-is Mayn) is an image-forward movie drenched in the kind of dense, thick film grain you can find in e.g. the work of Ben Rivers or […]

The post Watch: The Making of Enys Men (Exclusive Premiere) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Set in a shadowy world of scam artists and grifters, Sharper follows four characters through interlocking stories set in a modern-day noir version of New York City. From Park Avenue penthouses to abandoned warehouses, director Benjamin Caron builds a dangerous world filled with betrayals and double-crosses. Justice Smith plays Tom, manager of a used bookstore. A chance meeting with Sandra (Briana Middleton) leads to Max (Sebastian Stan), a self-professed con man. Max will encounter Madeline Phillips (Julianne Moore), a wealthy widow with designs on corporate titan Richard Hobbes (John Lithgow). Sharper is the feature debut for Caron, best known for his […]

The post “To Shoot on the 48th Floor is a DP’s Nightmare”: DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen on Sharper first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Last year at the 2022 Berlinale I had the uncanny experience of watching Hito Steyerl’s documentary The Empty Center (Die leere Mitte, 1998) in a 75-seat theater hidden away beneath The Sony Center. If you’re unfamiliar with The Sony Center in Berlin, take a second to Google it, or think back to the sterile postmodern backdrops of Brian De Palma’s Passion, in which architect Helmut Jahn’s eight-building complex plays a prominent role. The Empty Center is, in part, about the obscene land grab that occurred after German reunification, when multinational corporations like Sony, Daimler-Benz and ABB swept in to stake […]

The post Berlinale Forum 2023: The Trial, De Facto, Anqa, I Heard It Through the Grapevine first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Two years after The French Dispatch finally landed in theaters after an extended COVID delay, the trailer has arrived for the first of two Wes Anderson films releasing this year, the star-studded Asteroid City. Boasting an extensive ensemble cast, the film stars Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Ed Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, Grace Edwards, Aristou Meehan, Sophia Lillis, Ethan Lee, Jeff Goldblum and Rita Wilson. Written and directed by Anderson […]

The post Trailer Watch: Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Filmmaker‘s issue #122 is arriving in mailboxes and at newsstands now, and in conjunction we’ve launched a Spring Subscription sale until Sunday. For the first time, we’re discounting our print and digital subscriptions by 50%. A one-year digital subscription — which includes our archives back to 2007 — is just $5. In the US, a print subscription is just $9. Both subscriptions include access to all paywalled content as well as Filmmaker on Exact Editions, which offers fantastic browser and tablet reading. (Check out a sample issue here.) Your subscriptions help underwrite all of our editorial content, including on the […]

The post Filmmaker Issue #122 Out Now (Along With a Flash Subscription Sale) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

When I first met Kimi Takesue, I saw a flash of recognition from her that my eyes reflected. It was clear we understood something very specific about each other—being biracial is, as she said, “a particular sensibility.” Takesue’s father is Japanese American, and her mother is Italian and German; my father is Filipino American, and my mother is also German. I’ve seen this same immediate recognition disarm other half-white, half Asian Americans whose way of carrying themselves, especially when that has helped them pass in white company, suddenly loses its balance: they feel seen for what they are (and are […]

The post “We Need Work That is Impossible to Describe”: Kimi Takesue on Onlookers first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

After premiering at Venice and screening at the NYFF last year, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener finally receives a release date. The writer-director’s latest, which completes his late-career trilogy after The Card Counter (2021) and First Reformed (2017), will hit theaters via Magnolia Pictures on May 19. The film’s official synopsis reads: Master Gardener follows Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), the meticulous horticulturist of Gracewood Gardens. He is as much devoted to tending the grounds of this beautiful and historic estate, to pandering to his employer, the wealthy dowager Mrs. Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). When Mrs. Haverhill demands that he take on her […]

The post Trailer Watch: Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Edwin Lee Gibson’s stage career spans 40 years and over 100 U.S. and international theater productions. On television he is currently reprising his role as series regular “Ebraheim” in season 2 of FX’s hit series The Bear. On this episode, he talks about the importance of listening, “letting the character find me,” working with the late Peter Brook, cultivating a relationship with fear, how his stutter actually made him dig deeper into the study of speech, and much more. Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher. And if you’re […]

The post “I Don’t Want To Know Anything. I Just Want to Listen”: The Bear Series Regular Edwin Lee Gibson (Back To One, Episode 246) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.