MUBI has released a new trailer for the 25th anniversary 4K restoration of Lars von Trier‘s dark comedy The Idiots. The only film that von Trier made under the Dogme 95 “Vow of Chastity” (and the second official Dogme film, or Dogme #2), The Idiots centers on a commune in the Danish suburbs where members aim to disrupt wider “bourgeoisie” society by pretending to have mental and physical ailments in public. It is the second film in von Trier’s Golden Heart Trilogy, preceded by Breaking the Waves and followed by Dancer in the Dark. The Idiots will open theatrically at […]

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Distribution strategist Peter Broderick, whose articles on microbudget filmmaking were foundational in the early days of this magazine, publishes a weekly newsletter that is a must-read for anyone tracking the independent film industry. A recent edition, his report on Sundance 2023 documentary sales, has prompted discussion and clarified important current trends in non-fiction acquisitions. This report is reprinted with his permission. Sign up for Broderick’s newsletter here. — Editor “Every independent filmmaker should learn the lessons of Sundance. This year’s festival revealed critically important developments in the indie ecosystem.” Let’s start with the same two sentences that began my Special Report […]

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A lived-in, swooning memory piece on the intersection of roads taken and missed, Celine Song’s Past Lives is as confident as filmmaking debuts come. “I needed to invent the way that this movie should be made. I wanted it to be the first movie of its kind to be made,” Song tells me recently during an interview at the Madison Square Park—one of the locations of her film—over a picnic of petits fours and sparkling lemonade. “I think that every filmmaker pursues this when they approach a new project,” she continues. “I needed this to be something that stands on […]

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The poster for Sanctuary features a blonde Margaret Qualley whispering to a mysterious Christopher Abbott. Its imagery — a seeming femme fatale, an unknowing male prey and all the imagined chaos in between — evokes the height of the cinematic erotic thriller era. But the strength, elegance and wit of Micah Bloomberg’s (TV series Homecoming) script and Zachary Wigon’s (The Heart Machine) direction is their interest in subverting your (and the characters’s) expectations at every step. In Sanctuary, Abbott plays Hal, a hotel mogul’s son and heir. He has ordered a fancy meal to a decadently opulent hotel suite where […]

The post “Music Will be a Prism That You Can See the Whole Movie Through”: Director Zachary Wigon on Story Beats, Miles Davis and His BDSM-Themed Thriller Sanctuary first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes says that shooting an actor playing twins is like learning a new filmmaking language. By now, he’s fluent. Lipes lensed all six episodes of the 2020 HBO miniseries I Know This Much Is True, with Mark Ruffalo playing identical twins. As an added complication, the coverage of each brother was shot months apart as Ruffalo took a hiatus to gain 30 pounds to physically transform himself into the other sibling. On the new Amazon series Dead Ringers, it’s Rachel Weisz starring as twin New York City gynecologists who meet a tragic end. The show is a […]

The post “Annoying, Finicky Placement Stuff”: DP Jody Lee Lipes on Shooting Two Rachel Weiszs for Dead Ringers first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Our projected identities—and the constant performance inherent in presenting ourselves—fuel the surrealist philosophy of Ted Schaefer’s Giving Birth to a Butterfly. The filmmaker’s directorial debut, from a script he co-wrote with author Patrick Lawler, delves into a psychedelic psychology of what truly constitutes “the self” (very fitting for a collaborative duo who met through a mutual therapist). Giving Birth to a Butterfly largely consists of a roadtrip odyssey shared by Diana (Annie Parisse), a pharmacist stuck in an unfulfilling marriage to aspiring chef Daryl (Paul Sparks), and Marlene (Gus Birney), a heavily pregnant young woman who’s dating Diana’s son Drew […]

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It’s the rare three-hour film that has as light a touch as The Delinquents while keeping a deft hold on the audience. That’s partly down to its surefire bank heist plot, borrowed somewhat from Hugo Fregonese’s 1949 Argentine noir Hardly a Criminal: a longtime clerk steals enough money to retire on, stashes it, then goes to jail, planning to recover the loot upon release. Morán (Daniel Elias) is the nebbishy thief in Rodrigo Moreno’s new film, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes to general delight. But his accomplice on the outside, Román (Esteban Bigliardi), gets distracted by another […]

The post “I Had Three Art Directors and Two Cinematographers”: Rodrigo Moreno on The Delinquents at Cannes 2023 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It is extremely hard not to love Jeff Hiller’s character Joel, opposite Bridget Everett’s Sam, on the hit HBO series Somebody Somewhere. Their friendship is sweet, revelatory, and concerningly codependent, all at the same time. On this episode, he talks about how he got good at auditioning while wondering if he’d ever play someone with an inner life, “or a name.” He tells the story of landing “Joel,” the surprising connections he shares with the character, the secret ingredient that makes his chemistry with Everett work so well, and much more. Back To One can be found wherever you get […]

The post “The Sweat of Desperation Does Not Translate to a Series Regular”: Jeff Hiller (Back To One, Episode 255) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

To celebrate Cannes is to celebrate film history itself—or at least so the fest would have it. But while there’s certainly meaningful and genuine overlap, any self-venerating mythology is going to breed unwelcome byproducts, as at the premiere of Jean-Luc Godard’s “final” film, Trailer of a Movie That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars.” (Its actual finality status is TBD, as Goodfellas has more of his work, in whatever form, still to sell.) The short was preceded by a French TV documentary, Godard by Godard, which was fairly useless in part because it ignores half of his life and work while playing the […]

The post Cannes 2023: The Pot-au-Feu, Portraits of Ghosts first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Cannes wrapped another edition last weekend, and a new batch of prize winners have been announced. I’ve typically used this final wrap-up to offer brief comments on many of said winners, namely those Vadim and I didn’t already address in prior dispatches. Ruben Östlund and co. did well, though, because the only victor currently unremarked upon is Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, a poetic drama about a Japanese toilet cleaner for which its lead, Koji Yakusho, was awarded Best Actor. We already published my discussion with Wenders about his new 3D film, Anselm, which premiered as a Special Screening earlier in […]

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