The Gotham Announces the 2025 Gotham Award Nominees; “One Battle After Another” Tops with Six Noms
One Battle After Another, Familiar Touch and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You are among the multiple nominees for the 2025 35th edition of the Gotham Awards, announced today by The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker‘s publisher. Among its six nominations, the Paul Thomas Anderson picture received nominations for Best Feature, Best Adapted Screenplay (from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland), and Outstanding Supporting Performance (for both Benicio Del Toro and Teyana Taylor). Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Filmmaker‘s current cover story, received nominations for Best Feature, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Outstanding Lead Performance (Rose Byrne). Sarah […]
Benny Safdie’s mixed martial arts drama The Smashing Machine, currently in theaters from A24, is brutal and tender, and both in surprising ways. Working with blockbuster actor Dwayne Johnson, who, shapeshifting into the role of fighter Mark Kerr, is even more bulked up than usual, Safdie dramatizes an early 2000s time when MMA was in a transitional phase, with its fighters touring internationally on a loosely regulated circuit where the purses weren’t so huge, there was still a camaraderie among fighters, and the rules felt a bit slippery. Drawing from John Hyams’s 2002 documentary, The Smashing Machine: The Life and […]
When it comes to filmmaker biographies, the “print the legend” maxim so frequently misattributed to John Ford has long been the preferred coin of the realm. Tales told out of school, dirty details of deals gone wrong, artistic hubris, on-set disasters — such recountings often obscure the actual realities of a filmmaker’s life and career. For much of cinema’s history, it was rare for directors to speak on their own terms, and with some notable exceptions, more important that a memorable narrative be broadcast posthumously. More oft than not, the more outrageous, the better. When written by the filmmakers themselves, […]
Greenlight Coverage was proud to partner with Gotham Week this year, offering script analysis and story development support to a remarkable range of submissions. Out of the many compelling entries, three projects stood out for their creativity, emotional resonance, and cinematic potential: The Ballad of Tita and the Machines, The Poem, and The Camford Experiment. Based on Greenlight’s coverage reports these screenplays ranked among the highest across every evaluation category, earning top marks for storytelling, originality, and thematic depth. The Ballad of Tita and the Machines – Scored 8.7/10 Set against the strawberry fields of California, The Ballad of Tita […]
As I wrote in my capsule review for this year’s SXSW curtain raiser, Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud is a film that Craig Renaud, Brent’s brother (and my friend for the past dozen years, ever since I met the tight-knit siblings covering their now defunct Little Rock Film Festival) should never have had to make and instigated by an event no family should ever have to live through. And that puts Brent’s loved ones in the grieving company of untold numbers of families around the world — the very same people the award-winning […]
Cooper Raiff returns to the podcast (first time was Ep. 128) to discuss his latest project, the eight-episode, independently-made, decades-spanning series Hal & Harper. He picks up right where we left off in the first interview, five years ago, taking us through the process of getting Cha Cha Real Smooth made, and how that green light helped him avoid compromising Hal & Harper. He explains why no matter what success you’ve had (like winning top prizes at the biggest festivals for his previous two films) the industry makes you start over and prove each new project’s worth. He talks about […]
My relationship with the stretch of Sixth Avenue running between West 3rd and West 4th Streets, on one corner of which stands New York City’s legendary IFC Center, mirrors my relationship with cinema, bad tattoos, crushing hangovers, and a whole mess of memories that sit in the back of my brain like luggage stuffed in a collapsing mid-flight Ryan Air jet. The relationship is complicated, messy in an overloaded-Papaya-Dog sort of way, and something I profoundly cherish. I’ll back up. I won’t recount the full history of the IFC Center, or that stretch of the city — that’s what Wikipedia’s […]
Perhaps one of the strangest and most captivating docs of the year, Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller centers on a middle-aged wife and husband, the latter of whom is having an affair that the former is desperate to end. Enter Wang Zhenxi, one of a growing number of China’s professional “mistress dispellers.” For a fee, Teacher Wang will orchestrate scenarios that allow her to get to know the man and his mistress in order to discern how she can best manipulate a breakup – one in which all parties hopefully emerge for the better. A series of staged deceptions that add […]
A half-hour into Connor Sen Warnick’s Characters Disappearing, left-wing revolutionary Mei (Yuka Murakami) hangs up a poster declaring “The East is Red.” Until that point, the film seems to take place in the strict past-tense, moving through the domestic spaces of Asian Americans in New York’s Chinatown in the early 1970s. But when Mei crosses the street, a woman moves through the frame in front of her in a mask and puffy jacket clearly out of our current decade—Mei, and her radical moment, exist in a past which haunts our present. Warnick’s film doesn’t hide the reality of how and […]
With Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor premiering on Netflix today, we’re reposting our interview with Gandbhir out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. — Editor Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, which premiered in the US Documentary section of this year’s Sundance, is likely one of the first feature docs primarily composed of police body camera footage. Sifting through footage with editor Viridiana Liberman (The Sentence), Gandbhir builds out a suspenseful and heartbreaking portrait of neighborly violence in a close-knit Central Florida community, after white woman Susan Lorincz fatally shot Ajike Owens—Gandbhir’s sister-in-law’s best friend, though Gandbhir didn’t know Owens personally. Given […]