Filmmaker is happy to share an exclusive clip of writer-director Laurel Parmet’s feature debut The Starling Girl ahead of its limited release next week. In the two-minute long film excerpt, 17-year-old Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) interacts with her father Paul (Jimmi Simpson). As he leaves the room after their chat, he says, “Do not tell your mama,” exiting with an emphatic “Shh.” Jem then checks a mug he was using out of curiosity. As a teenage girl living in a Christian fundamentalist community in rural Kentucky, Jem has never felt that she truly fit in. Through an escalating bond with […]

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New York state’s just-passed fiscal year 2024 budget includes an expansion of the New York Film Tax Credit, Governor Kathy Hochul announced yesterday. The amount allocated to the program has been raised substantially, from $420 million per year to $700 million. Additionally, the base credit, which was reduced to 25% in 2020, has been raised to its prior level of 30%. And within the details are other significant changes. For the first time, the New York credit will apply to above-the-line costs. Salaries of writers, directors, “specific producers,” actors, and composers will be eligible for the credit, capped at $500,000 […]

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Though it hasn’t reached the fever pitch of absurdity of The Fast and the Furious franchise just yet—a series that began as a Point Break riff but now includes nuclear submarines and Pontiac Fieros in space —the John Wick saga has certainly expanded from its humble beginnings. Produced independently and shot in New York on a budget in the mid-$20 million range, the original film found its titular assassin (played by Keanu Reeves) emerging from retirement to avenge the death of his dog. Four chapters later, Reeves is hopping between New York City, Osaka, Berlin, Paris and the Wadi Rum […]

The post “A Kick is Like a Line of Dialogue”: Editor Nathan Orloff on John Wick: Chapter 4 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Dune: Part Two will hit theaters just over two years after Dune, director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 landmark sci-fi novel. The first trailer arrives six months before the second and final installment of Villeneuve’s saga is set for release. The story will continue to follow characters from the first film (save for Oscar Isaac, whose Duke Leto Atreides perishes during the first half of the story), with roles reprised by Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, Stellan Skarsgård, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Charlotte Rampling and Javier Bardem. Yet there’s a considerable amount of buzz surrounding […]

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Visions du Réel is so punctilious about its nonfiction festival identity that the program booklet explicitly labels the few titles not fitting that (honestly very broad) categorization as “Fiction,” a tag only deployed this year for sidebar retrospectives of Alice Rohrwacher and Lucrecia Martel. For myself, I wanted to attend less because of any particular predilection for nonfiction and more because VdR seems full of stronger iterations of a type of movie I tend to enjoy, roughly categorizable as “relatively well-financed art-leaning European (co)productions”—i.e., I was primarily interested for aesthetic reasons, with the filmmakers chosen for this year’s sidebars illustrative […]

The post Visions du Réel 2023: Nights Gone By, Linda and Irina, This Woman, Chagrin Valley first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Canadian actress Charlotte Le Bon steps behind the camera for the spectral love story Falcon Lake, her directorial debut. Written by Le Bon in collaboration with François Choquet, the film is loosely based on the 2017 graphic novel A Sister by Bastien Vivès. After premiering at Cannes last year during Directors’ Fortnight, Falcon Lake now receives an official trailer ahead of its theatrical and digital release later this summer. The French-language film follows an aloof teenage boy on summer vacation who fosters an unlikely relationship with an older girl, experiencing a plethora of extreme emotions while they stay on what’s […]

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Portland Art Museum’s PAM CUT // Center for an Untold Tomorrow has announced the honorees for the fourth annual Cinema Unbound Awards, which recognizes those working within the intersection of art and cinema. This year’s recipients are actor-comedian Fred Armisen, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, chef Gregory Gourdet, writer Jon Raymond (who frequently collaborates with Kelly Reichardt, most recently on Showing Up), film scholar Jacqueline Stewart and actress Tessa Thompson. The ceremony will take place in-person at the Portland Art Museum on June 22, featuring a “culinary takeover” by Gourdet’s Haitian live-fire restaurant Kann, which was a finalist for the […]

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Prismatic Ground, the New York-based film festival that showcases experimental documentary and avant-garde works, kicks off this week. Spanning five days and six theaters, the festival will run from May 3-7 with screenings at the Museum of the Moving Image, Maysles Documentary Center, BAM Cinematheque, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, Light Industry and Anthology Film Archives. Now in its third year, Prismatic Ground’s 2023 slate features approximately 60 films, including both recent films from contemporary artists and new restorations of work from essential filmmakers. During a recent chat with Prismatic Ground’s founder and director Inney Prakash, he emphasized that the festival’s lineup […]

The post 15 Films to Catch During Prismatic Ground 2023 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Filmmaker is pleased to premiere the trailer for Film at Lincoln Center’s “The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” series, a complete retrospective of the Thai filmmaker’s career so far. The series will run from May 4-14 in New York City and feature seven feature films, four short film programs and Weerasethakul in attendance for select screenings. The filmmaker also programmed several films to screen alongside his own, including Chantal Ackerman’s La Captive, Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster, Guy Maddin’s Careful, Abbas Kiarostami’s Homework and Frederick Wiseman’s Primate (presented in 16mm), among others. Several of the filmmaker’s […]

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The 4K restoration and re-release of the comedy Party Girl brings Parker Posey to Back To One. Shortly after the success of that movie in 1995, she went on to star in so many independent films, like The Daytrippers, Clockwatchers, The House of Yes (not to mention a bunch of Hal Hartley and Christopher Guest classics), that she was dubbed “Queen of the Indies.” On this episode, she explains why that moniker was oddly detrimental to her career. She talks about recent experiences on the sets of Beau Is Afraid and The Staircase; the connection between actors and athletes; why, […]

The post “It’s a Difficult Sport”: Parker Posey (Back To One, Episode 251) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.