A woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Sissy St. Claire (Sophie von Haselberg) appears on a soundstage for her Saturday night television special. Like the tireless performers who came before her, St. Claire will spend the duration of the broadcast showcasing elaborate outfits, dramatic monologues, groan-worthy jokes, peppy musical numbers and an assortment of special guests (some human and others canine). Tonight is either her big break or the conclusion of a descent into madness—either way, don’t dare change that channel!  Give Me Pity!, the latest film from director Amanda Kramer, is a warped take on variety show […]

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Featured on our 25 New Faces of Independent Film list in 2019, A.V. Rockwell‘s directorial debut A Thousand and One is set to hit theaters next month. The film had its world premiere at Sundance in January, where it won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize. Teyana Taylor stars as Inez, a single mom whose first objective after being released from Rikers is reuniting with her six-year-old son Terry, who has been placed in the foster care system. With no legal alternatives, Inez kidnaps Terry and utilizes her Harlem-based support system to lay low and begin anew. Over a decade later, […]

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“I have no shame saying that on some level, I’ve kind of been making the same film over and over,” writer-director Jennifer Reeder tells me on a recent Zoom call. We’re speaking ahead of the Berlinale premiere of Perpetrator, the anticipated follow-up to her 2019 feature debut Knives and Skin, a horror-tinged teen noir that centers on the disappearance of a high school-aged girl and the reckoning that it brings to a Midwestern town’s inhabitants, particularly the girl’s mother and her teenage friend group. Perpetrator iterates a similar narrative trajectory, this time with a distinct genre sensibility. Precocious 17-year-old Jonny […]

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The trailer has arrived for Celine Song’s directorial debut Past Lives, which garnered early buzz out of Sundance before screening at Berlin. The decades-spanning film, loosely inspired by the filmmaker’s own life, stars Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro. Per the film’s official synopsis: Nora (Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo), two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrest apart after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. Two decades later, they are reunited in New York for one fateful week as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life, in this heartrending modern romance. Magaro plays Arthur, […]

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You might know Todd Stashwick from The Riches or 12 Monkeys (the Syfy series, where he played Deacon), but you definitely know him from his guest star work on countless shows, both dramas and comedies, spanning more than two decades. And now he plays Captain Liam Shaw in the new season of Picard. On this episode, he talks about how the little boy Star Trek fan in him leapt for joy when he sat in his captain’s chair for the first time, while the “all business” actor in him had to focus on the work at hand. Plus we discuss […]

The post “I Kind of Wanted To Keep Doing It All, and Fortunately They Kept Letting Me”: Todd Stashwick (Back To One, Episode 241) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A self-described “knock-knock joke ten years in the making,” Gary Huggins’ debut feature Kick Me has to be seen to be believed. The film ostensibly tells the story of a high school guidance counselor who goes into Kansas City, Kansas one night to buy a pet bunny and meet with a delinquent student before attending his daughter’s choral concert. But nothing — and I mean nothing — goes as planned. What unfolds instead is an (often funny) nightmare freakshow featuring three-legged dogs, maniacal Winnebago-driving swingers, geriatric drug dealers, abandoned shopping malls and jenkem huffers that makes Scorsese’s After Hours seem […]

The post “The ‘Micro-Budget Apocalypse Now“: Gary Huggins On His “Cursed” Debut, Kick Me first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

My Berlinale 2023 started with a trip down Eduardo Williams’ digestive tubes. Much of the material in A Very Long Gif, a single-channel installation included in the Forum Expanded exhibition, was captured with a capsule endoscopy camera. This minuscule device is swallowed like a pill and journeys through one’s gastrointestinal tract, taking thousands of pictures along the way. Effectively, it records a traveling shot at a frame rate of two or three images per second. Williams ingested one himself and condensed its eight-hour passage into a 75-minute sequence, which is looped and projected on a wall in a large round […]

The post Berlinale 2023: A Very Long Gif, Our Body and Orlando, My Political Biography first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Tina Satter’s Reality opens with a high-angle shot of its eponymous heroine, Reality Winner, her blonde head poking up amongst a stretch of cubicle dividers in a Georgia NSA facility. It’s 2017 and above her on the walls are an array of television monitors, chyrons blaring, all tuned to the latest news about James Comey’s Congressional testimony regarding Russian election interference. The channel is Fox, and you don’t have to be at any particular place on the political spectrum to view this work environment as already an abusive one. Winner works translating Farsi to English, a task that requires sensitivity, […]

The post “Second by Second, She is Trying to Game Out What to Say Next…”: Writer/Director Tina Satter on Her Sydney Sweeney-Starring Berlin Premiere, Reality first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

You might think of Pacifiction as a feature-length version of the shot of the boat in The Parallax View before it explodes—before you know it might explode, before you know anything for sure. A man in a white suit, De Roller (Benoît Magimel), makes his rounds on the Polynesian islands, presiding more like a benevolent impresario at a Euro nightclub than the nebulous political figure that he is (High Commissioner, it turns out). He hears out local power players, consults with Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau) and other underlings and associates and grows concerned about nuclear machinations by the French government. “It’s not […]

The post “One Cinematographer, Two Camera Operators and Three Cameras”: Albert Serra on Pacifiction first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The psychedelic potency of fictional invertebrates is pure nightmare fuel in Alex Phillips’s feature debut All Jacked Up and Full of Worms. Yet worms alone don’t drive the film’s deviant characters past the brink of sanity. Rather, the creature’s hallucinogenic properties serve as unfortunate conduits for their most depraved intrusive thoughts. There’s no shortage of  gross-out bodily functions and overtly taboo images on display here—milky vomit, slimy appendages, an infant sex doll which must have put Phillips or another crew member on some sort of watchlist. Yet somehow, Worms doesn’t feel like just another piece of dirtbag, edgelord cinema. It’s […]

The post “Someone Said I Should Be Publicly Executed”: Alex Phillips on All Jacked Up and Full of Worms first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.