Mia Wasikowska’s first project in The States was the HBO series In Treatment. She was just 16 years old, but if you watched it then, you were probably in awe, like me, marveling at this seemingly fully formed acting artist, performing, with nuance and subtlety, well beyond her years. She continued to wow us with stellar work in Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, Alice In Wonderland, Stoker, The Double, Tracks, Damsel and Bergman Island, to name a few. Her latest is an absolutely beautiful film called Blueback. In this woefully brief episode, she talks about the underwater acting she had to do […]

The post “The Reality of a Life of Acting All the Time Is Different From the Perception”: Mia Wasikowska (Back To One, Episode 242) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A tiny visual suture at the very beginning of Philippe Garrel’s The Plough inadvertently attests to two different formats being stitched together. The letters of the production company/financing body credits have slightly serrated edges against a dark grey background and clearly come from a digital file, while the subsequent dedication and title card have smooth-lined lettering against a perceptibly darker black, with a few scratches further confirming their celluloid origin. Somebody output those titles to 35mm, then scanned them back in, which speaks to differing deliverables standards for different parts of the chain, as well as to Garrel’s loyalty to the medium (he’s […]

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MUBI has released the trailer for The Five Devils, French filmmaker Léa Mysius’s sophomore feature following her 2017 debut Ava. The film stars Adèle Exarchopolous as a woman whose daughter Vicky (Sally Dramé) possesses an unusual magical quality. The Five Devils had its world premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it screened in the Director’s Fortnight section. The film’s official synopsis reads: Vicky, a strange and solitary little girl, has a magical gift: she can reproduce any scent she likes, and collects them in a series of carefully labeled jars. She has secretly captured the scent of Joanne, […]

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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 […]

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