Raoul Peck’s new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 opens with a credit sequence featuring images of what appear to be microscopic larvae wriggling across the screen. The message seems clear: something nefarious is afoot on this globe, but still in its incipient stages. If we fail to act, it’s going to get much worse. In recent years, the filmmaker has made direct, no-nonsense use of the nonfiction form to address, from various angles, the rot of white supremacy, its historical roots and its unchecked future. Building on I Am Not Your Negro, Silver Dollar Road, the miniseries Exterminate All the Brutes and […]

The post “There Was No Going Around Gaza”: Raoul Peck on Cannes 2025 Premiere Orwell: 2+2=5 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

You know Bobby Naderi from his subtle and sometimes hilarious work in films like Bright and The Beekeeper. Now he brings that same aliveness to the new Amazon series The Better Sister, where he plays Detective Matt Bowen. On this episode, he talks about how his nomadic youth shaped his life and work, how failures paved the way for breakthroughs, why he stopped anticipating how a scene will play out, how his mother’s blunt criticism of his acting work helped him get better, and much more. Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, […]

The post “To Me All This is the Circus and I Get to Join this Family, This Tribe of People”: Bobby Naderi, Back To One, Episode 343 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Producers Joe Pirro and Caroline Clark attended the 2025 Cannes Film Festival as Gotham Cannes Producer Network Fellows. Pirro is with the New York company Symbolic Exchange, and Clark L.A.’s Kindred Spirit. The two recently collaborated on Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet, and here, in a part one of a two-part conversation, that share their festival debrief. First up, Clark querying Pirro. Clark: You were awarded this year’s Sundance Institute | Amazon MGM Studios Producers Award for Fiction at the Sundance Film Festival. From a decorated producer’s point of view, how do you like to prioritize your time at Cannes, […]

The post “We’re On the Cusp of a Real Revolution in Independent Film”: Producer Joe Pirro on Cannes 2025 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The cinema world was quick to juxtapose an image from the climax of this year’s award ceremony—where Iranian director Jafar Panahi took home the Palme d’Or for his generously-received It Was Just an Accident—alongside one in which this year’s jury president Juliette Binoche protested Panahi’s 2010 arrest and imprisonment while she accepted her Best Actress prize for Certified Copy. The latter image, one of the most indelible of recent Cannes history, also circulated a bit after the lineup was announced several weeks before the festival began, as many doubted Binoche’s capacity for impartiality. Whether or not Panahi’s film needed only […]

The post Cannes 2025: Awards, Young Mothers, Sentimental Value, Resurrection first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The film festival world can be so depressingly homogenous that to come across a title straying beyond its aesthetic and storytelling conventions is nothing short of exhilarating. The Last One for the Road is one such film. Conversant as it may be with a long and varied set of influences—from 1960s Italian comedies all the way to Aki Kaurismäki—Francesco Sossai’s second feature synthesizes its touchstones into something that feels bracingly alive. It heralds its writer-director as a new talent to watch, and confirms that the most exciting Italian cineastes working today are those shooting a long way away from the […]

The post “There’s a Reason We Call Them ‘Films’ and Not ‘SD Cards’”: Francesco Sossai on His Cannes-Premiering The Last One for the Road first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In a piece about the documentaries at this year’s Cannes, Slate’s Sam Adams noted the existence of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk but declined to name the section it was in, referring to it only as “a low-profile sidebar devoted to independent productions.” That would be ACID, which—with the possible exception of the CINEF section that shows film school shorts—is, yes, probably the lowest-profile of the Cannes premieres sections. To decide ACID isn’t worth naming is a reminder of the infinite proliferation of hierarchies at Cannes; there are dark rumors that even though the press badges are […]

The post Cannes 2025: Entroncamento, The Mastermind first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s epic 2022 film Godland mapped the crisis of faith experienced by a 19th-century Danish priest on a mission to Iceland. A majestic tapestried shot of a horse skeleton lifts viewers from the difficult physical and emotional terrain of the film’s narrative world into a realm that is more formal, ethereal, and symbolic. Similarly, Pálmason’s fourth feature, The Love That Remains, which premiered at Cannes last weekend, is only in some layers a dark comedy about the varied pains experienced by a rural Icelandic family undergoing a separation of parents Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason). Horses […]

The post “It’s Not Enough to Only Have Narrative”: Hlynur Pálmason on Cannes 2025 Premiere The Love That Remains first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Spike Lee’s maligned 2013 update of Park Chan-wook’s 2003 revenge picture, Oldboy, did little to inspire confidence in his latest reimagining of an Asian classic, this time relocating Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) to DUMBO in Brooklyn. Given a very Spike title of Highest 2 Lowest, the Denzel Washington vehicle is expectedly brimming with the director’s signature expressive filmmaking—wildly cubist jump cut coverage within establishing shots, double-take character greetings and spontaneous shifts into saturated 16mm footage of New York abound—and tends to feel more like another excuse to create a cinematic love letter to his hometown and the Black […]

The post Cannes 2025: Highest 2 Lowest, Die My Love, The Love That Remains first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Sentenced by the Iranian government in 2010 on spurious grounds to six years in prison, a punishment that came with a 20-year ban on making movies, Jafar Panahi immediately set about violating the latter. Title notwithstanding, 2011’s This is Not a Film was what I’d call an “actual movie,” spry and self-reflexive like his first two features, 1995’s The White Balloon and 1997’s The Mirror. The post-Film features that followed—Closed Curtain, Taxi, 3 Faces and No Bears—merited that first post-ban title more. Leaning upon his undeniably courageous status as a (since) multiple-times-jailed dissident filmmaker, those works foregrounded the director as a benign […]

The post Cannes 2025: It Was Just an Accident, The Secret Agent first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe entry Thunderbolts*, a reluctant squad of antiheroes team up to save New York City. Behind the scenes, another superteam comprised of A24 alumni joined forces. As this trailer breaks down, Thunderbolts* is brought to you by “the writers and director of Beef, the cinematographer of The Green Knight, the production designer of Hereditary, the editor of Minari and the composers of Everything Everywhere All at Once.” That Green Knight cinematographer would be Andrew Droz Palermo, whose resume includes work for both Marvel (the Disney+ series Moon Knight) and A24 (David Lowery’s A Ghost Story and […]

The post “Not Everything Could Have Been IMAX”: DP Andrew Droz Palermo on Thunderbolts* first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.