The Passion of Amir Naderi
Amir Naderi is on the move. I connected with the Iranian filmmaker over WhatsApp on a chilly February morning, or at least morning where I am. He’s calling me from Rome, which is the second stop on his tour through Europe teaching classes on filmmaking. In every country he visits, he tells me, he shapes the curriculum around that nation’s cinema history. It’s a pedagogical approach that aptly reflects the cosmopolitanism of a filmmaker who has shot films in the United States, Japan, and Italy, and who hopes to potentially make a film in Australia. “If I can do it,” […]
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One year after camera giants Nikon and RED Digital Cinema merged, their first collaboration comes with the release of the Nikon ZR full-frame digital cinema camera. The ZR differentiates itself from its mirrorless competitors—whether Panasonic’s LUMIX line, Sony’s FX line or Blackmagic cinema cameras—with its unique ability to record 12-bit REDCODE RAW (R3D NE), internally at up to 6K and 60 frames per second. And it’s available at the enviable price point of only $2,199. (By comparison, Sony’s full-frame FX3 costs nearly twice as much.) Surveying the camera body, its large 4-inch screen immediately stands out. The addition of an […]
Drumroll: Amy Adams stares at you. It’s intense—not haunting, but certainly not inviting. The camera pulls away, and it’s her character Laura who’s playing the drums. It’s daytime, there’s unremarkable company around. Music, no dance. Soon, she will leave the facility. Soon, she will return to her Cape Cod home, to her devoted yet frustrated husband Martin (Murray Bartlett), to her barely tolerant teenage daughter Josie (Chloe East), to her young son Felix (Redding Munsell) who scurries away from her embrace, to her dance company that made her famous but which she now wants to quit, and to the forbidden […]
Lady, the titular lead of Olive Nwosu’s neo-noir feature debut about a taxi driver’s gradual solidarity with a group of Lagosian sex workers, possesses a piercing gaze. She’s not scanning you as much as she is preemptively fending you off. In her red taxi she stalks the nocturnal streets of the largest city in Nigeria, very much her own person, the only lady cab driver in a city on the verge of revolution around eradicating gasoline subsidies. Played with fiery commitment by Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah, Lady doesn’t even necessarily care that she’s a “woman in a man’s world,” or if […]
“I have never seen the problem with fetishizing objects and fetishizing people as though they were objects,” director Amanda Kramer tells me in a conversation ahead of the release of her latest film, By Design. “It doesn’t mean we don’t also see the person for their soul…They elicit romance. They elicit seduction. There’s something drawing you in, compelling, alluring, and the object itself is not necessarily lesser-than because it’s looked at in this way.” Kramer’s provocative theory is instructive. Her latest film, By Design, about a lonely woman named Camille (Juliette Lewis) who swaps bodies with a beautiful chair and […]
In a big studio-backed awards season, it’s rare to see much overlap between the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Oscars. A west coast cousin of sorts to the Gotham Awards, the Indie Spirits often celebrate the movies that the Academy skipped over with its nominations. The ceremony itself is also more fun (there’s some day-drinking involved) than the more staid guild awards that dot the homestretch ahead of the similarly serious Academy Awards. Having said that, the Indie Spirits still matter quite a bit to campaign strategists and the people who employ them. They take place in the heart […]
Samantha Smart is the lead actress, writer and producer of Charliebird, the feature debut of director Libby Ewing, which won the top prize at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, calling it “a deeply affecting portrait featuring grounded and complex performances.” On this episode, Smart describes the process of writing it, getting to a crisis point of wondering if she could still play the character she was creating for herself, and miraculously finding young Gabriela Ochoa Perez who skillfully plays Charlie. She details the fine-tuning that needed to happen with the central scene, how the camera operator’s energy affects actors, talks about her […]
Matt Johnson is the center of attention wherever he goes. He’s especially popular in his hometown of Toronto, where his advocacy for young Canadian filmmakers and warm, self-referential humor have made him one of the city’s most favored sons. Mayor Olivia Chow was in attendance when Johnson and his co-star/co-writer Jay McCarrol brought their film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie back to Toronto for a TIFF Midnight Madness screening that Jonson calls “one of the foundational moments of my adult life.” After years of attending the festival, he “wanted so badly to share that same kind of joy […]