John Lilly’s very Californian trajectory from Cold War scientist to New Age visionary, aided by prodigious consumption of LSD and ketamine, feels quaint from today’s vantage. The Silicon Valley inventors and tech pioneers who could be considered his present-day counterparts mostly went the opposite route—first taking psychedelics and proclaiming lofty ideals, then turning to ever more terrifyingly real fantasies of world domination. Such comparisons account for the wistful experience of watching John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’s documentary portrait of Lilly, which premiered at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. That’s not to say […]

The post “Now the Main Person Talking about Lilly is Joe Rogan”: Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens on John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse! centers on a legendary cartoonist who’s long struggled with being eclipsed by his own creation. Decades ago Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Holocaust-focused, autobiographical graphic novel Maus launched the underground artist into mainstream fame, and its success prompted him to follow up with the explanatory MetaMaus so he could finally stop having to publicly dissect the most painful time in his family’s history. (Needless to say, the plan backfired spectacularly.) Fast forward to today, when calls to ban Maus — and other “uncomfortable” books — make the moral of the story […]

The post “He Realized It Was Useful to Stop Running From the 500 Pound Maus Chasing After Him”: Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin on Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse! first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Chicken & Egg Films, the organization that champions women and gender-expansive documentary filmmakers with funding, mentorship, and access, today announced more than $550,000 in grants to seven recipients and one finalist of its 2025 Chicken & Egg Award. Each cohort member will receive a $75,000 grant: a $50,000 unrestricted career grant and $25,000 to be applied to a project the filmmaker will work on during their breakthrough award year. The Award recipients are Rita Baghdadi, Kelly Duane de la Vega, Carola Fuentes, Angelo Madsen, Habiba Nosheen, Jenni Olson, and Anupama Srinivasan. The 2025 Chicken & Egg Award Finalist is Marcela […]

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Sean Baker’s Anora was the big winner at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards, held yesterday at California’s Santa Monica beach. The film, about a stripper’s ill-fated marriage to a Russian oligarch’s son, picked up prizes for Best Film, Best Director and, for Mikey Madison’s lead performance, Best Lead Performance. Other films and TV shows picking up multiple wins were A Real Pain (Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Performance), Didi (Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay) and Baby Reindeer (Best Breakthrough Performance in a New Scripted Series, Best Lead Performance in a New Scripted Series, Best Ensemble Cast in […]

The post Anora, Didi and Baby Reindeer Are Multiple 2025 Film Independent Spirit Award Winners first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here. This is my final Considerations of the season—a somewhat bittersweet statement to write. It’s been a lot of fun covering this wacky and wild Oscar season, even as I (along with so many other folks I’ve spoken to over the last few weeks) am also extremely ready for it to be done. But with voting closing on Feb. 18, we’ve basically reached the end of the line for campaigning. And what a season, one that […]

The post Considerations: Some Final Predictions first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

We didn’t have to wait too long after Earwig (2021) for Lucile Hadžihalilović’s enigmatic new offering, The Ice Tower. The whistling sounds of mountain winds announce the arrival of the Snow Queen (Marion Cotillard), both to the set of a film she’s leading in 1970s France and in the life of 16-year-old runaway orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini). Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” the script—co-written by Hadžihalilović together with Geoff Cox—explores the subterranean tensions of loneliness and womanhood in various shapes and forms. While it may as well be considered the most “legible” Hadžihalilović film […]

The post Mirror Mirror: Lucile Hadžihalilović on Berlinale 2025 Premiere The Ice Tower first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Los Angeles is a city in constant renewal. When the Arclight Cinemas closed during COVID in 2021, the initial despair was lessened as a host of repertory options sprang up in its aftermath, including Quentin Tarantino’s revamped Vista Theatre, the Academy Museum and Micah Gottlieb’s Mezzanine series. On the festival side, when L.A. Film Festival and OutFest both shut down a few years apart, much discussion centered around why this city has such difficulty sustaining a film festival, especially when on the opposite coast, the New York Film Festival thrives. (This line of questioning largely overlooks the long-running, can’t-miss AFI […]

The post Slamdance Co-Founder Peter Baxter and Fest Director Taylor Miller on Moving to Los Angeles first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet.” So wrote the spectacularly good Brutalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It’s a fair guess Brady Corbet and his longtime co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold have encountered this quote, and that they recognize the affinities between architecture and movies. Being good in either medium requires a sure knowledge of your materials, an ability to translate imagined designs into physical reality, to assemble and guide teams of inspired collaborators and to know or intuit more than a little about visual textures, space and light and how to move […]

The post Taking Everything to Extremes: A Conversation Between Michael Almereyda, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastveld on The Brutalist first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Everybody dies, and that’s life,” one character proclaims in Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, approaching the inevitability of suffering with a wink and a grin.  In between executing a real-estate agent via shotgun blast and setting fire to an occupied baby stroller, this more deliberately comedic outing from the writer-director behind Longlegs is all about the strange catharsis of helplessly laughing through life’s horrors.  Adapted from Stephen King’s short story of the same name, The Monkey follows twin brothers Bill and Hal (Christian Convery in childhood, Theo James in adulthood), who discover a sinister wind-up “organ grinder” monkey toy among their […]

The post Inspired by Springfield and Sesame Street: Osgood Perkins on The Monkey first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Spanish seaside entanglements, a combustive mother-daughter relationship, mysterious, painful malaise, the veiled threat of healing and new currents of love trail Ingrid (Vicky Krieps). Nearby, watching her life pass by is Sofia (Emma Mackey), a doctoral student in anthropology and caregiver since she was a young girl to her defiant mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), mostly restricted to a wheelchair.  A story of self discovery, queer kindling and medical melancholy among these three fascinating women in a sun-baked setting, Hot Milk, premiering at the 75th Berlinale, is one of the most buzzed new titles in the Competition section. The directorial debut […]

The post You Can Never (Maybe?) Break the Chain: Rebecca Lenkiewicz on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Hot Milk first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.