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. It’s my last dispatch of the year—I’ll be back with another newsletter the first full week of January—as the Oscar campaigning unofficially pauses for the holidays. The last major awards event of the year will take place on Dec. 17, when the Academy announces the shortlists for 10 categories: documentary feature, international feature, animated short, documentary short, live-action short, original score, original song, makeup/hairstyling, sound and visual effects. Then, the Golden Globes on Jan. 5 […]

The post Considerations: The Best Picture Shortlist first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

When she competed in the 2012 Summer Olympics, Claressa Shields became the first American woman to win a gold medal in boxing. It was the culmination of a lifelong struggle to make her way as a fighter. Growing up on the edge of poverty in Flint, Michigan, Shields trained with coach Jason Crutchfield in a long-term collaboration. Nicknamed “T-Rex” for her short arm span, she was the subject of the 2015 documentary T-Rex: Her Fight for Gold.  In 2019, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rachel Morrison chose a project about Shields for her feature directing debut. Working from a script by Barry Jenkins, […]

The post “I Keep My Local 600 Card So I Can Operate”: Rachel Morrison on The Fire Inside first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

As the year draws to a close, the urge to compile “best of the year” lists feels both inevitable and deeply complicated. In a world grappling with profound crises—most notably the genocide in Palestine and ever-deepening fractures in democratic institutions globally—such an exercise risks seeming trivial, detached from the urgent realities shaping our collective experience. Yet cinema at its best has always offered a lens to confront, process and perhaps even find meaning in the chaos. This list emerges not as an escape but as a form of engagement, a way to reflect on the artistic vitality that endures and […]

The post The Best Films of 2024 As Chosen by Some of Its Key Filmmakers first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Movies are a uniquely collaborative art form. A painting, a novel or a song can be created in solitude, but you can’t make a commercial narrative film by yourself. That said, the original Terrifier came about as close as you can get: Writer-director Damien Leone is also credited for producing, editing, special make-up effects, visual effects, sound design and props. In addition to putting up money, producer Phil Falcone served as UPM, AD and stunt driver and also assisted with the effects. As for cinematographer George Steuber, he was the entirety of the camera department. He operated, pulled his own […]

The post Christmas with Art the Clown: DP George Steuber on Terrifier 3 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

This year was a peak travel year for me, mostly festival-enabled, and I was pleased by the number of good films I was privileged to see along the way that I wouldn’t have otherwise. While the globalization of film via the internet has improved access all round, it’s a mistake to think that everything good winds up somewhere legally accessible, even if only as an obscure VOD option. Some films remain unaccounted for, which is both unfortunate and a reminder of how many good films there remain to see. Here are ten of the year’s best, with links to their longer […]

The post The Ten Best Undistributed Films of 2024 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Alessandro Nivola returns to the podcast (Ep. 37 and Ep.170) to discuss three performances he gives in three different films out at the same time this week—Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, The Brutalist, and Kraven The Hunter. He gifts us with a detailed peek into what it took to build each of these characters. He talks about the interesting way he received a “green light” from Almodóvar in terms of his approach to the role of an Upstate New York policeman, the challenge of balancing adherence to period authenticity with a modern accessibly as Attila in Brady Corbet’s epic, […]

The post “Another Guy, Another Wig,” Alessandro Nivola Returns to Talk about Almodóvar, The Brutalist, and The Rhino: Back To One, Episode 322 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

At the end of each year comes the excitement of listing my favorite released films. This is a moment where I like to reflect on the status of modern cinema. When great films populate my list, ones that make my heart pound, I become alit with hope. Great is the desire to believe in the work being made today, especially as the gems of today’s moviemaking are often found on the deeper pages of Letterboxd.com’s most popular movies. In the 1950s, for example, the most critically lauded films are ranked at the top of page #1, sorted by the most popular […]

The post Cinema is Not a Sport: My End of the Year List, 2024 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Just as its characters shift roles in their erotic game of cat and mouse, Halina Reijn’s third feature Babygirl fluently shifts between erotic thriller, existential melodrama and corporate satire. At the center is Nicole Kidman role as Romy, a successful CEO of a high-powered New York-based e-commerce company who relinquishes her sense of control when a chance encounter with a new company intern (Harris Dickinson) plunges Romy into the erotic chaos of a BDSM-charged relationship. Babygirl carefully traces how the seismic shifts of this newfound dom-sub dynamic open up an emotional rift in Romy, resulting in an explosive and messy […]

The post Creating Composed Chaos: DP Jasper Wolf on Babygirl  first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In late October, A24 dropped a teaser for their highly anticipated The Brutalist, where glimpses of Brady Corbet’s epic flash by as credits and review pullquotes horizontally crawl across the screen like the VistaVision-format celluloid that ran through the camera to capture the picture. It’s a sharp piece of trailer design that formally evokes the experience of the film as much as it serves as a piece of marketing. The design of the scroll also summons the Bauhaus stylings that inspire the architecture of The Brutalist’s subject, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), highlighting the words on screen around evocations of the […]

The post “Apple Changed the Whole Landscape of How You Market a Product”: Sebastian Pardo on Crafting Graphic Design for The Brutalist first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It’s been a busy year for Kamal Aljafari.  One of the most innovative voices working in contemporary found footage cinema, the Palestinian filmmaker’s latest feature, A Fidai Film (which premiered this past spring at Visions du Reel in Nyon, Switzerland, where it won the Jury Award of the Burning Lights section) has propelled him to a wholly new level of fame – and deservedly so. Often traveling alongside his latest short film, UNDR (which premiered at IFFR), A Fidai Film has been screened in almost three dozen festivals, while Aljafari has been the subject of two major retrospectives at Anthology […]

The post “The Process of Dehumanization that Happened to the Palestinians”: Kamal Aljafari on A Fidai Film first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.