Following its inaugural edition last year, Knoxville, Tennessee’s FILM FEST KNOX returns for its second year from November 14 to 17. Here are the five films announced for this year’s American Regional Cinema Competition, the winner of which will receive an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run in Regal Entertainment’s cinemas. From the press release:  The directors of the competition films—Vera Brunner-Sung, Tracie Laymon, Nicholas Colia, Brandon Colvin, and Kelsey Taylor—will be in attendance, along with additional cast and crew, who will introduce the films, participate in Q&As, and discuss the current state and future of regional cinema. Collectively, these filmmakers have screened […]

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In the opening scene of Dìdi, the titular 13-year-old and his friends film themselves blowing up a mailbox and making a run for it while laughing hysterically. It perfectly encapsulates director Sean Wang’s view of adolescence as “the worst version of yourself, having the best time of your life.” Set in 2008 in Wang’s hometown of Fremont, California, the coming-of-age story follows a Taiwanese American teen during his final summer before high school. Though not strictly autobiographical, the film was inspired by Wang’s own adolescence and the making of it was awash in familiarity. The main character’s bedroom scenes were […]

The post “The Budgetary Challenges of Getting a Dead Squirrel Puppet”: DP Sam Davis on Dìdi first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A standard festival story: I had plans to see a particular film at the end of TIFF 2024 day one, but my schedule had to be hastily rearranged, I had time to kill and thought I might as well see a movie I was kind of curious about. So there I sat at the P&I screening of Kenichi Ugana’s Midnight Madness world premiere The Gesuidouz, sandwiched between two independent theater bookers having a catch-up. The man on my left started reeling off every anime he’d programmed for the last two months and would be showing for the foreseeable future; the […]

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Depicting aging and diminishing mental acuity, with increasing candor about same, essentially has become its own subgenre—the drama of descent or disappearance. Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch feels like something different, eschewing the conventions of linear decline to stay rooted in the present-tense bodily experience of its protagonist: Ruth Goldman, played by a galvanizing Kathleen Chalfant. Beyond the subjective design of the filmmaking—comprising not just what we hear, but how we understand the premise of any given scene—this is a catalyzing collaboration between Chalfant, storied veteran of both stage (Wit) and screen, and Friedland, a student of choreography who sought out […]

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Odessa Young is only 26, but she already has a truly impressive body of work behind her. Assassination Nation, A Million Little Pieces, Shirley, Mothering Sunday, The Stand, The Staircase, Manodrome, in each of these projects, she seems to have an effortless command over her character, each unique, never forced, always true. Now she stars as Vita, the lead character based on Zia Anger in My First Film. On this episode, she talks about the need to “cultivate an obsession” as character preparation, recent musings on “how much an actor should act to the camera,” why she never worries about […]

The post “The Process Was More Important Than the Result”: My First Film Star Odessa Young, Back To One, Episode 308 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Waiting for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud to start, I wondered how much time I’d spent over the years watching his signature warehouses, offices and apartments. The man loves a purpose-built soundstage set, the drabber the better but counterintuitively showcased under unrepentantly artificial lighting—one rung down from “Lynchian” in terms of overt ominousness but similarly ready to radiate menace. Those sets’ simplicity offsets his films’ often elevated eccentricity levels, though by Kurosawa’s standards Cloud is comparatively sedate insofar as it has a fully explicable plot: Online reseller Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) offloads one too many shoddy knockoff goods, attracting the ire of […]

The post TIFF 2024: Cloud, The End first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In Jeremy Saulnier’s breakthrough films Blue Ruin and Green Room, the writer-director thrust protagonists into violent cacophonies they weren’t equipped to navigate. With his new Netflix actioner Rebel Ridge, Saulnier centers his story on a hero much more adept at meeting force with force. The film stars Aaron Pierre as a Marine hand-to-hand combat expert who comes to a small southern town to bail out his cousin. Before he can do so, his bail money is confiscated by the corrupt, militarized local police force (led by chief Don Johnson) via a bogus civil asset forfeiture claim. Confrontations—both verbal and physical—ensue. […]

The post “It Sounded Like a Good Title”: Jeremy Saulnier on Rebel Ridge first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The J-horrors that catapulted Kiyoshi Kurosawa from reliable gun for hire under the Japanese studio system to internationally revered auteur saw terror as indissolubly bound with tech. Conceived at the turn of the millennium, they spoke to those years’ paranoias about digital life: ghosts pouring out of dial-up internet (Pulse, 2001), senseless murders upending pristine cityscapes (Cure, 1997), and lives aremodeled by perfect doubles (Doppelganger, 2003).  Cloud, his latest, offers a new equation, no longer anchoring dread to media but capitalism. It’s not that computer screens are nowhere in sight; the film’s hero, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), is a hustler who […]

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Bell and Bulgari are gone as sponsors, but Listerine is one of 37 new ones at TIFF 2024. This year, the defining image of the fest’s early days has been the 95-milliliter bottles of Listerine Total Care (Mild Mint) neatly arrayed on mini-shelves next to the sinks in the washrooms of the festival’s Lightbox headquarters. There, the walls are branded with mock-movie poster key art for “Listerine: The Movie,” with a bottle of that pink liquid sandwiched between five-star laurels for “Refreshing Plot Twist” and “Breath of Fresh Air.” An employee stocking those bottles estimated that over a thousand are […]

The post TIFF 2024: Lázaro at Night, Hard Truths first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

One of the cinematic highlights of this year’s TIFF, Olivier Sarbil’s Ukraine-set (and Darren Aronofsky-produced) Viktor follows the titular protagonist, a Kharkiv resident who lives with his widowed mother and faces a most unusual conundrum. Desperate to defend his country, Viktor — a sword-loving giant of a man whose bible is Miyamoto Musashi’s The Strategy of the Samurai — is nevertheless blocked from joining the war effort because he just so happens to be Deaf. Fortunately, Viktor possesses the dogged determination of a noble warrior and manages to convince the local army to take him on as a volunteer photojournalist […]

The post “With Viktor I Approached Sign Language Just Like Any Other Language”: Olivier Sarbil on His TIFF-premiering doc Viktor first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.