In The Damned, Roberto Minervini embeds us with Union Army soldiers ranging across the Western front in 1862, far from the battlegrounds in the East but no less at risk. But  when you direct a Civil War movie in 2020s America, it can be hard for audiences to view it as solely a fictional matter, especially when you’ve previously directed two of the most revealing documentary cross-sections of the United States in the last decade, The Other Side (2015) and What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire (2018). It’s possible to watch The Damned as a rugged journey […]

The post “We Question Together Hyper-Masculinity in Life as Well As In the War Movie Genre”: Roberto Minervini on The Damned first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

At dinner my first night at this year’s Cannes, a friend asked our waiter if this was his restaurant’s busiest time of year. Not even close; that would be MIPIM, “the world’s leading real estate market event,” taking place in March and drawing 26,000+ people—a number handily dwarfing the 13,000+ market attendees, plus assorted press and filmmakers, at last year’s festival. It was a useful perspective check: if Cannes is roundly conceded the status of world’s biggest film festival when all components are accounted for, that doesn’t mean too much in the global scheme of things, where cinema, as we […]

The post Cannes 2024: This Life of Mine, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Since he was last on the podcast (Ep. 112), Tom Pelphrey has been nominated for an Emmy for his work on Ozark, he’s had juicy roles on Outer Range and David E. Kelly’s Love and Death, and now Kelly has given Pelphrey perhaps his most exciting role to date in the character of Raymond Peepgrass in Netflix’s A Man In Full. On this episode, Pelphrey takes us deep into his work on that limited series. He talks about why a good costumer designer is an actor’s best friend, what made him feel free to go “full weird” with Regina King, […]

The post “You Have to Make it All Personal”: Tom Pelphrey, Back To One, Episode 291 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Amidst wi-fi and cellular outages, a threatened workers’ strike, and dialogue around the #MeToo movement in France, the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival is underway. For Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov and Blake Williams are both back with on-the-ground reports and Critics Notebooks, and we begin with this list of 15 films that might be sliding under your radar. You don’t need us to recommend Coppola’s Megalopolis, Schrader’s Oh Canada, Cronenberg’s The Shrouds or any of the other titles from the higher-profile auteurs. Instead, we’ve focused here on debuting directors, U.S. independents, and arthouse auteurs who have dazzled us with […]

The post 15 Films Not to Miss at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Baltimore filmmakers and audiences commingled in and around the historic Parkway Theater at the physical center and symbolic heart of the city from May 2 – 5 for the 25th anniversary edition of the Maryland Film Festival (MdFF). When MdFF announced in 2022 that they would be ceasing operations the following year, including all screening activity at the Parkway (its home since the renovations finished in 2017), I thought the fest could go the way of so many things in the city’s arts district, Station North: quiet abandonment and disrepair. It is a testament to the institutional strength of the […]

The post Festival Report: The 2024 Maryland Film Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today the nominations in seven competitive award categories for the inaugural Gotham TV Awards, recognizing a range of series, including Baby Reindeer, Ripley, The Curse, Shōgun, Bodkin, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and Black Twitter: A People’s History as well as performances from Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder in The Curse, Andrew Scott in Ripley, Kristen Wiig in Palm Royale, Richard Gadd in Baby Reindeer, and Lily Gladstone in Under The Bridge, among others. “In a historic moment for The Gotham, we’re thrilled to recognize an extraordinary collection of TV series […]

The post Nominees Announced for Inaugural Gotham TV Awards first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel appeared on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2019 as her feature The Tuba Thieves, screening next week on Independent Lens, moved from stop-and-start production — she had been shooting the film in “bits and pieces” since 2013 — to a finishing sprint. Inspired by a news story about a rash of tuba thefts from Los Angeles marching bands, the film is an impressive and wholly original expansion of O’Daniel’s overall project. As I wrote in the 25 New Face piece, “Sound — as subject matter, metaphor, and structuralist organizing principle — is at the […]

The post Watch: An Exclusive Clip from Alison O’Daniel’s Independent Lens Premiere, The Tuba Thieves first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The logline for Snack Shack—two teenaged best friends spend the summer of 1991 working at a community pool food stand and get up to shenanigans—suggests a hyper-generic “one crazy summer”-type coming-of-age flick, but the film distinguishes itself with specifics almost immediately. It opens with AJ (Connor Sherry) and Moose (Gabriel LaBelle) at an off-track betting parlor intently watching the races with lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They exchange gambling strategies and profane insults before deciding to bet their new winnings on one more long-shot race. They hit big, but upon leaving they see someone swipe their cab, making it […]

The post “You Can’t Go Into Your Hometown and Not Shoot Cinemascope”: Writer/Director Adam Rehmeier on His Early ’90s Nebraska-Set Comedy, Snack Shack first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Monica Sorelle’s debut feature Mountains is currently screening at the Seattle International Film Festival, with its final screening tomorrow, May 14, and then on the festival’s streaming platform from May 20 – 27. Mountains, the debut feature by Miami-based filmmaker Monica Sorelle, opens with a Haitian proverb: Dèyè mòn gen mòn—behind mountains are mountains. We hear the brutal clamor of a towering demolition crane—perpetually under construction, Miami, where Mountains is set, has no mountains but these—as it rakes the shingles off a roof. The patriarch of the family at Mountains’ center is Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), a construction worker who’s been […]

The post Critic’s Notebook: Monica Sorelle’s Miami-Set Debut, Mountains first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In The Conference of the Birds, the famous Persian epic written in 1177 by Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, a group of birds gather and discuss their collective journey to meet their king, the Simurgh, a mythical winged creature. In this allegory for the human search for enlightenment and wisdom—despite our flaws—a sparrow cowers, hoping to avoid the quest altogether. “I do not wish to begin such a toilsome journey for something I can never reach…I shall be content to seek here my Joseph in the well,” she says, in one translation. “If I find him and draw him out, […]

The post “How Do I Capture the Storytelling That is Quintessential to South America, and Marry It to the Experience of Living Here in Florida?”: Director Kevin Contento on His Vimeo Staff Pick, From Fish to Moon first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.