Cassandra Freeman has made her mark in everything from drama to laugh out loud comedy across film, television, and the stage. She is best known for her feature roles in Spike Lee’s Inside Man and Chris Rock’s I Think I Love My Wife. She has also starred in The Last O.G., NBC’s The Enemy Within, and Marvel’s Luke Cage. And now she just finished her four-season run as Vivian Banks (Aunt Viv) on the hit Peacock show Bel Air. On this episode, she explains how she came to trust her intuition, how research into African traditions of performance shifted her paradigm, the “thievery” of over-direction and how it robs […]

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Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man, much like its main character Julian Assange, is a doc destined to spark controversy. Jam-packed with gripping never before seen footage (much of it captured by Ecuadorian embassy CCTV) and an eclectic roster of interviewees (from Edward Snowden to Pamela Anderson), the film offers a sort of vertigo-inducing alternative history of the WikiLeaks founder and his tabloid-sensationalized troubles; and in doing so asks us to reconsider the media narrative that’s long been built by unseen hands around him. For how much of what we know about the information freedom fighter is actually “true,” […]

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On November 12, 2025, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) “gutted” Video Data Bank (VDB), the essential moving-image art distributor, archive and streaming platform. The elimination of 60% of its staff, including director Tom Colley, and announcement that it would as a result of this reduction no longer acquire new work, sent shock waves through the video art community, including the hundreds of artists represented by the distributor, an illustrious roster including, to name a few, Bruce Nauman, Miranda July, Martha Rosler, Tiffany Shaw, Christopher Harris and Elisabeth Subrin. One artist included in VDB’s catalog is an […]

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The last time I visited Tennessee, I was 15, traveling around Memphis with my parents, and spent most of the time listening to In Rainbows on cheap headphones; we ate barbecue, visited my grand-uncle and toured Graceland. 17 years later, I returned to Tennessee for the third annual FILM FEST KNOX, co-founded by filmmaker Paul Harrill and Filmmaker contributor Darren Hughes, and quickly realized my half-remembered teenaged experiences bore almost no relevance to this trip. For all intents and purposes, Knoxville might as well be in a separate state called East Tennessee, or so I’m told given the so-called Grand […]

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Architect of the three last films in the Predator franchise (the previous two being the 1719-set Prey and animated anthology film Predator: Killer of Killers), Dan Trachtenberg would be the first to tell you that many of Predator: Badlands’s gorgeous landscape shots are inspired by Terrence Malick or Sergio Leone. In the same breath, he’d also be quick to mention how composer Sarah Schachner’s score for the video game Anthem served as a launching pad for the this film’s music—Trachtenberg creates something new by unifying artforms most people don’t group together. With Predator: Badlands, for the first time the franchise […]

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Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury, made in collaboration with writer Charles Mudede (who also co-wrote Devor’s 2005 acclaimed narrative feature Police Beat and 2007’s provocatively disturbing Zoo), is as counterintuitively intense as its title might imply. The unconventionally riveting doc takes us on a wild and winding (car) ride back in time, via the backseat reminisces of its enigmatic star Sara Jane Moore, who in September 1975 tried to shoot President Gerald Ford outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. Eschewing recreations for cinematically staged interviews with the infamous nonagenarian (who passed away in September at age 95), along with evocative archival […]

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Michael Brook has collaborated with some of the most influential filmmakers and musicians of the last 40 years without ever threatening to become a household name. When I spoke to the inventor and composer last month at the Warsaw Film Festival, I asked if he valued the recognition of awards bodies, to which he explained with typical candor that “almost everything I do is not the kind of thing that the Academy is interested in, and that’s fine.” Brook got his first break in 1984 when he convinced Brian Eno, then a customer in the Toronto video lab where he […]

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International titles dominated at last night’s Gotham Awards, with films from Iran, France, the UK and Ireland, including one that was entirely Lagos-shot, winning seven of ten competitive categories. It Was Just an Accident‘s Jafar Panahi, who, it was revealed by his lawyer shortly before the event, has been sentenced in absentia to one year in prison and a two-year travel ban for engaging in “propaganda activities” against the state, was on hand to accept awards for Best Director, Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay. Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, a 2025 Cannes selection and MUBI release that […]

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Few actors have been able to consistently make a living dipping their toes in as many different mediums and genres as Feodor Chin has—film, television, theater, gaming, animation, audio books—he’s done it all. He just ended his run as “China” in the remarkable and timely play Kyoto at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York City. We use that experience as a jumping off point to explore his approach to this crazy endeavor called acting. He talks about the importance of knowing exactly how your character serves the story, explains how he got into voiceover work, details the one medium he […]

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With Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017), Chloé Zhao constructed tender epics out of prolonged time spent at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Much like her Oscar-winning Nomadland (2020), these films are born out of geography, setting characters yearning for freedom and belonging against vast American landscapes.. Zhao’s fifth feature, Hamnet, likewise finds a synthesis between the natural world and the interiority of her characters in telling a story of creation in every sense of the word — the genesis of new life and the mysterious place within where creativity and artistic processes emerge. […]

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