If awards season is useful for anything, it’s to provide a distraction. Bombarded as we are by bleak headlines, there’s something soothing about watching a lot of very famous people collect trophies and crack jokes for a few hours. At the 83rd Annual Golden Globes, host Nikki Glaser set the tone for a fun celebration. But there was substance too. Those of us looking for clues to Oscar outcomes (I don’t mean Polymarket bettors, but, hey, they’re welcome too) were left with plenty to chew on.Warner Bros.’ One Battle After Another continued its hot streak, taking best picture (musical or […]

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In 2017, for the 25th anniversary of Filmmaker, we commissioned a radical redesign and also initiated a new upfront section: Reflections. For four issues we published pieces looking back at the history of the magazine as well as ones that meditated anew on its enduring concerns, such as struggles of early career filmmakers, the changing models of independent producing, the role of print magazines in a digital culture, and the shifting definitions of the word “independent.” When our anniversary year was over, I decided to keep the section, reasoning that “reflections” didn’t have to just refer to the past; these […]

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As I devoted more time and energy to the Filmmaker newsletter throughout the last decade-plus, I’d often find myself in some form of dialogue with producer, strategist and consultant Brian Newman. His invaluable Sub-genre newsletter arrives on Thursdays (now, biweekly), mine on Fridays, and, like me, he’ll often comment on the production and distribution challenges facing independent filmmakers in an increasingly commercialized, politically cautious and algorithmically-driven media landscape. So, many Fridays, I have found myself trying to add something new to Brian’s erudite musings on the topic of the week, often defaulting to just throwing him a link. But our […]

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I first met producer, director and non-profit executive Esther Robinson in the early aughts, when she was Film/Video Program Director at Creative Capital, a still invaluable organization that not only funds bold work but helps artists in their paths towards overall sustainability. Later, in 2006, I selected her for our 25 New Faces while she was in production on her luminous documentary A Walk Into the Sea, about her uncle, Danny Lyons, a filmmaker at Warhol’s Factory. In the years since, Robinson has been a contributor here, conducting the occasional interview but most notably writing columns that spoke uncomfortable but […]

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Steam pouring from manhole covers, the neon-lights of 42nd street seen through rain-streaked taxicab windows, phalanxes of cops spied from tenement rooftops as they sweep a city block — David C. Roberts’s Song of My City distills the visual rushes of a score of 1970s and early ’80s New York City-set film classics into a 15-minute city symphony of sorts. Drawing inspiration from 1920s pictures such as Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, Roberts has pulled shots from Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Across 110th Street, The Warriors in order to capture not just ’70s New York but the […]

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For the first time since 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson has made a movie with a contemporary setting. To do so, he used a film format dormant for the last half century. Anderson’s One Battle After Another continues a resurgence of VistaVision that now includes The Brutalist and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and Bugonia. The format, which uses 8-perf 35mm traveling through the camera horizontally rather than vertically to create a larger negative, gained popularity as a non-anamorphic widescreen alternative in the mid-1950s. It was used for everything from Biblical epics (The Ten Commandments) to musicals (White Christmas) to […]

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When I realized I’d be laid off (via: restructuring) from the publication I’ve worked at for 11+ years, I went back through the print archives to round up work I was proud of as an interviewer and commissioning editor. It holds up better than I hoped: I came out swinging in my second print issue with what I’m reasonably sure was the first non-video, written-out English-language interview with Roberto Minervini for Stop the Pounding Heart; his next film, The Other Side, is a defining work of the decade. There’s a solid mixture of European arthouse known quantities (Arnaud Desplechin, Mia […]

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As 2025 unfolded, returning to the ritual of asking filmmakers about the films that moved them feels both fragile and necessary. This exercise appears days after yet another grotesque display of interventionism in Latin America, an event so swiftly normalized that its violence dissolves into the background noise of the present. In this context, cinema—even in its most superficial, market-driven or seemingly shallow dynamics—reasserts its essence: a place of resistance, a safer space, a memory capsule. Against a futile and often despicable world, the cinema persists not because it is pure, but because it is collective, embodied, and stubbornly alive. […]

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After spending the last Knives Out entry on a billionaire’s private Greek island, master sleuth Benoit Blanc’s latest mystery Wake Up Dead Man takes him to a remote parish in upstate New York to solve the murder of a priest (Josh Brolin). It’s a classic locked door mystery, with Brolin’s monsignor stabbed mid-mass in a closet a few feet from his pulpit. The suspects include a recently reassigned young priest (Josh O’Connor) and a tightly knit clique from the church’s flock (Jeremy Renner’s recently dumped doctor, Cailee Spaeny’s injured concert musician, Andrew Scott’s paranoid novelist and Kerry Washington’s lawyer). Like […]

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Kimball Farley is the future. His breakthrough role in Hippo, the critically acclaimed dark comedy that RogerEbert.com called “an unholy fusion of A Clockwork Orange and Napoleon Dynamite” established him as a talented, chameleon-like actor to watch, then his performance in The Righteous Gemstones, opposite Bradley Cooper, displayed his range. And now 2026 is shaping up to be a big year for him, with upcoming releases from filmmakers like Tim Sutton, Mark H. Rapaport, and Henry Chaisson showcasing more of what he can do. On this episode, he details his “outside-in” approach to character work, and why changing his appearance […]

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