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Necessary | Filmmaker Magazine
One Battle After Another, Familiar Touch and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You are among the multiple nominees for the 2025 35th edition of the Gotham Awards, announced today by The Gotham Film &| Filmmaker Magazine
Benny Safdie’s mixed martial arts drama The Smashing Machine, currently in theaters from A24, is brutal and tender, and both in surprising ways. Working with blockbuster actor Dwayne Johnson, who…| Filmmaker Magazine
When it comes to filmmaker biographies, the “print the legend” maxim so frequently misattributed to John Ford has long been the preferred coin of the realm. Tales told out of school…| Filmmaker Magazine
Greenlight Coverage was proud to partner with Gotham Week this year, offering script analysis and story development support to a remarkable range of submissions. Out of the many compelling entries, three projects stood out for their creativity, emotional resonance, and cinematic potential: The Ballad of Tita and the Machines, The Poem, and The Camford Experiment. Based on Greenlight’s coverage reports these screenplays ranked among the highest across every evaluation category, earning top m...| Filmmaker Magazine
As I wrote in my capsule review for this year’s SXSW curtain raiser, Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud is a film that Craig Renaud, Brent’s brother (and my friend for the past dozen years, ever since I met the tight-knit siblings covering their now defunct Little Rock Film Festival) should never have had to make and instigated by an event no family should ever have to live through. And that puts Brent’s loved ones in the grieving company of untold numbers of f...| Filmmaker Magazine
Cooper Raiff returns to the podcast (first time was Ep. 128) to discuss his latest project, the eight-episode, independently-made, decades-spanning series Hal & Harper. He picks up right where we left off in the first interview, five years ago, taking us through the process of getting Cha Cha Real Smooth made, and how that green light helped him avoid compromising Hal & Harper. He explains why no matter what success you’ve had (like winning top prizes at the biggest festivals for his previo...| Filmmaker Magazine
My relationship with the stretch of Sixth Avenue running between West 3rd and West 4th Streets, on one corner of which stands New York City’s legendary IFC Center, mirrors my relationship with cinema, bad tattoos, crushing hangovers, and a whole mess of memories that sit in the back of my brain like luggage stuffed in a collapsing mid-flight Ryan Air jet. The relationship is complicated, messy in an overloaded-Papaya-Dog sort of way, and something I profoundly cherish. I’ll back up. I w...| Filmmaker Magazine
Perhaps one of the strangest and most captivating docs of the year, Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller centers on a middle-aged wife and husband, the latter of whom is having an affair that the former is desperate to end. Enter Wang Zhenxi, one of a growing number of China’s professional “mistress dispellers.” For a fee, Teacher Wang will orchestrate scenarios that allow her to get to know the man and his mistress in order to discern how she can best manipulate a breakup – one in whi...| Filmmaker Magazine
A half-hour into Connor Sen Warnick’s Characters Disappearing, left-wing revolutionary Mei (Yuka Murakami) hangs up a poster declaring “The East is Red.” Until that point, the film seems to take place in the strict past-tense, moving through the domestic spaces of Asian Americans in New York’s Chinatown in the early 1970s. But when Mei crosses the street, a woman moves through the frame in front of her in a mask and puffy jacket clearly out of our current decade—Mei, and her radical...| Filmmaker Magazine
With Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor premiering on Netflix today, we’re reposting our interview with Gandbhir out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. — Editor Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, which premiered in the US Documentary section of this year’s Sundance, is likely one of the first feature docs primarily composed of police body camera footage. Sifting through footage with editor Viridiana Liberman (The Sentence), Gandbhir builds out a suspenseful and heartbr...| Filmmaker Magazine
This is the second part of my interview with Crispin Glover where we dive deep into his latest film No! You’re Wrong or Spooky Action At A Distance, which he spent the better part of the last 18 years making, completely independently. He touches on many of the technical aspects of the film, such as shooting ratio, color correction, music scores, film vs. digital, why he’s bad at sound mixing, what “spooky action at a distance” actually means, and much much more. Go to CrispinGlover.co...| Filmmaker Magazine
Few recent films have offered such an overwhelmingly immersive audiovisual experience as Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt. It’s no coincidence that the first shots of the film show tough-looking tech guys assembling an intimidatingly huge sound system on a remote and desolate location, as music is a major driving force behind this cinematic trip. The fourth film by the French-Spanish director (Mimosas, Fire Will Come) begins at a psychedelic rave before embarking on a treacherous journey into the Mor...| Filmmaker Magazine
Drawing heavily from internet aesthetics that feel at once contemporary and dated, In the Glow of Darkness is a sprawling, hand-made cyberpunk ensemble film following detectives, streamers, pop stars, struggling families, corporate conspiracies and a rave-dancing hitman. Eschewing direct references to our world’s online space, In the Glow of Darkness constructs a parallel reality of tech-run nightclubs, LAN party fraternities and a “meme-tripping” drug culture, where users get have thei...| Filmmaker Magazine
Indie director Nobuhiro Yamashita was not under the impression that he had much insight into the lives of high-school girls. For his first three features (Hazy Life (1999), No One’s Ark (2003), and Ramblers (also 2003)) he’d focused on what he knew best—“lazy men.” But Yamashita’s fifth feature, Linda Linda Linda (2005), would prove pivotal, expanding the horizons of his career, his cast and Japanese independent cinema itself. A gentle slice-of-life drama, Linda Linda Linda tells ...| Filmmaker Magazine
When I caught up with Martin Eden during the pandemic, I liked it pretty well but didn’t understand “what, exactly, is the value of […] a eulogy for the Western European project’s dissolution at this late date.” Whoops! I don’t know why I couldn’t grasp why Pietro Marcello wanted to delve into fascism’s allure for charismatic upstarts in 2019; I certainly get it now, so perhaps my positive response to his tepidly-received Duse is, in part, a delayed apology for spacing the fir...| Filmmaker Magazine
Harris Dickinson’s characters are demarcated by specific class consciousnesses: Coney Island’s Frankie in Beach Rats, who cruises for older men on a webcam site; a particular brand of selfishness and vulnerability as a model and influencer in Triangle of Sadness; most recently, a supremely confident intern who casts a domineering spell over a tech CEO in Babygirl. Urchin, the film Dickinson chose as his feature directorial debut vehicle (he’s directed shorts before, as early as 2013), s...| Filmmaker Magazine
Begun as a scrappy response to the Maryland Film Festival cancelling its edition in 2023, New/Next held its third run in Baltimore from October 2 to 5 and has already announced that the festival will be back next fall. “The word about the festival in the filmmaker community is really strong, especially about the quality of experience we offer them,” festival programmer and co-founder Eric Allen Hatch said during an edition which brought in over 300 filmmakers to The Charles Theater. “I ...| Filmmaker Magazine
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a decade since I last interviewed queer film pioneer Monika Treut. At the time trans identity was just starting to become tentatively accepted. Fifty Shades of Grey (a story centered around two straight, white, privileged cisgender protagonists into BDSM) had been released earlier that year, and was well on its way to becoming a glitzy Hollywood franchise. In other words, marginalized subjects the German filmmaker had been deeply and cinematically explo...| Filmmaker Magazine
Back To The Future, but for the past three decades he’s been very thoughtful, patient, and selective about his acting roles and even more thoughtful and patient as a true independent filmmaker, self-financing and self-distributing three films — What is it?, It is Fine! Everything is Fine, and his latest, No! You’re Wrong Or: Spooky Action at a Distance. On this episode, which is the first part of a two-part conversation, he talks about a characteristic in certain directors that usually ...| Filmmaker Magazine
If it’s true that the rich are getting richer faster than at any point in American history, then independent producers should devise ways to lure their dollars into films. That was one of three recurring finance-focused sentiments expressed at the 20th annual Film Independent Forum, a focused, thoughtfully curated two-day event that took place on 26-27 September at the plush Directors Guild of America headquarters in Los Angeles. Events included a “sacred and private” keynote fireside c...| Filmmaker Magazine
Reviews of Busan International Film Festival 2025 premieres including Sanju Surendran’s If On a Winter’s Night and Chen Jianhang’s The River That Holds Our Hands.| Filmmaker Magazine
Filmmaker Magazine covers independent cinema with interviews, industry news, and insights for filmmakers and movie lovers.| Filmmaker Magazine
Award-winning Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention) makes idiosyncratic films about the endless conflict between Arabs and Israelis, stitching together wryly humorous tableaux that…| Filmmaker Magazine
With Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade now in theaters, we’re reposting this interview with the writer/director conducted during SXSW 2018. The movie: Eighth Grade The Plot: Shy and uncertain (except when…| Filmmaker Magazine
At TIFF 2025, Vadim Rizov reviews Ben Rivers’s partial Don DeLillo adaptation Mare’s Nest and Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon.| Filmmaker Magazine
Necessary | Filmmaker Magazine
Sprawling in scope, observational in form and jaw-dropping in access, Leslie Tai’s How to Have an American Baby shows exactly what its title describes. The title is also the name of a sales talk one…| Filmmaker Magazine
Grasshopper Film has acquired North American digital and non-theatrical rights to How to Have an American Baby, directed by Chinese-American filmmaker Leslie Tai, the company said in a press release.| Filmmaker Magazine
In Duster, an impossibly cool wheelman (Josh Holloway) and a rookie FBI agent (Rachel Hilson) join forces to take down a crime boss (Keith David) in 1970s Phoenix. If any of the creative forces behind…| Filmmaker Magazine
