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July 13, 2015
Singapore’s most truthful chronicler, Tan Pin Pin, is censored in her home country with the documentary To Singapore, with Love.
July 7, 2015
If the phrase “independent film” has in recent years felt problematic to you, with one-time rebels “going studio” and A-listers populating your neighborhood film festival, Sean Baker’s Tangerine is cause for celebration.
June 23, 2015
“Like magic.” That’s how Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy describes the intricate, lightning-quick articulations of sign language. It’s also a fitting description of his stunning first feature, The Tribe.
May 13, 2015
The key to the 25-year success of Writers Boot Camp? “Having the integrity to give people what they need instead of what they want.”
April 1, 2015
20 Years of Madness is a film propelled by all manner of irrational forces: heady emotions, gloriously untethered creativity, and the ironic hand of fate.
March 24, 2015
Brilliantly acted by Rinko Kikuchi, hauntingly scored by The Octopus Project, and shot by cinematographer Sean Porter (whose breakthrough work we praised after Sundance 2014), Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is an original and strangely affecting cinematic pilgrimage, with a sweeping emotional register bound to resonate with anyone who has been pulled by the undertow of a work of art.
February 17, 2015
Giuseppe Andrews—and the gobsmackingly untraditional making of Garbanzo Gas—is the subject of Adam Rifkin’s Giuseppe Makes a Movie. It’s a documentary, but it might as well be a fairy tale, for both the movie’s gotta-see-them-to-believe-them cast of characters, and the miraculous way they come together to produce a truly original piece of cinema.
January 7, 2015
Does second album syndrome apply to moviemaking, too? Absolutely. It’s one thing to cobble together favors and enthusiasm for your first feature, but it takes a moviemaker with unusual perseverance, energy, and commitment to follow up a splashy start with a strong second film. For that reason, we’ve always had a soft spot for sophomore directing efforts at MovieMaker. In fact, it’s a long-standing tradition of ours to recognize second-time directors: For years, we gave out The MovieMaker Breakthrough Award, a.k.a. “Best Second Feature,” at film festivals. (Winners took home a package of goods and services worth up to $50,000!) And while we’ve temporarily retired that award, we still want to applaud five tenacious moviemakers who overcame the sophomore slump… by ranking them in this Top Five list.
January 2, 2015
A Most Violent Year, director J.C. Chandor’s third feature after Margin Call (2011) and All is Lost (2013), packs an unsentimental punch: It unfolds over three wintry months in New York City of 1981, when the city’s crime statistics were at an all-time high.
October 30, 2014
Mo Anouti, the 39-year-old champion bodybuilder-turned-actor/producer/writer moved to Los Angeles in 2004 to forge his path in the business. 10 years later, the Lebanese-Russian former athlete has a feature, Hero of the Day, opening on VOD today (October 30, 2014), which he conceived, produced, and starred in.
September 19, 2014
Actress-turned-director Jen McGowan premiered her feature debut, Kelly & Cal, at South by Southwest this March. The film, about the unusual friendship between a struggling new mom and her wheelchair-bound young neighbor, stars the ever-luminous Juliette Lewis and a dynamic, confident Jonny Weston (Chasing Mavericks). It won this year’s Gamechanger Award at SXSW (previously known as the Chicken & Egg Pictures Emergent Narrative Woman Director Award), in part for being a heavily female-driven project, written by Amy Lowe Starbin and produced by Adi Ezroni and Mandy Tagger Brockey.
September 16, 2014
“I said I want to eat something alive.” So begins probably the most visceral, hypnotic, and, well, just plain bananas scene in the history of onscreen consumption. As famous as the octopus scene in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy is, hype cannot prepare a viewer for when the recently freed Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) walks into a sushi restaurant, orders a live octopus, grabs the animal with bare hands, rips off its head with his teeth, and downs the struggling creature in one horrific go.
September 9, 2014
September 9, 2014 – MovieMaker Magazine’s 110th issue, the Complete Guide to Making Movies 2015, hits newsstands around the U.S. and Canada today.
September 2, 2014
Every year, MovieMaker publishes an “Indie-Friendly Business List” in our Fall issue. Last year, we opened up the floor for readers to nominate these companies for our consideration, and many of those suggestions made it into our final 25 (see last year’s full list here). So this year we’re calling upon you guys once more.
August 28, 2014
VOD platform YEKRA announced today the launch of the customizable digital YEKRA theater, which, in keeping with the model of the previous single-film YEKRA player, can be embedded into any “affiliate” website for a direct-to-viewer VOD experience.
August 22, 2014
When Ira Sachs’ new feature, Love is Strange, begins, the title feels somewhat ironic. In many ways, there could be nothing as conventional as the love between protagonists Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina).
August 20, 2014
Festival hits The One I Love and Creep, FX’s The League, box-office hit Tammy, a new HBO show, Togetherness—that’s just some of the work Mark Duplass is serving up this year. From the moment Duplass appeared on the scene alongside his brother, Jay, in 2005’s The Puffy Chair, to his turn in Zero Dark Thirty, the actor-director-writer-producer has juggled genres and budget levels with startling ease. Duplass’ ubiquity is made more remarkable by his creative integrity and commitment to cultivating a community of younger artists. As a fairy-godfather, Robin Hood-type hero working the system for personal and public good, the indie icon explains how he built the castle in his “corner of the sandbox.”
July 22, 2014
It’s impossible not to include Adrienne Shelley’s Waitress in Feast for the Eyes, a discussion of cinematic food. The problem is that it’s too good.
July 9, 2014
Besides linguistic ability (or lack thereof), food is the primary means for social manipulation in Inglourious Basterds—and the grandmaster of the film’s particular brand of gastronomic chess is Christoph Waltz’s sublimely despicable Colonel Hans Landa. It’s hard not to love a villain who’s a foodie, and who, more importantly, uses food as his chief means of asserting power.
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April 25, 2014
The Final Member, a feature documentary by Canadian directors Jonah Bekhor and Zach Math, is the story of Sigurður ”Siggi” Hjartarson, curator of the Icelandic Phallological Museum, and his quest to complete his penis collection with a human specimen. Yup, we said “his penis collection.”
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April 3, 2014
With NAB 2014 kicking off this weekend, we asked one of the trade show’s visiting luminaries to give us a preview of his presentation. Barry Sandrew, PhD is the founder, Chief Creative Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Legend3D, the 3D conversion company behind films like Life of Pi and Hugo. While the technology is well-suited to studio tentpoles, though, what relevance does it have to independents? We asked Sandrew to predict how the twain shall meet in the future.
March 27, 2014
Director Tom Berninger had no initial conception of where his documentary on the National, Mistaken for Strangers, was going to go, beyond being a simple rock-doc, albeit one where the band isn’t a drama-driven, rock ‘n’ roll, radio-friendly hit-machine, but careful crafters of gloriously mournful, doom-laced ballads. Also, one where the filmmaker’s older brother is the lead singer.
March 25, 2014
Little Feet, the latest project from writer-director Alexandre Rockwell, is our Crowdfunder Pick of the Week, and it’s kicked off its Kickstarter campaign with suitably high spirits.
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March 25, 2014
Daniel Patrick Carbone, writer-director of Hide Your Smiling Faces, explains how he brought his moody drama to life, through the eyes of two brothers in rural America.