Filmmaker is pleased to premiere the trailer for Film at Lincoln Center’s “The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” series, a complete retrospective of the Thai filmmaker’s career so far. The series will run from May 4-14 in New York City and feature seven feature films, four short film programs and Weerasethakul in attendance for select screenings. The filmmaker also programmed several films to screen alongside his own, including Chantal Ackerman’s La Captive, Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster, Guy Maddin’s Careful, Abbas Kiarostami’s Homework and Frederick Wiseman’s Primate (presented in 16mm), among others. Several of the filmmaker’s […]

The unbreakable bond of sisterhood threatens to be thwarted by a eugenic evil conspiracy in Polite Society, writer-director Nida Manzoor’s feature debut. The British filmmaker, who was raised in a Pakistani Muslim household, has encased vital aspects of her own life in each project she’s embarked on so far. Her Peacock/Channel 4 show We Are Lady Parts, which follows a punk band comprised entirely of Muslim women, incorporates her natural musical prowess through writing the show’s music with her siblings Shez and Sanya. Now with Polite Society, Manzoor reflects on another immutable aspect of her life: the chaos and camaraderie […]

The last official day of Overlook arrived, and I was pleased to spend it watching a double feature of Joe Dante’s Matinee (a special 30th anniversary screening) and William Castle’s 1959 film The Tingler. The double header was programmed by Dante himself, and after the screening I was scheduled to conduct a 20-minute interview with the director.  I’d seen Matinee before, and upon re-watch was struck again by how lush and detailed each aspect of the film’s production is. The set decoration only creeps up on ‘60s-era pastiche, managing to evoke nostalgic memory more than hokey over-stylization. Even the wardrobe […]

Prismatic Ground, the annual New York-based film festival for experimental and avant-garde works, has unveiled the lineup for its 2023 edition, which will take place from May 3-7. Co-presented by Screen Slate, the festival will be hosted across several NYC theaters: Museum of the Moving Image, Maysles Documentary Center, BAM Cinematheque, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, Light Industry, and Anthology Film Archives. Featuring approximately 60 films, Prismatic Ground will showcase recent works from renowned artists, such as Tsai Ming-Liang and Kimi Takesue, alongside new restorations of essential filmmakers like Raphael Montañez Ortiz and Bill Brand. Retrospective screenings will also honor late filmmakers […]

The air became almost oppressively heavy with humidity on my second proper morning of Overlook. Walking to a relatively cheap brunch outpost called Toast, my boyfriend and I became drenched in sweat from the weight of cotton pants and button-up shirts after a 10-minute walk in 9 AM sunlight. The news of a 20-minute wait for a table didn’t bother us: it meant we had exactly enough time to head back to the hotel and change into full-blown summer garments before being seated. The sudden immersion into a solstice-temperate climate didn’t trouble me (or my skin, which cleared considerably from […]

One of John Waters’s favorite movies of 2022, Sick of Myself possesses a distinctly American outlook despite being the creation of Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli. Indeed, the ego-driven, crime-ladden pursuit for fame and recognition are as present in Sick of Myself as they are in many of American trash ambassador Waters’s films. “No, it’s not Female Trouble,” wrote Waters in his Artforum blurb of the film, “but it’s just as nuts,” and the film’s overtly American satirical edge has everything to do with his decision to relocate to Los Angeles several years ago. Sick of Myself follows Signe (Kristine Thorp), a […]

After a four-hour flight delay (owed to a malfunctioning back-up system accessory, subsequent plane evacuation and a lengthy re-fueling process), I arrived in New Orleans exhausted but still, miraculously, eager to spend much more time sitting in a shifting rotation of seats. Even if I wanted to, I wasn’t entitled to complain much. I’d been invited to cover the annual genre-themed Overlook Film Festival, now in its seventh year, and was genuinely thrilled by the opportunity. As a relatively green (not to mention newly full-time) magazine staffer, longtime horror obsessive and someone who’d yet to visit New Orleans, Overlook presented […]

Today, BAVC Media (formerly Bay Area Video Coalition) announces their 2023 MediaMaker Fellowship cohort, comprised of emerging and mid-career artists embarking on social documentary projects. All seven participants will receive $10,000 in unrestricted funding as well as mentorship, feedback sessions and workshops during a nine-month period. The fellows are Paige Bethmann (Remaining Native), Aurora Brachman (Dear You), ilana coleman (The Inventory, also a 25 New Faces of Film from 2017 and co-writer of fellow 25 New Face Juan Pablo González‘s 2021 film Dos Estaciones), Tommy Franklin (You Don’t Know My Name), Cyrus Moussavi (Somebody’s Gone), Hannah Myers (Daddy) and tashi […]

All of Joe Dante‘s films revolve around distinctly American paranoias—consumerism, threats to the nuclear family, suburban NIMBY sensibilities—but none feel more entrenched in a tangible era of American anxiety than Matinee. Now 30 years old, the film takes place during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, centering B-movie shlock jockey Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman, riffing big time on William Castle), who lands in a panicked Key West, Florida for a promotional screening of his radioactive new horror film Mant (half-man, half-ant, all monster!) Both enraptured and horrified by the real-world implications Woolsey’s film hints at (nuclear disfigurement, neighborhoods-turned-warzones, the […]

Winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes last year, writer-director Saim Sadiq’s feature debut Joyland depicts a blooming love between closeted married man Haider (Ali Junejo) and Biba (Alina Khan), a trans erotic performer who employs Haider as one of her (heretofore untrained) back-up dancers. The film chronicles the ever-shifting dynamics between Biba, Haider, his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) and their intensely patriarchal immediate family. A ban on the film in Sadiq’s native Pakistan occurred due to Joyland‘s queer explorations. In a public statement, a right-wing government pundit stated that the film was “against Pakistani values,” adding that “glamorizing transgenders […]