My annual exercise in what our audience — as well as our “audiences,” the latter term used to refer to the concoction of first and possibly last-time readers driven to our site by algorithmic determinism and SEO “best practices” — is always a mixture of the predictable and the unexpected. Regular features like our 25 New Faces series and Vadim Rizov’s survey of 35mm production always show up, as do articles by our excellent columnist Matt Mulcahey and podcaster Peter Rinaldi. I was particularly happy to see this year on the list two pieces that were especially deeply researched and […]

Each Friday I write an original Editors Letter as part of the free Filmmaker newsletter. Always original and not usually archived on the site, the letters consist of essays, thoughts, recommendations and sometimes even early versions of pieces that appear later here. This week I wrote about the Apple Vision Pro and am reposting that piece in updated form here. To subscribe for free to the Filmmaker newsletter, click here. If you watched any of Apple’s WWDC keynote on Monday, or saw any of its videos, and thought that its new AR headset, the Apple Vision Pro, looked like science […]

Filmmaker‘s issue #122 is arriving in mailboxes and at newsstands now, and in conjunction we’ve launched a Spring Subscription sale until Sunday. For the first time, we’re discounting our print and digital subscriptions by 50%. A one-year digital subscription — which includes our archives back to 2007 — is just $5. In the US, a print subscription is just $9. Both subscriptions include access to all paywalled content as well as Filmmaker on Exact Editions, which offers fantastic browser and tablet reading. (Check out a sample issue here.) Your subscriptions help underwrite all of our editorial content, including on the […]

At Filmmaker, we are seeking freelance writers to cover new media — AR, VR, XR, the metaverse, AI-generated work, etc. — as well as audio (podcasts, etc). Opportunities exist for regular print columns as well as web columns and one-off web pieces. Ideal writers will have published writing samples and deep knowledge of these topics and be able to cover them from a Filmmaker style, which is to mix critical appraisals with insights into the production, technical and financing issues that affect both individual works and the respective fields. If you feel you qualify and would like to pitch or […]

Winners of the Best Screenplay and Best Picture awards at last night’s Oscars for their Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Daniels — Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — have appeared in our pages many times over the years, with the various articles and interviews offering a historical timeline of the iconoclastic creators’ move from music video stars to celebrated feature directors. The two showed up first in 2015, in our 25 New Faces list, while they were in production on their first feature, Swiss Army Man. But we had already been knocked out by their music videos for the […]

Jonathan Caouette, the director whose breakthrough experimental personal doc Tarnation (2004) has proved both tremendously influential but never really matched in terms of formal inventiveness and emotional intensity, is facing significant health challenges, and friends and supporters have launched a GoFundMe to help. Marie Therese Guirgis, Stephen Winter, Brian Kates, John Cameron Mitchell, and Gus Van Sant are behind the fundraiser, which is currently just over midway to its $60,000 goal. Treatment is occurring abroad, and funds raised will go towards “crucial surgeries and medical care, his outstanding medical bills, and his living expenses while he undergoes this long and delicate process […]

As 2022 comes to a close, Filmmaker returns with our annual recap of the year’s most read posts. As I click through Google Analytics, this piece always becomes something of a revelation, a mixture of the predictable (our 25 New Faces list); the news-triggered (an old profile resurfacing on the director’s recent success, for example, or, more sadly, their passing); evergreen articles on filmmaking itself; and pieces for which strong content, aided by SEO and provocative headlines, meshed to attract an abnormally large slew of first-time readers. As in the past, the list is divided into two: the 10 most […]

Filmmaker is proud to announce that we have moved our quarterly digital edition and archive going back to 2005 to Exact Editions, a London-based  company that specializes in digitizing content, selling subscriptions and providing streaming solutions across web, iOS and Android platforms. Our digital edition, which replicates our print edition, is now available to read via Exact Editions across browsers and mobile devices, the latter through a browser or the company’s Exactly app, found in the App and Google Play stores. As a long-time reader of other publications using Exact Editions, I’ve admired the company’s elegant, easy-to-use platform. Issues download quickly, can […]

Film writer and festival curator Travis Crawford, who worked extensively with various home video labels in the restoration of classic foreign-language, independent and genre work, died this week, I was saddened to learn via social media. He was 52. Crawford, who for many years curated the Philadelphia Film Festival’s Danger after Dark series, wrote extensively for Filmmaker over the years, predominantly in the late aughts and early ’10s, when he headed up the print magazine’s “Load and Play” columns. His pieces on Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and the seven-disk Criterion box-set, American Lost and Found: […]

Filmmaker‘s once-a-year subscription sale launches today, with 40% discounts on our print and digital subscriptions. Filmmaker will be raising its cover price next issue, so this will be the last chance to lock in our old (and very reasonable!) pricing. All subscribers during this sale will receive Filmmaker‘s upcoming Spring issue and will be eligible for a selection of bonus gifts — Blu-rays, box sets and swag from a number of top distributors. In addition, all new and returning subscribers will receive a free three-month subscription to Metrograph, which includes discounts to its New York theater as well as access […]

Each Friday I write an original Filmmaker newsletter, which is free to all. Always original and not archived on the site, they consist of various musings, thoughts, link recommendations and sometimes even early versions of pieces that appear later here. And while yesterday’s “Top Ten New Posts of 2021” was determined using Google Analytics, I’ve chosen today’s “Top Newsletter of 2021” purely empirically. Forget Mailchimp open rates, this newsletter about George Saunders’s book on writing and Russian literature, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life, is […]

If you’re not a daily visitor to Filmmaker, reading this piece, our annual “top ten,” will be a process of discovery as you can scan through the articles that received our highest traffic in 2021. But, increasingly, compiling this article is a discovery process for us as many of its entries are simply not ones we would have guessed. There are articles that kick up conversation across Twitter, or that I receive emails and calls about, and then there are quiet traffic-getters that only surface when the Google Analytics button is hit. The top post here is no surprise, as […]

Each week I write a free Filmmaker newsletter that’s normally not published on this site. Letters range from links and recommendations to longer-form pieces and article first passes. Here’s a newsletter that was sent out June 18 that received a lot of response. With Caveh Zahedi finishing his Kickstarter campaign with a 24-hour telethon, and Jaime Grijalba’s Ruiz Diaries continuing, I thought I’d post it here. You can subscribe to the Filmmaker newsletter at the link. — SM I’ve recently been spending time each day with Raúl Ruiz and Caveh Zahedi. Not literally, of course — Raúl died in 2011, […]

To rhyme with the year, I’ve expanded this year’s roundup of our most popular posts, as determined by Google Analytics, from 10 to 20. It’s full of both expected entries — our 25 New Faces scores highly every year — as well as a few surprises. It also shows the dominance of TV and streaming, or perhaps the ’20 decline in theatrical exhibition. So many of the articles on this list — which aren’t “a best of the year,” although many are indeed that — are the ones that intersected best with search analytics, caught viral waves, or rode along […]

I’m very happy to announce that Filmmaker will return to print for our Fall issue, which will reach subscribers — new and continued — in late October. Filmmaker‘s Winter, 2020 issue will be published in January to coincide with IFP’s Gotham Awards. Facing the uncertainty of the coronavirus shutdowns in the Spring, and with bookstores closing throughout the country, Filmmaker published its Summer issue in a special, redesigned PDF format. But now we’re thrilled that, with the support of our publisher, IFP, and our advertisers, we’ll be back with a printed edition next month. The Fall, 2020 issue Filmmaker will also be […]

As previously announced, Filmmaker‘s Summer 2020 issue is being published as a PDF, and it’s now online and available for single-issue purchase. It’s our largest page-count ever (244 pages!), and our designers, Caspar Newbolt and Charlotte Gosch, tweaked the whole design to make it a beautiful and comfortable experience on both a tablet and a laptop in either portrait or landscape view. For the first time, we’ve also enabled the issue to be purchased individually as a PDF for $5.95, and you can do that by clicking here or on the button below using PayPal or your credit card. On […]