Tendaberry, the feature debut from writer-director Haley Elizabeth Anderson, follows 23-year-old protagonist Dakota (first-time actor Kota Johan) throughout an entire calendar year as she experiences day-to-day life in New York City. Specifically, Dakota and her boyfriend Yuri (model Yuri Pleskun, who previously appeared in the Safdie Brothers’s Heaven Knows What) reside in the South Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, which is alight with sunbathers and Coney Island-bound tourists in the summertime, but otherwise very quiet—save for the constant hum of ocean wave and gulls—during the off-season. A permanent air of loneliness engulfs Dakota when Yuri travels back to Ukraine to […]

India Donaldson has been ready to make her narrative feature debut for a while now, with three short films under her belt already. But it was only after the pandemic hit and she moved in with her family for a few months that she found her story around family dynamics in isolation. So she poured that inspiration into Good One, a terrific slow-burn at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (US Dramatic Competition) that follows the 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) on a Catskills camping trip with her dad Chris (James Le Gros) and his longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). As the […]

A heady, elegantly-constructed ghost story, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has a bunch of half-buried threads, a couple of perfectly-timed scares, and a horrific close-up of an act of violence that mesmerizes the camera—just as horror films mesmerize their audience. The camera is the star here, and not merely because its sustained, floating movements, its sudden turns and retreats, its anxious hovering display the virtuosity of the operator who is also the film’s director, but because it is the titular character, the unseen presence whose half-life is disturbed and then engaged by a family of four that moves into a suburban house […]

On a dreary Valentine’s Day in New Jersey during the early aughts, intersex laundromat employee and sex worker Ponyboi (River Gallo) finds themselves embroiled in a bungled drug deal. Estranged from his family and afraid of coming clean to his best friend (Victoria Pedretti) and her husband (Dylan O’Brien)—also Ponyboi’s boss and clandestine sexual partner—he decides to go on the run and permanently escape the Garden State. Along the way, he crosses paths with a rugged kindly stranger who’s shrouded in mystery and en route to Las Vegas. Just when he’s ready to hitch a ride to the desert, however, […]

Premiering in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Stress Positions—the feature debut from writer, director and star Theda Hammel—takes place during the not-so-distant summer of 2020. While this setting immediately evokes recollections of quarantine, protest movements and rapidly-changing health and safety standards, Hammel isn’t striving to present a time capsule. Instead, the filmmaker opts for a satirical take on how the pandemic shaped generational notions of social justice, artistry and personal identity, particularly among New York’s well-to-do queer fringe. Hammel plays Karla, a trans woman whose relationship with Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), her cis lesbian girlfriend, has […]

The Settlers simulates several different types of Westerns without committing to one mode. The set-up of Felipe Gálvez’s first feature is classic: Scottish soldier MacLennan (Mark Stanley), American mercenary Bill (Benjamin Westfall) and their Chilean mestizo guide Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), who’s been pressed into service from a chain gang, are sent on a mission by landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro). Making their way on horseback across the Chilean landscape, the three are captured in long zooms and accompanied by the booming tympani of Harry Allouche’s orchestral score. If that music places The Settlers somewhere in the realm of ’50s westerns, […]

Near the end of Matewan (1987), socialist union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper), a guiding light and galvanizing force for a West Virginia town of striking coal miners under siege, attempts to console frustrated young Danny Radnor (Will Oldham), a nascent preacher and union man. Overwhelmed by the violence and hardships they’ve suffered, the boy gives into despair, declaring in rage and desperation that it’s every man for himself. Joe’s stirring reply is that they must all look after each other, no matter what. Though followed by a long-brewing scene of climatic violence, this quiet but deeply moving moment between […]

Originally published during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, our interview with Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton about their recommended feature, The Sweet East, is being reposted today as the film is in theatrical release from Utopia. America’s fraught political present meets the less savory corners of cinema’s past in The Sweet East, the first feature directed by celebrated cinematographer Sean Price Williams. Penned with typically acerbic wit by film critic Nick Pinkerton, The Sweet East stars Talia Ryder in a should-be-star-making performance as Lilian, a high school senior who impulsively runs off while on a class trip to Washington, […]

“I wanted to make something about a desire so intense that it destroys everything around it,” says Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell of Saltburn, her opulent sophomore psychodrama about class, obsession and longing set in an English countryside estate. “That locust cannibal obsession that I think we’ve all felt about someone that makes you completely lose your fucking mind.” In Saltburn, it’s Barry Keoghan’s humble and unknowable Oxford novice Oliver Quick who feels that fixation. His object of desire and fascination is Jacob Elordi’s dreamboat Felix Catton, an upper-class cool guy who welcomes Oliver into his inner circle, and later, to […]

Immersive and poetically expressive, Raven Jackson’s confident debut feature All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt chronicles the life of Mack, a Black Mississippi woman portrayed at different ages by four different performers, with a lived-in attentiveness and affection. Throughout Jackson’s non-linear ecosystem of portraits, quiet sequences, dewy visuals and sensual soundscapes, the filmmaker breaks the conventions of storytelling so naturally that you instantly recognize the confidence of someone well-versed enough in her art and craft to make her own set of rules.  The seeds of Jackson’s approach and exactness of imagination were already planted in her short film, Nettles (2018), […]

Good Condition is an eight-minute meditation on loneliness, technology and new beginnings. It marks the second collaboration between filmmakers Frank Mosley and Hugo De Sousa after their 2022 comedy short film, The Event, in which a filmmaker wakes up his roommate in the middle of the night to ask why he hasn’t watched his short film. This time, they embark on an eerie trip to the suburbs, following a melancholy man named Barry (Hugo De Sousa) trying to complete a transaction with a ghostly figure who keeps evading him. Good Condition premiered at Aspen ShortFest and Fantasia earlier this year, and […]

Reviewing a boxset of writer-director Larry Fessenden’s work in 2015 for Filmmaker, I began by noting that “Fessenden can frequently be found on the outskirts of the New York filmmaking community, using his production company Glass Eye Pix as an outlet of support for fellow filmmakers.” While my summation of the celebrated horror auteur’s altruism remains accurate (the company turns 40 in 2026), Fessenden’s own films have grown tougher to get off the ground. A new film by him is therefore a major event, albeit one that happens quietly.  Having made its world premiere at the 27th Fantasia International Film […]

“Unfortunately, because aging is so common and natural, we tend to think of it as destiny or something we should accept,” says biologist and researcher David Sinclair. And while the scientist’s work on aging and epigenetics is tied to discoveries in biology from the mid-20th century onwards, within the arts the theme of immortality goes back centuries. Filmmaker Eddie Alcazar, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2011, is the latest to tackle man’s search for eternal life, doing so at a time when interest in longevity and even avoidance of death is contemplated by tech community thinkers […]

Todd Solondz’s indelible Happiness was released 25 years ago today. Filmmaker is reposting here its interview with Solondz, the cover story of our Fall 1998 issue. — Editor Winner of the Critic’s Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Todd Solondz’s startling new Happiness is not only one of the most challenging and invigorating independent films of the year, it’s also, by virtue of the strange politics of its release, a talking point for prognosticators everywhere concerned with the co-option of indie-film attitude by corporate-controlled majors and mini-majors. Ambitiously weaving five separate tales of modern alienation, romantic woe, and shocking […]

In the late 1980s, Gregg Araki began making movies. He made films on a shoestring budget with a do-it-yourself mindset–not due to any kind of loyalty to the auteur theory, but the constraints of what he had at his disposal. In 1992, he made The Living End, a tale of two HIV-positive gay men, a loner and a film critic, who set off on a bloody, ferocious adventure. The film was dedicated to “the hundreds of thousands who’ve died and the hundreds of thousands more who will die because of a big white house full of republican fuckheads.” From there, […]

Onur Tukel is a boldly independent writer-director-actor who, for more than a decade, has been making cutting edge comedies in New York City that sometimes land in the horror category, sometimes social satire, are often absurd, mostly hilarious and always thoughtful—Catfight, Applesauce, Summer of Blood, The Misogynists, Scenes From An Empty Church, to name just a few. His latest, Poundcake, about a serial killer who only targets straight white men, is maybe his boldest yet, which says a lot. In this hour, he talks about his reluctant approach toward acting in his own films, the ways he has navigated low […]

The following interview was originally published during our Sundance 2023 coverage and is being republished today ahead of birth/rebirth hitting theaters via IFC Films and Shudder this weekend. — Editor The narrative kernel of birth/rebirth, Laura Moss’s debut feature, was originally planted in the writer-director’s mind 20 years ago. The filmmaker (and former EMT) was creatively stirred after reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and feeling that its interest in unnatural procreation could translate well to an all-female retelling. As the decades passed, Moss began negotiating integral facets of their identity—namely coming out as non-binary and becoming increasingly convinced they would never have […]

A breakout at Sundance, Berlinale and New Directors/New Films this year, Chilean-Serbian writer-director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s debut feature Mutt is as scrappy and charming as its canine title. Following a frenzied 24 hours in the life of New York trans man Feña (Lío Mehiel, the first trans actor to win the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Acting at Sundance), Mutt explores the constant micro-aggressions that trans people face daily—even in a supposedly hyper-tolerant locale, especially from loved ones—and the connections and community that make these encounters sting a little bit less. Even when Feña faces his capricious ex-boyfriend, moody tween […]

“Have you ever seen Romanian TikToks?” It’s a torrid afternoon in Locarno and Radu Jude and I are sitting in a container repurposed as an interview booth, a couple of days after the premiere of his latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Social media play a prominent role in the film, an electrifying snapshot of life in the 21st century designed to both immortalize our back-to-front digital zeitgeist and dissect its textures. A collage straddling black comedy and road movie, Do Not Expect centers on Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked production assistant whose company […]

Gaining access to an underrepresented community comes with a great amount of responsibility. There are countless examples of a director visiting a site for a few days, getting what they need, then hightailing it out only to use their subsequent press tour to emphasize the “raw grittiness” they observed while filming on location. It’s crucial to question who benefits from this exchange. Does the filmmaker gain authenticity for their work merely by virtue of who they put in front of the camera? Does the portrayed community benefit from being used to confirm an outsider’s predetermined perception? Gina Gammell and Riley […]