Independent Films

Filmmaker Magazine

• “I Hope They Boo”: Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim Take Cannes June 11, 2026
  Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Nichols and May… Tim and Eric. A double-act for the ages, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim first teamed up as students at Temple University in Philadelphia, and secured comedy-legend status with their chaotic-good surrealist sketch show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (2007–2010), produced for Adult Swim. Like public-access TV […]
  Keva York
• Hacks and The Comeback Beat the Odds June 10, 2026
  The Comeback always seems to coincide with a new existential crisis facing television. In 2005, the HBO comedy series—created by Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow, and starring the then recent Friends actress as a former sitcom star desperate to return to the spotlight—was a cutting satire about reality TV, which threatened to cheapen the medium with its […]
  Tyler Coates
• Taiwan International Doc Fest: The Island a Stage June 9, 2026
  In 1998, the Taiwan International Documentary Festival held its first edition, a decade after martial law was lifted in the island nation. It was a particularly exciting moment for documentary in Taiwan: independent video activism was on the rise, and new models of community media pointed to alternative structures for production and distribution. And yet, […]
  Cici Peng
• John Travolta on Propeller One-Way Night Coach June 9, 2026
  When I was asked for my favorite discoveries at Cannes this year, “the Travolta” was high on the list. Propeller One-Way Night Coach (2026), John Travolta’s feature directorial debut, premiered on the frantic first Friday night, when no one knew exactly what to expect. Before the screening, and following a highlights reel of the star’s career, Thierry […]
  Nicolas Rapold
• If Youth Knew: Chie Hayakawa on Renoir June 4, 2026
  Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir (2026) focuses on Fuki (Yui Suzuki), a preteenage girl whose perspective on life is darkened and complicated over the course of her father’s terminal illness. The film is set in 1987, a year or so into Japan’s “bubble period,” when financial and real-estate speculation radically reshaped the country’s economy a generation after its “miraculous” […]
  Steve Macfarlane
• The Spinoff Comes of Age June 3, 2026
  Showrunner Bruce Miller admits that when he first read The Handmaid’s Tale, he thought the ending of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel was a little unsatisfying: “I was like, ‘Well, I hope there’s a sequel!’” Two decades later, Miller was at the helm of the Hulu series based on Atwood’s book. The show was an immediate hit—it […]
  Tyler Coates
• The Day YouTube Wept: Marcus Batto’s Found-Footage Memorial to Michael Jackson June 2, 2026
  A day in the life of the internet is impossible to reconstruct as a feature film. The pace of the scroll is too quick; any given snapshot is too algorithmically myopic to be comprehensive. There’s too much that evades notice, and still more that evades preservation. With the slow obsolescence of search engines—lost first to […]
  Dylan Adamson
• Point of No Return: Digital Nostalgia in Backrooms June 2, 2026
  Like the internet lore for which it is named, Backrooms (2026) encapsulates a paradox of embodiment and time. Kane Parsons’s feature film—an adaptation of his cult YouTube series of the same title—has its origins in a photograph of a former furniture store undergoing renovations in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, taken in 2003 and uploaded to 4chan in 2019. This […]
  Payton McCarty-Simas
• Bleak Week, C’est Chic May 29, 2026
  The inaugural season of the American Cinematheque series Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair took place in 2022, a cheeky stab at some summertime counter-programming. Its diverse lineup was aimed, as per the Cinematheque’s website, at spotlighting “filmmakers who wholly embrace a cinema of despair in pursuit of unpleasant truths and raw empathy.” Indeed, in the […]
  Chris Cassingham
• Widow’s Bay and the Genre Jump Scare May 29, 2026
  In recent years, a trend has emerged in horror: auteurs have moved into the genre after first establishing themselves in sketch comedy. In 2018, Jordan Peele of Key & Peele won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Get Out, his feature directorial debut (which he would follow up with 2019’s Us and 2022’s Nope). This year, Amy Madigan won Best Supporting […]
  Tyler Coates