Independent Films

Filmmaker Magazine

• Practical Magic: DP Aaron McLisky on Bring Her Back May 30, 2025
  In A24’s Bring Her Back, a grieving mother (Sally Hawkins) takes a pair of orphaned siblings into her secluded home with nefarious ulterior motives.  It’s another slice of southern Australian horror steeped in trauma and grief from Talk to Me twins Mark and Danny Philippou, infused with ample gore and unsettling dental carnage. The brothers’ sophomore directorial effort […]
  Matt Mulcahey
• “There Was No Going Around Gaza”: Raoul Peck on Cannes 2025 Premiere Orwell: 2+2=5 May 29, 2025
  Raoul Peck’s new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 opens with a credit sequence featuring images of what appear to be microscopic larvae wriggling across the screen. The message seems clear: something nefarious is afoot on this globe, but still in its incipient stages. If we fail to act, it’s going to get much worse. In recent years, […]
  Inney Prakash
• “To Me All This is the Circus and I Get to Join this Family, This Tribe of People”: Bobby Naderi, Back To One, Episode 343 May 27, 2025
  You know Bobby Naderi from his subtle and sometimes hilarious work in films like Bright and The Beekeeper. Now he brings that same aliveness to the new Amazon series The Better Sister, where he plays Detective Matt Bowen. On this episode, he talks about how his nomadic youth shaped his life and work, how failures […]
  Peter Rinaldi
• “We’re On the Cusp of a Real Revolution in Independent Film”: Producer Joe Pirro on Cannes 2025 May 26, 2025
  Producers Joe Pirro and Caroline Clark attended the 2025 Cannes Film Festival as Gotham Cannes Producer Network Fellows. Pirro is with the New York company Symbolic Exchange, and Clark L.A.’s Kindred Spirit. The two recently collaborated on Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet, and here, in a part one of a two-part conversation, that share their […]
  Filmmaker Staff
• Cannes 2025: Awards, Young Mothers, Sentimental Value, Resurrection May 26, 2025
  The cinema world was quick to juxtapose an image from the climax of this year’s award ceremony—where Iranian director Jafar Panahi took home the Palme d’Or for his generously-received It Was Just an Accident—alongside one in which this year’s jury president Juliette Binoche protested Panahi’s 2010 arrest and imprisonment while she accepted her Best Actress […]
  Blake Williams
• “There’s a Reason We Call Them ‘Films’ and Not ‘SD Cards'”: Francesco Sossai on His Cannes-Premiering The Last One for the Road May 25, 2025
  The film festival world can be so depressingly homogenous that to come across a title straying beyond its aesthetic and storytelling conventions is nothing short of exhilarating. The Last One for the Road is one such film. Conversant as it may be with a long and varied set of influences—from 1960s Italian comedies all the […]
  Leonardo Goi
• Cannes 2025: Entroncamento, The Mastermind May 25, 2025
  In a piece about the documentaries at this year’s Cannes, Slate’s Sam Adams noted the existence of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk but declined to name the section it was in, referring to it only as “a low-profile sidebar devoted to independent productions.” That would be ACID, which—with the possible exception of […]
  Vadim Rizov
• “It’s Not Enough to Only Have Narrative”: Hlynur Pálmason on Cannes 2025 Premiere The Love That Remains May 23, 2025
  Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s epic 2022 film Godland mapped the crisis of faith experienced by a 19th-century Danish priest on a mission to Iceland. A majestic tapestried shot of a horse skeleton lifts viewers from the difficult physical and emotional terrain of the film’s narrative world into a realm that is more formal, ethereal, and […]
  Ritesh Mehta
• Cannes 2025: Highest 2 Lowest, Die My Love, The Love That Remains May 23, 2025
  Spike Lee’s maligned 2013 update of Park Chan-wook’s 2003 revenge picture, Oldboy, did little to inspire confidence in his latest reimagining of an Asian classic, this time relocating Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) to DUMBO in Brooklyn. Given a very Spike title of Highest 2 Lowest, the Denzel Washington vehicle is expectedly brimming with […]
  Blake Williams
• Cannes 2025: It Was Just an Accident, The Secret Agent May 23, 2025
  Sentenced by the Iranian government in 2010 on spurious grounds to six years in prison, a punishment that came with a 20-year ban on making movies, Jafar Panahi immediately set about violating the latter. Title notwithstanding, 2011’s This is Not a Film was what I’d call an “actual movie,” spry and self-reflexive like his first two features, […]
  Vadim Rizov