Independent Films

Filmmaker Magazine

• Considerations: The Best Picture Shortlist December 20, 2024
  Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here. It’s my last dispatch of the year—I’ll be back with another newsletter the first full week of January—as the Oscar campaigning unofficially pauses for the holidays. The last major awards […]
  Tyler Coates
• “I Keep My Local 600 Card So I Can Operate”: Rachel Morrison on The Fire Inside December 20, 2024
  When she competed in the 2012 Summer Olympics, Claressa Shields became the first American woman to win a gold medal in boxing. It was the culmination of a lifelong struggle to make her way as a fighter. Growing up on the edge of poverty in Flint, Michigan, Shields trained with coach Jason Crutchfield in a […]
  Daniel Eagan
• The Best Films of 2024 As Chosen by Some of Its Key Filmmakers December 20, 2024
  As the year draws to a close, the urge to compile “best of the year” lists feels both inevitable and deeply complicated. In a world grappling with profound crises—most notably the genocide in Palestine and ever-deepening fractures in democratic institutions globally—such an exercise risks seeming trivial, detached from the urgent realities shaping our collective experience. […]
  Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal
• Christmas with Art the Clown: DP George Steuber on Terrifier 3 December 19, 2024
  Movies are a uniquely collaborative art form. A painting, a novel or a song can be created in solitude, but you can’t make a commercial narrative film by yourself. That said, the original Terrifier came about as close as you can get: Writer-director Damien Leone is also credited for producing, editing, special make-up effects, visual […]
  Matt Mulcahey
• The Ten Best Undistributed Films of 2024 December 19, 2024
  This year was a peak travel year for me, mostly festival-enabled, and I was pleased by the number of good films I was privileged to see along the way that I wouldn’t have otherwise. While the globalization of film via the internet has improved access all round, it’s a mistake to think that everything good […]
  Vadim Rizov
• “Another Guy, Another Wig,” Alessandro Nivola Returns to Talk about Almodóvar, The Brutalist, and The Rhino: Back To One, Episode 322 December 18, 2024
  Alessandro Nivola returns to the podcast (Ep. 37 and Ep.170) to discuss three performances he gives in three different films out at the same time this week—Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, The Brutalist, and Kraven The Hunter. He gifts us with a detailed peek into what it took to build each of these characters. […]
  Peter Rinaldi
• Cinema is Not a Sport: My End of the Year List, 2024 December 18, 2024
  At the end of each year comes the excitement of listing my favorite released films. This is a moment where I like to reflect on the status of modern cinema. When great films populate my list, ones that make my heart pound, I become alit with hope. Great is the desire to believe in the […]
  Tyler Thomas Taormina
• Creating Composed Chaos: DP Jasper Wolf on Babygirl  December 18, 2024
  Just as its characters shift roles in their erotic game of cat and mouse, Halina Reijn’s third feature Babygirl fluently shifts between erotic thriller, existential melodrama and corporate satire. At the center is Nicole Kidman role as Romy, a successful CEO of a high-powered New York-based e-commerce company who relinquishes her sense of control when […]
  Hugo Emmerzael
• “Apple Changed the Whole Landscape of How You Market a Product”: Sebastian Pardo on Crafting Graphic Design for The Brutalist December 17, 2024
  In late October, A24 dropped a teaser for their highly anticipated The Brutalist, where glimpses of Brady Corbet’s epic flash by as credits and review pullquotes horizontally crawl across the screen like the VistaVision-format celluloid that ran through the camera to capture the picture. It’s a sharp piece of trailer design that formally evokes the […]
  Alex Lei
• “The Process of Dehumanization that Happened to the Palestinians”: Kamal Aljafari on A Fidai Film December 17, 2024
  It’s been a busy year for Kamal Aljafari.  One of the most innovative voices working in contemporary found footage cinema, the Palestinian filmmaker’s latest feature, A Fidai Film (which premiered this past spring at Visions du Reel in Nyon, Switzerland, where it won the Jury Award of the Burning Lights section) has propelled him to […]
  Flavia Dima