The Middleburg Film Festival announced additional programming today for its 11th anniversary edition including THE ZONE OF INTEREST as the Friday Centerpiece, AMERICAN FICTION as the Saturday Spotlight film and MAESTRO as the Closing Film. MFF also announced additional honorees and special guests attending the festival for various awards, conversations and special presentations including actor Christian Friedel (The Zone of...

I've always admired Atlanta's Out on Film from afar. I have never been lucky enough to attend the festival, but I was thrilled to have an opportunity to watch some of the short films on this year's slate. An Oscar-qualifying film festival, Out on Film will catapult the winner of its short film award into consideration for the 96th annual...

Garth Davis’ Foe, a sci-fi chamber drama based on the eponymous novel by Iain Reid, with whom Davis co-wrote the script, starts off well enough. Set in the midst of or toward the end of our current prolonged apocalypse, Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal star as married farmers on seemingly barren land in the year 2065, past the time where...

The dirty little secret about the Oscar game is that there is no such thing as a "frontrunner." Oh, we pretend there is. We imagine it. We predict it. We manifest it. But it actually doesn't exist. It's never been quite as bad as it right now, mainly because there used to actually be an economy attached to the Oscars....

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ surreal, hyper-sexual follow-up to The Favourite, may start with a death, but it’s soon after filled with life from every department of the crew. Based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray, the film boasts unabashed creativity in every corner. The lush production design transports us to a fantastical version of turn-of-the-century...

When depicting a sensitive, personal, and ongoing true story, what responsibility does an artist have to a victim? When is capturing that story for hungry audiences not worth re-inflicting the pain onto those who experience the situation firsthand? With May December, veteran auteur Todd Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch, making her feature-length debut, set out to explore the purpose and...

Today, Montclair Film announced the full slate for the 2023 Montclair Film Festival, taking place October 20-29, in Montclair, NJ. Each year, the Montclair Film Festival presents juried awards to films in four categories; Documentary, Fiction, Future/ Now, which seeks to support emerging voices in independent filmmaking with The Mark Urman Award, a $5,000 cash prize to help support &...

We've come to my final TIFF recap of 2023, where I cover documentaries and the last of the 42 titles I saw while in Toronto. The concurrent SAG and WGA strikes meant that I don't have many fun star sightings to tell you about, although I was seated behind Guy Pearse during Lee and overheard him tell a friend how...

Yes, yes, I know; I can't believe I'm still talking about TIFF. I absolutely planned on publishing this piece a few days ago, but then a travel disaster struck, and I got stuck in Dallas overnight on my home and have now come down with a flu that feels like I've been thrown off a mountain. So even though this...

The last big festival of the year is the AFI Film Fest. It is well positioned to push some films into the race that might have been left behind. The big get is Freud's Last Session, Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode deliver crafty performances as Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, as the World Premiere. No trailer for the film yet,...

The Wind Rises would have made a fine send-off for Hayao Miyazaki. The tender 2013 biopic of fighter plane engineer Jiro Horikoshi took a more adult approach than history’s greatest animator had before while still touching classic Studio Ghibli themes like our moral responsibility to the world/nature and an aversion to war. If ranking Miyazaki’s filmography, it lands comfortably in...

At three hours, writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi was able to turn Drive My Car’s deliberate pacing into an asset, transforming its complex, humanistic, lo-fi exploration of grief and forgiveness into a quiet epic. Why then is his follow up, Evil Does Not Exist, occasionally such a bore, gorgeous as it may be, when it clocks in at little more than half...