Filmmaker

Read our Spring 2026 issue as it rolls out over the next few weeks, featuring David Lowery and Chloé Zhao on Mother Mary, Radu Jude on Kontinental '25, and more to come...

Winter 2026

The Music Guides the Way: Oliver Laxe and Gaspar Noé Discuss “Sirāt”

When Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt premiered at Cannes this year, it caught both those familiar with his work as well as new viewers off guard; that the film takes an unexpected turn in its second half is only part of its disorienting effect. Where his first three, score-free features defaulted to the quiet and contemplative, Sirāt is nearly an action movie and accordingly nerve-wracking, increasingly suspenseful and—thanks in large part to Kangding Ray’s excellent electronic score—sometimes so deafeningly loud that it’s been known to literally make projection booths shake. With a larger budget and longer schedule than Laxe has had before, […]

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Features

On “Filmmaker”‘s First Decade: A Dialogue Between Scott Macaulay, Karol Martesko-Fenster and Holly Willis

Curious as to what it would say, I recently asked ChatGPT for a history of Filmmaker. It returned a biography that incorrectly listed one of our longest-running occasional contributors as a founder, which made me realize how very little of Filmmaker’s origin story is online, available to be scraped by LLMs. To put some of that history officially on the record, and to salute my original co-founding partners, I sat down via Zoom with founding publisher Karol Martesko-Fenster and founding west coast editor Holly Willis to discuss our earliest days, before the internet succeeded in fully disrupting the arts publishing […]

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  • An Improved Revision: Gregg Araki and the Restoration Team Behind “Mysterious Skin”

    Toward the end of my interview with Gregg Araki, I remind him of his scene from Michael Almereyda and Amy Hobby’s 1995 documentary At Sundance. Sitting on a couch next to Todd Haynes, Araki is at that year’s festival with The Doom Generation. “The first draft of Doom was done when The Living End premiered at Sundance in 1992” he says. “The hard part is always the money and the financing, and it gets worse, and worse and worse [….] I hate the fact that you write, you make a movie, it’s fresh and what you want to say and […]

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  • A Most Violent Year: Vampires, Families, 2025 in Film

    Since our 2019 winter edition, the brilliant Mark Asch has done something here that isn’t our default position; he’s examined films together, not in isolation, and has teased out what, for him, are their deeper meanings and interconnections—how they say something about our society today. Here, he considers images inside and outside the arthouse, finding trenchant, sometimes troubling messages elided by rote awards season discourse. — Scott Macaulay I remember about a decade ago when Charlie Kirk was a teenage gimmick, a debate-club prodigy haunting college campuses demanding to be taken seriously, provoking protests and deplatformings and then spinning this […]

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  • Hits & Misses: The Sundance Class of 2025

    By conventional measures, the 2020s have not been very good for the movies. At mid-decade, there’s the nagging sense that the pre-COVID years represented glory days that will never be recaptured. Corporate media consolidation, the dominance of streaming and short-form content and the rapid rise of A.I. have far-reaching implications for the future of the medium. In many ways, independent film and filmmakers are in a far more perilous position than ever, increasingly squeezed out on screens big and small by an algorithmically driven and politically pressured media ecosystem irrevocably moving toward the middlebrow, mediocre and mainstream. Yet, independent filmmakers, […]

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Other articles

  • Tension and Releases: Editor Ronald Bronstein on “Marty Supreme”

    Ronald Bronstein premiered his feature Frownland at South by Southwest the same year as Josh Safdie’s short We’re Going to the Zoo played, and he felt a pang of insecurity when he saw it. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, there’s somebody also vying for the same kind of immediacy,” said the veteran writer-editor. “It was like my feet were made of lead; this guy was like a helium balloon.” Back in New York City, Josh introduced himself to Bronstein and convinced him to play a character based on his own father. Bronstein helped write and edit the project, which […]

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  • Back to Zero: 25 Fragments on Yong Soon Min, Film Theory and Genocide

    Producer, director and screenwriter James Schamus has been an invaluable presence at Filmmaker from its earliest days. He wrote the introduction to our very first cover story—a dialogue between Simple Men’s Hal Hartley and Laws of Gravity’s Nick Gomez—and has contributed many articles since, including a remembrance of Raúl Ruiz, a 2017 conversation with mathematician Cathy O’Neil about how algorithms are reshaping society, his debate with Ted Hope about whether independent film is alive or dead, introductions to the work of Elia Suleiman and cultural theorist Franco Moretti and 2015’s critical manifesto of sorts: “23 Fragments on the Future of […]

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  • Subterranean Histories: Laura Poitras on “Cover-Up”

    When we meet Seymour Hersh at his Washington office in Laura Poitras’s and Mark Obenhaus’s Cover-Up, the veteran journalist is framed by papers—documents piled on his desk, notebooks stacked against the wall, binders stuffed into bookcases. The man who began his career in 1959, broke stories about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and prison torture in Abu Ghraib and penned provocative counter-histories about the killing of Bin Laden and the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline is very much still at work. (Now on Substack, he’s recently been writing about the genocide in Gaza, Trump administration plans to […]

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Also: Before and After Sunlight: DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw on “Sinners” Reflecting on 33 Years of “Filmmaker” and Independent Film Crafting a Personal Poetics: The Pleasures of Critical Writing Horrifying Looks: Costume Designer Kate Hawley on Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” On “Filmmaker”‘s Fall 2003 Issue Richard Kern on Shooting for “Filmmaker” Anthony Dod Mantle on Cinematographer Origins Images of the World (After the Death of Cinema) Going Again: Laura Klein Interviewed by Scott Macaulay A Letter From the Brink Dwelling A Return to the Video Store Film and Psychoanalysis Paris, Remembered: Production Designer Katia Wyszkop on “Nouvelle Vague” Learning From Amos Poe Producing and Motherhood One Trillion Possibilities: The Internet Archive and the Vanishing Open Web The Purity of Song: Mona Fastvold on “The Testament of Ann Lee” Revolutionary Sounds: Sound Editor Christopher Scarabosio on “One Battle After Another” I Want Aura The Way It Was Microbudget Case Study: “Free Time” Revisiting the Neoliberal Echo Chamber The Notes of an Age: Composer Bryce Dessner on “Train Dreams” Scott Macaulay’s Final Editor’s Letter as Filmmaker Editor-in-Chief The Gotham Pages: Tessa Thompson on the Pleasures of Playing the Villain

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