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Finlay Pretsell Photo: Cycling Films Ltd

When I first read about Finlay Pretsell’s documentary Time Trial, which screened at the 2018 Edinburgh International Film Festival, I wasn’t expecting to find it very interesting. Although we aim to be neutral, every film critic has their own personal preferences, and taking on a new subject is difficult, especially if the film doesn’t communicate it very well. I knew nothing about cyclist David Millar and relatively little about his sport, but the film turned out to be quite unlike what I had anticipated. Furthermore, when I spoke to director Finlay Pretsell, he seemed pleased that I’d covered it as an outsider.

“It’s really good, the reaction from people who have no interest in or no knowledge of cycling,” he told me. “One of the big things we wanted to get over was to translate that experience on screen for...

Welcome to the latest installment of Trailer Park, our semi-regular look at the latest trailers to hit the interwebs. This edition features a even More of the latest video game trailers to debut during this years E3… If you haven’t checked out part one, click here.

Fist of the North Star

From Ryu ga Gotoku Studio, the development team behind the acclaimed Yakuza series, Lost Paradise is a high-intensity action-adventure RPG based within the world of the beloved Fist of the North Star manga. Players take control of Kenshiro as they progress through an alternate universe of the original story, explore the post-apocalyptic wastes of the Earth in a customizable buggy, and tear through groups of thugs using Kenshiro’s signature Hokuto Shinken techniques.

Team Sonic Racing

Team Sonic Racing is a fast paced arcade racer that brings in lots of fan favourite characters and well known environments from across the Sonic universe.

The programme will showcase features filmed and set the country, including ‘Calibre’ with Jack Lowden.

Edinburgh Film Festival (Eiff) has announced a celebration of Scotland for its 72nd edition.

The festival will showcase talent and locations from the country via a selection of features, shorts, documentaries, animations and events.

Included amongst these will be comedy horror-musical Anna And The Apocalypse, shot largely in and around Glasgow; and the world premiere of Jack Lowden-starring thriller Calibre, the debut feature from Matt Palmer, set in the Highlands and filmed at Beecraigs Country Park, which will get a worldwide release on Netflix the...

The company has also sold ‘Over The Limit’ to Canada and Spain.

Austrian documentary specialist Autlook has sold Finlay Pretsell’s Time Trial, its film about Tour de France cyclist David Millar, to Dogwoof in the UK and Mindjazz for Germany and Austria.

It has also secured deals to Swedish broadcaster Svt, Danish broadcasters Dr, and Dutch broadcaster Vpro and is in final negotiations for a theatrical release in The Netherlands, Australia, Italy and North America

Autlook has also sold Marta Prus’ Russian gymnast film Over The Limit to Blue Ice for Canada and Parallel 40 for Spain. The film premiered in competition at Idfa.

It’s been a couple months since the last edition of What’s Up Doc? placed Michael Moore’s surprise world premiere of Where To Invade Next at the top of this list and in the meantime much shuffling has taken place and much time has been spent on various new endeavors (namely my Buffalo-based film series, Cultivate Cinema Circle). Finally taking its rightful place at the top, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hagedus’ Unlocking the Cage is in the midst of being scored by composer James Lavino, according to Lavino’s own personal site. Though the project has been taking shape at its own leisurely pace, I’d expect to see the film making its festival debut in early 2016.

Right behind, the American direct cinema masters is a Texan soon to make his non-fiction debut with Voyage of Time. Just two weeks ago indieWIRE reported that Ennio Morricone, who scored...

The fall festival rush is upon us. Locarno is currently ramping up. Venice has released their line-up and Thom Powers and the Toronto International Film Festival team have dropped a bomb with a previously unannounced new feature from powerhouse docu-provocateur Michael Moore. It is truly a miracle that the production of a film such as Moore’s upcoming Where To Invade Next (see still above) managed to go completely undetected by the filmmaking community until it was literally announced to world premiere at one of the largest film festivals in the world. Programmed as a one of the key films in the Special Presentations section at Tiff, the film sees Moore telling “the Pentagon to ‘stand down’ — he will do the invading for America from now on.” Also announced to premiere at Tiff was Avi Lewis’ This Changes Everything, which has slowly been rising up this list, as well as...

It’s been a surprisingly interesting month of moving and shaking in terms of doc development. Just a month after making his first public funding pitch at Toronto’s Hot Docs Forum, legendary doc filmmaker Frederick Wiseman took to Kickstarter to help cover the remaining expenses for his 40th feature film In Jackson Heights (see the film’s first trailer below). Unrelentingly rigorous in his determination to capture the American institutional landscape on film, his latest continues down this thematic rabbit hole, taking on the immensely diverse New York City neighborhood of Jackson Heights as his latest subject. According to the Kickstarter page, Wiseman is currently editing the 120 hours of rushes he shot with hopes of having the film ready for a fall festival premiere (my guess would be Tiff, where both National Gallery and At Berkeley made their North American debut), though he’s currently quite a ways away from his $75,000 goal.

Well folks, after a rather long and brutal winter (at least for me here in Buffalo), we are finally heading into the wonderful warmth of summer, but with that blast of sunshine and steamy humidity comes the mid-year drought of major film fests. After the Sheffield Doc/Fest concludes on June 10th and AFI Docs wraps on June 21st, we likely won’t see any major influx in our charts until Locarno, Venice, Telluride and Tiff announce their line-ups in rapid succession. In the meantime, we can look forward to the intriguing onslaught of films making their debut in Sheffield, including Brian Hill’s intriguing examination of Sweden’s most notorious serial killer, The Confessions of Thomas Quick, and Sean McAllister’s film for which he himself was jailed in the process of making, A Syrian Love Story, the only two films world premiering in the festival’s main competition.

It should come as no surprise that Cannes Film Festival will play host to Kent Jones’s doc on the touchstone of filmmaking interview tomes, Hitchcock/Truffaut (see photo above). The film has been floating near the top of this list since it was announced last year as in development, while Jones himself has a history with the festival, having co-written both Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P. and Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage To Italy, both of which premiered in Cannes. The film is scheduled to screen as part of the Cannes Classics sidebar alongside the likes of Stig Björkman’s Ingrid Bergman, in Her Own Words, which will play as part of the festival’s tribute to the late starlet, and Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna’s Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans (see trailer below). As someone who grew up watching road races with my dad in Watkins Glen,...

Now that the busy winter fest schedule of Sundance, Rotterdam and the Berlinale has concluded, we’ve now got our eyes on the likes of True/False and SXSW. While, True/False does not specialize in attention grabbing world premieres, it does provide a late winter haven for cream of the crop non-fiction fare from all the previously mentioned fests and a selection of overlooked genre blending films presented in a down home setting. This year will mark my first trip to the Columbia, Missouri based fest, where I hope to catch a little of everything, from their hush-hush secret screenings, to selections from their Neither/Nor series, this year featuring chimeric Polish cinema of decades past, to a spotlight of Adam Curtis’s incisive oeuvre. But truth be told, it is SXSW, with its slew of high profile world premieres being announced, such as Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs...

Turkey or no turkey, these next couple of days lucky filmmakers who’ve been selected to screen as part of the Sundance Film Festival will get the invitation notice straight from John Cooper and the Park City programming team, and thus, those that we’re betting have made the cut have also inched up the list a bit. One of those that seem an obvious choice to premiere at the fest is director Steve Hoover and producer Danny Yourd’s Crocodile Gennadiy. Following up their Grand Jury Prize winning Blood Brother with incredible turnaround time, our new most anticipated film tracks the delicate operations of Gennadiy Mokhnenko, a Ukrainian activist, orphanage manager and savior of countless children whose addict parents favor injected cold medicine and alcohol over them. Part heartwrenching domestic drama, part sleuth thriller, the film looks to use the Ukrainian uprising as a backdrop to highlight its protagonist...

They often get quite a bit less attention than their fictional brethren, and it doesn’t help that many films fly under the radar while development and filming is underway. To chart this course with a little more precision, I’m launching Ioncinema.com’s latest feature, What’s Up Doc?, our monthly Top 50 Most Anticipated films, a sort of hitlist and/or snapshot of the most alluring, the most promising documentary film projects from the established documentarian guard, the new crop of future voices or the fiction filmmakers who on occasion dip their toes in the form. Curated by me, Jordan M. Smith, you’ll find docu items that are in their beginning stages to being moments away from their film festival berth. Like any such list, we can expect film items to fluctuate in ranking, with the cut-off being publicly items — such recent examples include Laura Poitras’s white hot Edward Snowden project,...