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Exclusive: Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried (Mank) and Scoot McNairy (A Complete Unknown) are set to topline The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, a new prison break thriller written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson.

Currently in production in Georgia, the film follows a teacher in an abusive marriage who takes a job at a maximum security prison, where she falls for a charismatic inmate. The disastrous consequences call into question not only the nature of punishment and retribution, but the very limits of our humanity.

Julie Buck, Nelson, Ryan Bartecki, Miles David Romney, and Billy Hines are producing, with Christopher Hines and Gary Levinsohn exec producing. Co Created Media, V42, and Nelson’s Red Barn Films are the production companies. WME, V42, and D Squared Films are co-repping domestic rights.

“I feel deeply fortunate to be able to tell this story with such an extraordinary lead cast,” Nelson said.

American Cinematheque’s This Is Not A Fiction Festival is returning for its second season.

The festival launched last year with screenings of Thank You, Good Night: The Bon Jovi Story, featuring a Jon Bon Jovi Q&a and Morgan Neville’s Steve! (Martin) A Documentary in 2 Pieces.

It is now returning with a slew of new premieres, screenings and appearances from the likes of Conan O’Brien, Survivor’s Jeff Probst, Errol Morris and Documentary Now!’s Bill Hader and Fred Armisen.

The second season premiere of Max’s Conan O’Brien Must Go will kick off the event on April 9 with a Q&a with the Oscars host.

The event, which runs through April 17, will also feature a 10th anniversary screening of IFC’s Documentary Now! and Probst is hosting Tribute to Survivor: An Evening with Jeff Probst.

Morris will be honored with a retrospective that includes Gates of Heaven,...

The 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival has unveiled its coveted Audience Award winners.

After IndieWire announced the festival’s Jury Awards, with Amy Wang’s “Slanted” taking the top Narrative Feature Award, the Audience Awards have been totaled. “The Accountant 2” starring Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal has won the Headliner section, with “Fantasy Life” getting the Narrative Feature Competition vote. (Amanda Peet also previously won the Special Jury Award for her performance in “Fantasy Life.”)

Jay Duplass’ “The Baltimorons” received the Audience Award for the Narrative Spotlight section. Documentaries “Remaining Native” and “Luv Ya, Bum!” were also recognized in the Documentary Feature Competition and Documentary Spotlight categories, respectively. Rodney Ascher’s “Ghost Boy” was also a winners in the Visions category.

Audience Award winners were certified by Maxwell Locke & Ritter Llp.

“Our deepest thanks to the filmmakers, audiences, and volunteers who made this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival exceptional,...

Ben Affleck starrer The Accountant 2, Amanda Peet comedy Fantasy Life, and Remaining Native have won the Headliner and narrative feature and documentary 2025 SXSW audience awards.

Jay Duplass’s comedy The Baltimorons won the Narrative Spotlight section, and Sam Wainwright’s Luv Ya, Bum! Took Documentary Spotlight honours, while Matt Johnson’s Blackberry follow-up Nirvanna The Band The Show was the audience favourite from Midnighter.

The 32nd edition of the festival announced its juried winners last week and screened 114 features including 93 world premieres, three international premieres, three North American premieres, four US premieres, 11 Texas premieres, and 57 shorts. The festival ran March 7-15 in Austin,...

SXSW on Monday said that Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life, Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal’s reteam The Accountant 2 and Paige Bethmann’s documentary Remaining Native were among the big winners of the 32nd annual festival’s Audience Awards.

The news of the honors across the Austin fest’s competition, narrative, documentary, shorts, TV and Xr Experience sidebars comes after the 2025 edition revealed its juried awards last week, with honors going to Amy Wang‘s thriller Slanted for Best Narrative Feature among others.

Fantasy Life, Shear’s feature writing and directorial debut, won the marquee Narrative Feature Audience Award. It stars Shear as a man who suffers a panic attack and stumbles into a job babysitting his psychiatrist’s three granddaughters, where he begins to fall for the girls’ mother, played by Amanda Peet. Peet earlier won a special jury prize for acting.

The Headliners section audience prize went to The Accountant 2,...

Directed by Rodney Ascher, best known for his horror-focused documentaries Room 237 and The Nightmare, Ghost Boy approaches its subject Martin Pistorius from, at times, the same perspective of his last feature A Glitch in the Matrix: locked in an infinite loop that suggests a simulation of life. In 1988, at age twelve, Pistorius became mysteriously ill with a sore throat. His condition rapidly deteriorated, leaving him unable to walk and feed himself. His family, initially supportive as they started slumber parties with him, became overwhelmed. A seemingly normal childhood in South Africa was upended overnight and he was ultimately sent to the Alfa and Omega Special Care Centre where he was abandoned, neglected, and abused by staff.

Like A Glitch in the Matrix and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Ghost Boy explores existential questions about the nature of living when one is a ghost or spectator,...

Like Alexandre O. Philippe, Rodney Ascher is a director who pushes the interpretive limits of what a documentary can do, something he made abundantly clear with his 2012 film Room 237. Named after the mysterious hotel suite in The Shining, this festival favorite gave a platform to some of the most bizarre readings of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror imaginable. The theories raised ranged from the esoteric to the ridiculous, but Ascher’s straightforward, non-judgmental approach proved surprisingly effective; though it has long been debunked, the fanciful thought that Kubrick made the film to exorcize his guilt about faking the moon landing footage in 1969 is enticing and still hard to shake off.

Ghost Boy contains some of that, being such an unbelievable true story that it’s almost impossible not to wonder how such a thing can happen, and just how many people have been affected by it: in very real terms,...

Director Rodney Ascher’s obsession with horror and mysterious phenomena takes a tragic real turn in Ghost Boy, which is based on the book of the same title by South African author, speaker and miraculous locked-in syndrome survivor Martin Pistorius.

Pistorius’ harrowing true story may be known to those who have read his autobiography, seen his TEDx Talk or listened to an episode of NPR’s Invisibilia that received some attention back in 2015. But for most of us, including this reviewer, what happens in Ghost Boy is an altogether new and unsettling experience to witness.

It begins when Pistorius is 12 and living a normal suburban life with his parents and siblings in Johannesburg. He has a certain knack for electronics but otherwise seems like your typical good-natured kid. Then one day he gets a sore throat, and from there things spiral downward until he becomes both paralyzed and entirely shut off from the world.

About eight or so years back, my dad started forgetting things. It was harmless at first, like losing an item he thought he’d put somewhere, but then it became more worrying. He’d get lost on his way home from work — a route he’d taken countless times before — and would have lapses where he could no longer recall names or where he was and what he was doing. As a doctor, he knew something wasn’t right, but other medical professionals failed to diagnose it as anything other than typical cognitive decline. He was in his 70s after all.

But as Covid hit and time moved on, it only got worse. His whole body started exhibiting signs of deterioration, ranging from hand tremors to his gait becoming lumbered. Finally, around two years ago, a name could be put to this cruelty: Parkinson’s with Lewy Body dementia. If this sounds familiar to some,...

“Ghost Boy” director Rodney Ascher first learned about Martin Pistorius through the NPR podcast “Invisibilia.” “I remember hearing the story and thinking, ‘This is the kind of story that I would like to tell.’”

The producers of the documentary, premiering Friday at SXSW, reached out to Ascher. They felt the same way: Pistorius’ story about a 12-year-old South African boy who emerges from a vegetative state with no memories, unable to move or speak, but all too aware of his surroundings, needed to be told.

Ascher was keen to pursue the story. Pistorius was inside, a human, but others doubted he was fully aware of what was happening. He took in conversations, like an eavesdropper. He caught TV shows left on for him. In the doc, Pistorius communicates through text-to-voice augmentative and alternative communication software. He spends time reflecting on his journey and the family, friends and caregivers and how...

As Sundance Film Festival kicks off, the next major American film festival has unveiled its lineup. SXSW 2025’s slate includes the premieres of the latest films from Michael Bay, Chad Hartigan, Flying Lotus, Mimi Cave, Jay Duplass, Babak Anvari, Rodney Ascher, and more. But first, last year’s SXSW winner of the Grand Jury Award and Audience Award in the Narrative Feature categories, Tracie Laymon’s Bob Trevino Likes It, will arrive on March 21 and Roadside Attractions has unveiled the first trailer.

John Fink said in his review, “A crowd-pleasing film inspired by director Tracie Laymon’s experience talking with a stranger online at a low point in her life, Bob Trevino Likes It is a moving story that proves good people do exist in this world. With two wonderful performances by Barbie Ferreira and John Leguizamo––playing two strangers who share the same last name but are otherwise unrelated...

Indie genre director Mickey Keating, who broke out with films such as 2015’s “Darling” and 2016’s “Carnage Park,” has wrapped shooting on his latest movie, the crime drama “Crooks.”

The film stars Keith Kupferer (“Ghostlight”), Angela Trimbur (“Quiz Lady”), Chase Williamson (“John Dies At the End”) and Melora Walters (“Magnolia”).

Per the logline, “Two small-time crooks rob a mob-run poker game in Chicago. Things immediately go wrong, resulting in a high-stakes adventure through the Midwest.”

“’Crooks’ is an incredible opportunity for me to break into the crime movie genre, which I’ve been hoping to do since I started my career,” Keating said in a statement. “This film is a highly stylized celebration of aesthetics ranging from noir to heist to western. I think anyone familiar with my work will see this as a natural progression from my previous films.”

Keating shot the movie in Chicago alongside producers Eddie Linker,...

If you’re fortunate enough to have a healthy sleep experience then the terms gamma-aminobutyric acid and glycine probably won’t mean much to you. If not, you may find yourself thinking about them a lot. They’re the two chemicals that regulate movement during sleep. Whilst most people enjoy a happy medium, at one end of the scale there’s sleep paralysis (as explored in Rodney Ascher’s fascinating documentary The Nightmare and at the other end there’s sleepwalking. A shocking 58% of sleepwalkers exhibit some degree of violence towards themselves or others whilst in that state. This can be very difficult to live with – both for the sleepwalkers themselves and for their loved ones – and it’s a theme explored by Jason Yu in his impressive début film, which has been winning praise all around the world.

‘Together we can overcome anything’ says a wooden sign in the kitchen of sweet-natured.

Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” is a movie that lives in its own special sphere. Simply put, I think it may be the most fascinating horror film ever made…that’s not scary. The most fascinating horror film ever made that is scary is “Psycho”; that’s because it’s the ultimate film to watch yourself watching. And let’s be clear: I realize that “The Shining” is widely considered to be a terrifying movie. But I saw it the night it opened — on May 23, 1980 — and have seen it a dozen times since, and while the film’s mood and mysteries have deepened for me, to the point that I find it a uniquely seductive piece of cinema, I have always had the same problem with it, going back to that very first viewing.

In “The Shining,” we watch an enormous metaphysical puzzle from the dark side, a ghost story...

Shine On: The Forgotten Shining Location explores an area of The Shining that hasn’t been covered before, here’s the trailer.

This month, we lost Shelly Duvall. Among her myriad acting roles, not least one of the most perfect pieces of accurate comic book casting ever as Olive Oyl in Robert Altman’s Popeye, she is perhaps best remembered for her incredible performance opposite Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The tales of tyranny from the set are legendary, with stories of endless takes and Duvall suffering from nervous exhaustion.

Shine On: The Forgotten Shining Location examines an area of the film not previously covered in documentaries like Rodney Ascher’s 2012 film Room 237.

The synopsis reads as follows:

Almost 50 years after its release, all the Overlook Hotel’s sets are thought to have been destroyed, but one last filming site remains. “There have been so many...

Few movie sets in Hollywood history have generated more interest than the Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” The fictional Colorado hotel provides the backdrop for Jack Torrance’s (Jack Nicholson) descent into madness, and Kubrick devotees have spent countless hours analyzing symbolism in the production design and the disorienting effects created by the hotel’s impossible floor plan. The hotel sets, hailed by many as some of the defining craftsmanship of Kubrick’s filmmaking career, now get their moment in the spotlight in a new documentary set to be released on the late director’s birthday.

Produced in partnership with the Stanley Kubrick Film Archive and the director’s estate, “Shine On — The Forgotten ‘Shining’ Location” dives into Kubrick’s process of scouting locations for the film and working with his design team to bring his vision to life. Narrated by Martin Sheen and directed by Paul King,...

The master of suspense is finally getting a 4K restoration for his final film.

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Frenzy,” which was also his sole R-rated feature, is being released at the Film Forum to celebrate its restoration. “Frenzy” stars Jon Finch, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, and Barry Foster; the feature is an adaptation of novel “Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square,” released by Arthur La Bern in 1966. “Sleuth” playwright Anthony Shaffer adapted the book for Hitchcock’s 1972 film, which was Hitchcock’s second to last feature.

“Frenzy” follows a down-on-his-luck ex-Royal Air Force officer (Finch) who is on the run amid accusations of being The Necktie Strangler after his ex-wife is found dead. “Frenzy” is billed as Hitchcock’s penultimate film, and his first feature made in London after thirty years.

The official logline teases that “Frenzy” is Hitchcock’s “return to fiendish form and his most salacious, sordid picture.”

Hitchcock worked with Stanley Kubrick...

Heading out into the wilderness and losing your shit is not that uncommon in genre cinema. What makes you pay particular attention to a project is when your film has the backing of one Rodney Ascher, director of such faves as The Nightmare and Room 237.   If Ascher believed so much in Matt Warren's Delicate Arch to throw in his clout and experience as an Executive Producer then that's certainly good enough for us. Then we saw the trailer and yep, this is going to some kind of special weirdness once it hits the festival circuit, starting with its world premiere at Dances With Films at the end of the month.    Check out the trailer below.   Delicate Arch To World Premiere At Dances With...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

From writer / director Matt Warren and executive producer Rodney Ascher comes the supernatural thriller Delicate Arch! We have a look at the new trailer and poster, plus details on the films upcoming premiere:

"Delicate Arch, the new supernatural thriller from writer/director Matt Warren and executive producer Rodney Ascher, will World Premiere as part of Dances With Films on Friday, June 28th. The celebrated Los Angeles festival is proud to welcome the film into the world, accompanied by a red carpet event and post-screening Q&a with the picture's cast and crew.

Grant, Wilda, Cody, and Ferg are all college students in Salt Lake City. Grant and Cody are supposed to be BFFs, but Grant - a paranoid and spoiled film student - suspects Cody is secretly hooking up with Wilda, an ex-girlfriend Grant is struggling to remain amicable with. Their friend is Ferg, Wilda’s nonbinary stoner cousin and...

Emma Roberts worked with global media company Stampede Ventures on the romantic comedy Space Cadet, which is set to be released through the Prime Video streaming service on July 4th, and Coming Soon reports that Roberts is now set to re-team with Stampede Ventures on the showbusiness thriller Fourth Wall, which has director Alexis Ostrander at the helm.

Ostrander’s previous directing credits include multiple short films and episodes of twenty different TV shows, among them Interview with the Vampire, Mayfair Witches, Cruel Summer, Sweet Tooth, Supergirl, Servant, Nancy Drew, Swat Team, Swamp Thing, Light as a Feather, Shadowhunters, Riverdale, and American Horror Story. For Fourth Wall, she’ll be working from a screenplay by Jerry Kontogiorgis, who primarily works as a post-production coordinator.

Roberts, who was only 10 years old when she made her screen acting debut, will be taking on the role of a former child star from a...

Exclusive: Emma Roberts (American Horror Story) is set to reteam with Stampede Ventures on Fourth Wall, a thriller that Alexis Ostrander (Servant) is directing from a script by Jerry Kontogiorgis, in her feature debut.

The project is Roberts’ second with the global media company on the heels of Space Cadet, a rom-com for Amazon MGM Studios, which will premiere globally on Prime Video this Fourth of July.

The film centers on a former child star (Roberts) from a popular ’90s television show who is kidnapped and wakes up in a complete recreation of the show’s set with the rest of the cast. As she’s forced to re-immerse herself in the iconic role she’s been trying to get away from her entire career, she must recreate the series’ most memorable moments to stay alive.

Roberts was a natural fit for the project, as an actress who’s been...

There are a lot of go-to platforms for seasonal streaming but do not forget what you presume are outliers to the spooky season cause.   Take Mubi for instance. Regarded as a home for the arthouse and the autuer, Mubi is stacked to the rafters with quality programming. They also know that their suscribers like to get their spook on so they've curated a handful of terror-ific titles for the month of October to scratch that spooky itch.    Mubi's seasonal programming will include two films from Masumura Yasuzo, Blind Beast and Irezumi - Spider Tattoo. Mubi has also put together a collection of film from female filmmakers, including Censor and The Love Witch. On the doc side they also have Rodney Ascher's A Glitch...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

This article discusses sensitive topics including child sexual abuse, murder, suicide, and genocide.

While some documentaries can be an easy watch, others give even the most disturbing horror movies a run for their money. Unlike fictional narrative movies, documentaries are theoretically constrained in what they can depict. Through techniques like re-enactments, dramatizations, and selective editing, documentaries can make reality conform to the structure of a story. However, documentaries are built on authentic footage, the lives of real people, and events that took place in reality. In contrast, fictional movies can focus on any far-fetched plot that the filmmakers come up with, and they have no fidelity to reality.

Despite this, sometimes documentaries prove even more intense than horror movies no matter how high their body counts. The documentaries listed here touch on intense, sensitive subjects ranging from institutional child abuse to suicide to genocide and the Holocaust. While these are tough topics,...

Film Independent is currently in the middle of a Matching Campaign to raise support for the next 30 years of filmmaker support. All donations make before or on September 15 will be doubled—dollar-for-dollar up to $100,000. To kick off the campaign, we’re re-posting a few of our most popular blogs.

Among other consumer benefits, one major upside to the increasing niche-ification of popular culture has been the continuing emergence of esoteric micro-genres of film and TV. Twenty years ago, you might not necessarily think of “horror documentaries” as its own subgenre. Sure, there were documentaries that maybe fell a little more on the creepy/unsettling side, but it was rare that a nonfiction film would be tailored to appeal to a horror-first genre audience. Now, of course, things are different. In recent years, a robust tradition of terrifying nonfiction films have emerged, many as terrifying – or even more eerie – than their traditional narrative counterparts.

Reminiscent of the Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse with its throwback features and faux trailers for non-existent movies, filmmaker and artist Pat Tremblay’s new book Terror in the Ailien Realms: Transdimensional Horror Movie Posters & Their Film Reviews consists of posters for and reviews of movies that have never existed!

An explanation of what this book is all about was provided in a press release (via Variety), “Drawn by the deep nostalgia of roaming video rental stores to find cool movies to watch by judging what its VHS box’s artwork would entice or beguile, filmmaker & artist Pat Tremblay has created a series of horror movie posters with the assistance of AI. He then proposed to talented individuals within the horror movie scene to write imaginary reviews for them. The result is a captivating mixture of styles, ranging from the enigmatic and alluring to the outrageously hilarious. The dimensional...

It’s no surprise that filmmaker David Lynch’s fanbase has, for four decades, continually renewed itself among each new generation of cineastes. Something about the strange alchemy of the multidisciplinary Eagle Scout’s sensuous images, earnest perspective and intuitive storytelling perspective is intoxicating, buoyed onscreen by the talents of great creative collaborators like Mary Sweeney, Alan Splet and Angelo Badalamenti.

The films themselves are often dark but always honest, their perversions expressive and earned rather than bluntly hammered. As we follow the cosmic tendrils of Lynch’s brain backwards toward their origin, it’s only natural to ask: why does this guy see the world the way he sees it?

One answer may lay in Victor Fleming 1939 MGM classic, whose enchantments reach even further back, to its position as an early television staple for impressional baby boomers developing their imaginations and material predilections in the glow of the family’s suburban RCA console.

David Lynch does not like talking about his movies. He’d prefer the work speak for itself, thank you very much. But in bending over backwards to avoid discussing what something might “mean,” or deflecting questions with humor and/or cryptic pronunciations, the Blue Velvet filmmaker occasionally drops a breadcrumb hint about what makes him creatively tick. An audience member at a Q&a once asked Lynch whether there was a connection between The Wizard of Oz and the movie he’d just screened, Mullholland Drive. His reply: “There’s...

“The Wizard of Oz is a film with very great power… And it’s to be expected that it has stayed with us for the past several years and that we find its echoes in our films for such a long time after. The Wizard of Oz is like a dream and it has immense emotional power,” David Lynch once said. “There’s a certain amount of fear in that picture, as well as things to dream about. So it seems truthful in some way.”

Indeed, from the overt references (Wild at Heart) to the more subtextual (see: every other David Lynch movie), Victor Fleming’s 1939 landmark has been a constant wellspring of influence for the legendary director. Yet even with such source of inspiration, Lynch’s films play as singular creations, every frame infused with a thrillingly unique voice. With his new essay documentary, Alexandre O. Philippe entertainingly explores...

“Is that an Oz narrative?” asks director Rodney Ascher in the second chapter of Alexandre O. Philippe’s trippy, tricky, and obsessive cine-essay Lynch/Oz. Ascher is clearly being a touch dishonest with the question because he’s at that moment referring to Beverly Hills Cop. He follows up that query by wondering in tongue-in-cheek fashion, “Is everything?”

Even though Philippe’s film is ostensibly about the many ways that The Wizard of Oz permeates the work of David Lynch, Ascher’s half-serious digression into the expansively universal nature of Victor Fleming’s Technicolor musical fantasy, calling its fish-out-water plot a “sturdy template” for just about any kind of film you could imagine, is typical of the filmed essays collected by Philippe. It’s both dead-serious about its subjects and playfully exploratory.

That dual nature is present in Lynch/Oz from the start. In the first chapter, film critic Amy Nicholson,...

When Betty White died in late 2021, I reflected on how our collective affection for her might be the only unifying thing in an increasingly fractured culture.

But we do have Michael J. Fox.

Whether you’re like me and grew up at a time when Fox was simultaneously the biggest star in movies and on television — back when those lines were harder to cross — or you’ve followed his life in the past two decades as a public crusader for Parkinson’s research and awareness, it’s hard not to have personal investment in the Canadian actor and advocate.

Fox gets admirable and intimate documentary treatment in Apple TV+’s Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. Director Davis Guggenheim is married to Fox’s ’80s co-star Elisabeth Shue, and whether that gives him a direct connection to Fox or just a direct understanding of...

Editor’s note: This article includes mild spoilers for “Adult Swim Yule Log.”

All due respect to James Cameron and his underwater actors in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” but you can’t beat the filmmaking gamble of Casper Kelly’s “Adult Swim Yule Log.” Adult Swim’s first feature-length live action endeavor dropped without warning December 11 after the season finale of “Ricky and Morty”: A cozy two-minute yule log video morphs into a disturbing home invasion horror movie that becomes a supernatural cabin-in-the-woods thriller with a young couple (Justin Miles and Andrea Laing) who may be at the mercy of a haunted fireplace.

And then things get really weird, with everything from time travel to UFOs figuring into an unclassifiable odyssey. “My dream has been making movies,” Kelly told IndieWire over Zoom this week. “I thought now that I’ve got one, I’m going to put in everything I can.

Casper Kelly opens up on how his stealth holiday horror movie came together, its curious development, and the importance of keeping audiences surprised.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to genuinely surprise audiences during a digital age where entire scripts can leak before a movie even exits pre-production. Horror is a genre that thrives through the unknown and its ability to make its audience uncomfortable and unsure of what they’re about to experience. A true surprise is easier said than done, even when there’s a strong plan behind it, but Casper Kelly’s The Fireplace (also known as Adult Swim Yule Log) manages to accomplish this rare feat (read my review here).

Casper Kelly is a challenging avant-garde filmmaker whose cut his teeth on Adult Swim series like Stroker and Hoop and Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell, but he’s perhaps better-known for his stylistically ambitious “infomercials,...

How the auteur was influenced by 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz is examined in witty and insightful expert contributions curated by Alexandre O Philippe

Here is a portmanteau movie: a collection of cine-essays, curated by documentarist Alexandre O Philippe, on the question of how director David Lynch was influenced by The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland. There are witty, insightful, dreamily cinephile contributions from a number of expert witnesses: film-makers David Lowery, Karyn Kusama, John Waters, Rodney Ascher, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, and critic Amy Nicholson.

Evidently they are all in love with The Wizard of Oz, and in love with David Lynch, and in love with what their interaction tells us: the juxtaposition of waking reality and another reality, a hidden reality, or buried reality, or transcendent reality which is nonetheless as real, or more real, than anything else. All this is punctiliously laid out, with some...

Stanley Kubrick is known for his meticulous devotion to every aspect of his films, which are painstakingly handcrafted from start to finish. The director's body of work still inspires conversations about the craft of filmmaking, and while some of his works have undergone critical reappraisal over the years, others continue to be lauded due to their thematic richness and enduring appeal.

The vastly interpretative nature of Kubrick's work has led to folks attempting to parse hidden layers of meaning in his films — a good example would be Rodney Ascher's "Room 237," which minutely unboxes what "The Shining" means, almost to a fault. Not every visual or thematic reference in a Kubrick film, however, is a deliberate or conscious nod to some grander idea.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Kubrick was asked whether there was some thematic resonance between certain scenes of "Paths of Glory" and "Full Metal Jacket." While...

David Lynch is the man behind the curtain, the wonderful Wizard of Oz, in the surreal construct we call cinema. Or so documentary “Lynch/Oz” makes it out to be.

Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, the film was born out of auteur Lynch’s response during a Q&a panel at the 2001 New York Film Festival following the screening of “Mulholland Drive.” Lynch said more than 20 years ago that “there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about ‘The Wizard of Oz'” when asked about the classic film’s impact on his own work.

“Lynch/Oz” reframes Lynch’s filmography within the context of the technicolor fantasy dream sequence that propelled innocent Dorothy (Judy Garland) into a storybook world. The documentary will make its U.K. premiere during the BFI London Film Festival and Film 4 will release the feature in U.K. theaters and...

Fantastic Fest 2022 has a great selection of film docs, and one of the most interesting ones is the latest from Alexandre O. Philippe. His resume includes some fascinating examinations of classic films, including 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene and Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist. His films always focus on an interesting corner of film and when I heard that he had a new one examining the work of David Lynch, I knew I couldn’t miss it.

This film takes on a bit of a different format from his previous works. It is divided into six chapters and essentially takes on the format of a series of video essays diving into various aspects of Lynch's oeuvre. The common theme is how those works relate or overlap to the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz.

With participation from Amy Nicholson, Rodney Ascher, Aaron Moorehead, Justin Benson, Karyn Kusama,...

A woman grieving her husband's death, an eerie, identical house in the woods with a reversed floor plan, and an entity hellbent on dragging a living person to the realm of death. These are the essential ingredients in David Bruckner's psychological horror, "The Night House," which, when combined, leads to a terrifying tale about grief, loss, and emotional trauma.

There are several reasons why Brucker's tale is haunting, which include a meticulous dedication to creating a tense atmosphere and sound design within a setting meant to confuse and disorient. However, the effectiveness of "The Night House" would be incomplete without the mechanics of the titular house, which becomes the site of horror for the protagonist, Beth (Rebecca Hall).

After Beth loses her husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), to suicide, she experiences jarring supernatural events inside her beautiful, secluded home, which Owen had built for the both of them. Amid unaccounted time gaps,...

Here’s a film documentary that feels like a time-travel machine. But we’re not escaping into the past — the past is coming to us.

In “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock,” film-besotted documentarian Mark Cousins hopscotches through the Master of Suspense’s body of work based on ideas and images, not your typical film-by-film chronological approach. He’s made hyperlinked connections throughout Hitchcock’s whole filmography (clips from almost every one of his films appear) to show that these works are not of the past: They remain eternally present tense.

To do that, Cousins presents us with a magnificent trick: making it seem as if Hitchcock is narrating the documentary and guiding you through his work and through the themes you might not otherwise notice. Impressionist Alistair McGowan portrays Hitch in the voiceover and has him down completely, from the sharp intake of breath to the almost-snort that precedes him...

Virtual reality is as good a place as any to meet people, especially during a pandemic. In documentary helmer Joe Hunting’s nonjudgmental plunge into the fast-evolving metaverse — set entirely in the realm of VRChat, where thousands of players reinvent themselves behind the avatars of their choice — we meet couples who fell in love online, hard-of-hearing outsiders who find a new way to connect with others and lonely souls who say their online friends saved their lives. While the real world was losing its collective mind (Hunting started “filming” in December 2020), these folks were giving lap dances and house parties in cyberspace.

At times, “We Met in Virtual Reality” — which world premiered at the (virtual) Sundance Film Festival last January, and now finds its way into (virtual) release via HBO Max — feels like a feature-length infomercial for this relatively new means of no-contact connection. Except that VR has been around for years and years,...

The Wizard of Oz has become a tradition. Synonymous with the wonder of childhood and the wonder of movies, Victor Fleming’s 1939 classic plays in homes across America every year—often cited as the most-watched film in movie history. A portion of those watches come from filmmakers who think it a sacred text, traditional source material for any story they might want to tell. One of those filmmakers is David Lynch, populist surrealist actor, writer, artist, musician, and director.

Lynch/Oz explores the connection between the famous film and dream-focused director. From documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe, this six-chapter inquiry acts as a video essay on that link, each section narrated by a critic or filmmaker, from Amy Nicholson to David Lowery. A mixture of archival footage, interview snippets, and a vast collection of movie scenes, the segments traverse the landscape of Lynch’s directorial efforts and clear parallels to aspects of The Wizard of Oz,...

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It shouldn’t surprise anyone that an artist who famously goes fishing for material beneath the surface of his conscious mind (via meditation) would frequently “catch ideas” with bits of childhood memories stuck to them, hard as barnacles. For David Lynch, whose films conjure some of the most disturbing psychological states in mainstream cinema, one might expect those memories to be of something less wholesome than The Wizard of Oz. Yet the 1939 classic echoes throughout Lynch’s work, and not just in things as obvious as red shoes and heavy, important curtains.

In Lynch/Oz, Alexandre O. Philippe gathers a handful of gifted filmmakers and writers to, among other things, guess at what all those allusions mean. Though frustratingly unfocused and sometimes overreaching (even compared to Philippe’s other docs, which are never what you’d call precision-crafted), the film is consistently enjoyable,...

It is famously useless (if also occasionally fun) to ask David Lynch about the meaning behind his art, which is why his interviews tend to offer more color than insight, and his panel appearances often prove to be exercises in frustration. It’s also why “Jennifer’s Body” director Karyn Kusama has such a vivid memory of what happened during the Q&a that followed the NYFF screening of “Mulholland Drive” in 2001, when Lynch’s usual elusiveness was suddenly interrupted by a question that seemed to pierce his armor and pull back the curtains of his mind.

The question was simple: “Can you talk about the influence of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ on your work?” Lynch’s answer was even simpler, but also intoxicatingly mysterious in the way that simple things often are in his films: “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about ‘The Wizard of Oz....

For better and worse, the 109-minute essay doc “Lynch/Oz” often feels like an anthology of thematically-connected shorts, all of which concern American filmmaker David Lynch and his recurring fascination with the classic 1939 movie adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz.”

Thankfully, the awkward presentation and inconsistent tone of each segment, divided into chapters with distinct themes, only slightly dampen the general effect of watching a few intelligent, articulate talking-head interview subjects (including filmmakers John Waters and Rodney Ascher) dig deep as they talk over footage from Lynch’s movies.

Some talking heads understandably struggle with adapting their natural speaking voice into voiceover narration. But some awkward phrasing and unnecessary throat-clearing only negligibly diminish writer-director Alexandre O. Philippe’s compelling juxtaposition of footage from “The Wizard of Oz” with Lynch projects like “Wild at Heart,” “Blue Velvet,” and “Twin Peaks.” So while some talking points tend to be belabored and others...

With Netflix’s recent emphasis on creating their own movies to fill up their vast digital library, there has been less importance placed on older, licensed films from other studios. But March’s slate of new Netflix movies is a potent mixture of Netflix original films and titles from elsewhere, making for a rich bouquet of springtime entertainment. (You heard us.)

Below are the very best new movies on Netflix this month – from horrifying nightmares to ace fighter pilots to “My Best Friend’s Wedding” (and everything in between).

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) New Line Cinema

Two “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies are making their debut on Netflix this month – both Wes Craven’s 1984 original and a widely derided 2010 remake starring Rooney Mara and Jackie Earle Haley. We suggest you stick with the original, which introduced the world to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), the burnt, razor-fingered child predator who returns in dreams to seek his revenge.

The year “The Matrix” came out — 1999 — already had a very sci-fi sound to it. It was the year Prince had imagined as the run-up to the apocalypse, a premonition that would be echoed in the Y2K jitters. And 1999 is just such a cool number; it’s like the other side of the coin from 2001. With its row of nines poised to turn over, it sounded like the future embedded in the present. And that’s kind of how 1999 felt. We knew that we were moving into the 21st century, and we thought we had a good idea of what that was about. The Internet was only a few years old, but already we could see where it was pointing: to a digital world that would bring everything (literally) to your fingertips. Everything could now be done at home, at the computer keyboard, including the manipulation of reality, which could...

To quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for documentarian Joshua Bonnetta, the Scottish Outer Hebrides is something of a “very silly place.” This is not to denigrate the remote cluster of islands on Scotland’s northern tip, and its inhabitants––far from it. More that, when taken as a whole, Bonnetta has been able to uncover a vast cluster of eccentricity on these sparsely populated lands, where people can see, hear or intuit things others can’t, and then tell of it gladly. Empirical science would question this, of course, but Bonnetta’s interviewees seem to transcend that, and instead carry knowledge more common to the animist practices of early homo sapiens, or maybe another plane of human evolution altogether. To cite a timely cinematic reference point, the desired end-goal of the Bene Gesserit breeding project in Dune, is this ability to intuit the future––the cutting-edge of human...

The distributor of films like “Melancholia” and “John Lewis: Good Trouble” is reportedly seeking a buyer. Magnolia Pictures has hired investment bank Stephens to run a sale of the company, Deadline reported after the New York Times first broke word of a potential sale on Wednesday.

The move comes as consolidation is rapidly reshaping the industry for the streaming era. While it has amassed a diverse library of 500 films during its 20 years in business, Magnolia is a vastly different company than other recent Hollywood acquisitions targets, like MGM with its exploitable IP or Reese Witherspoon’s “Big Little Lies” production outfit Hello Sunshine.

The Hollywood Reporter once called Magnolia “one of the last indie distribution houses dedicated to art house fare.” Magnolia wants to find out what that might be worth in a time where box office revenues are down, but streaming has fueled a demand for content that has never been greater.

Swan Song, Mayday, Queen Of Glory, A Glitch In The Matrix galvanise buyers.

Magnolia Pictures International head Lorna Lee Torres has reported brisk sales in Cannes on Udo Kier drama and SXSW selection Swan Song, Sundance action fantasy Mayday, Tribeca winner Queen Of Glory, and Sundance Midnight entry A Glitch In The Matrix.

Torres and Magnolia international sales director Marie Zeniter attended Cannes for what proved to be a productive trip.

Rights to Swan Song have gone in the UK (Peccadillo), Germany and Austria (Koch Media), Switzerland (Ascot Elite), Australia and New Zealand (Icon), Scandinavia, Baltics, Iceland (NonStop), Canada (Mongrel...

Also sold at the festival were Mayday, Queen Of Glory and A Glitch In The Matrix.

Magnolia Pictures International has reported a number of sales deals on its Cannes slate titles Swan Song, Mayday, Queen Of Glory and A Glitch In The Matrix.

With Udo Kier starring as a retired small-town hairdresser for director Todd Stephens, comedy Swan Song sold to Peccadillo for the UK, Koch Media for Germany/Austria, Ascot Elite for Switzerland, Icon for Australia/New Zealand, Nonstop for Scandinavia, the Baltics and Iceland, Mongrel for Canada, Telefilms for Latin America, Tongariro for Poland and Penny Black for airlines.

Ben Wheatley’s ‘In The Earth’ is playing in the main competition of the Swiss festival.

UK director Ben Wheatley’s in The Earth is among the competition contenders in this year’s 20th Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival which will take place as a hybrid edition from July 2-10 in Switzerland.

It is taking place under the interim directorship of Loïc Valceschini before a new head, Pierre-Yves Walder, takes up the reins in July.

The event includes 55 films, eight short films, eight immersive installations and two TV productions. Among the special guests will be legendary VFX artist Volker Engel,...