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Pressman Film, the indie producer founded by the late Edward Pressman and behind classics from Wall Street to American Psycho, has broken new ground in film financing with the first slate listed on popular investment platform Republic.

The offering launched Sept. 5 with a goal of $1.5 million to develop a minimum of six new projects. It’s raised over $1.7 million and could see additional coin by the time it closes on Friday.

This is not crowdfunding but equity investment from — so far — 295 investors with Pressman offering rather generous returns if a project does make it into production as the indie seeks to create a brand and attract a pool of followers and potential financiers going forward. Investors can also reap premiums at other milestones including a portion of Pressman Film’s producing fee and a portion of their share of the net profits.

“We’re the first slate they [Republic] offered in this way,...

Oh, Canada debuting this week on the Croisette is high time to see lesser-seen Schrader on the Criterion Channel, who’ll debut an 11-title series including the likes of Touch, The Canyons, and Patty Hearst, while Old Boyfriends (written with his brother Leonard) and his own “Adventures in Moviegoing” are also programmed. Five films by Jean Grémillon, a rather underappreciated figure of French cinema, will be showing

Series-wise, there’s an appreciation of the synth soundtrack stretching all the way back to 1956’s Forbidden Planet while, naturally, finding its glut of titles in the ’70s and ’80s––Argento and Carpenter, obviously, but also Tarkovsky and Peter Weir. A Prince and restorations of films by Bob Odenkirk, Obayashi, John Greyson, and Jacques Rivette (whose Duelle is a masterpiece of the highest order) make streaming debuts. I Am Cuba, Girlfight, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Dazed and Confused are June’s Criterion Editions.

When Barbra Streisand’s “Yentl” opened on Nov. 18, 1983, directing was very much a man’s world. In the 1970s, there had been a few inroads for women. Italian director Lina Wertmuller was nominated for best director for 1976’s “Seven Beauties” Stateside, actress Barbara Loden, who was married to Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan, wrote, directed and starred in the acclaimed 1970 indie drama “Wanda,” which won best foreign film at the Venice Film Festival. She never followed up with another movie and died of breast cancer in 1980.

There was also Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”), Claudia Weill (“Girlfriends”), Martha Coolidge (“Not a Pretty Picture”), Joan Tewkesbury (“Old Boyfriends”) and Joan Darling (“First Love”). But those filmmakers ran into brick walls when they tried to set up projects with the major studios. The late Silver told Vanity Fair in 2021 that a studio executive didn’t mince his word: “Feature films are expensive to make and expensive to market,...

Oscar-nominated actress Amy Irving is ready to release her first album.

The performer tells The Hollywood Reporter that Born In a Trunk, featuring 10 cover songs pulled from her life and career, will be released digitally on April 7. “Why Don’t You Do Right?” — the first single which Irving sang as Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit — will be available on digital platforms on March 3.

Irving, 69, made her film debut in Brian De Palma’s Carrie in 1976 and two years later was in supernatural thriller The Fury. Her role in Yentl earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress and she scored best actress Golden Globes nominations for Crossing Delancey and Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna. She also has a number of stage credits, earning an Obie Award for her off-Broadway performance in a production of The Road to Mecca.

Born In a Trunk also features Irving covering songs...

The November 2020 lineup for The Criterion Channel has been unveiled, toplined by a Claire Denis retrospective, including the brand-new restoration of Beau travail, along with Chocolat, No Fear, No Die, Nenette and Boni, Towards Mathilde, 35 Shots of Rum, and White Material.

There will also be a series celebrating 30 years of The Film Foundation, featuring a new interview with Martin Scorsese by Ari Aster, as well as a number of their most essential restorations, including films by Jia Zhangke, Ritwik Ghatak, Luchino Visconti, Shirley Clarke, Med Hondo, and more.

There’s also David Lynch’s new restoration of The Elephant Man, retrospectives dedicated to Ngozi Onwurah, Nadav Lapid, and Terence Nance, a new edition of the series Queersighted titled Queer Fear, featuring a new conversation between series programmer Michael Koresky and filmmaker and critic Farihah Zaman, and much more.

See the lineup below and learn more on the official site.

“What happens when you see them again?” reads the tagline for Old Boyfriends (1979), the directorial debut of screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury, a question which can just as easily be applied to re-experiencing this recuperation of a formidably dire psychological portrait. How the title did not generate a score of directing opportunities for Tewkesbury (who would steadily work as a director in television) marks this as one of many underrated masterstrokes directed by a woman whose box office failings resulted in stopping short her auteurdom.

Of course, Tewkesbury remains a name synonymous with the New American Cinema of the 1970s thanks to her collaborations with Robert Altman as screenwriter on Thieves Like Us (1974) and Nashville (1975), but what she accomplished with her first feature is the portrait of a woman in full tilt nervous breakdown scrabbling at finding a meaning she may have left behind in her past relationships.…

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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.Newsd.A. Pennebaker, best known for his cinéma vérité-style documentaries (including Don't Look Back and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) has died at the age of 94. Author Toni Morrison, the first black woman to win the Nobel prize in Literature, has also died, leaving behind a legacy of inimitable influence upon generations of readers. Her career was recently the subject of a documentary, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Recommended VIEWINGThe estate of Charlie Chaplin has made available a treasure trove of rare videos from the archives, which also features home videos like this one, entitled "Charlie Chaplin Swallows Easter Egg." Museum of Modern Art curator Anne Morra discusses Ida Lupino's Never Fear, Lupino's first credited directorial effort, in a new video essay. The official teaser for Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0, the final film...

Old Boyfriends. Courtesy of Rialto Pictures.Old Boyfriends, Joan Tewkesbury’s 1979 directorial debut, is ripe for rediscovery. Penned by Paul and Leonard Schrader, the film features a top-notch cast including Talia Shire as an inquisitive psychologist and John Belushi, Richard Jordan, and Keith Carradine as men from her past whom she seeks out in a journey of self-knowledge. The film is neither a broad comedy nor a melodrama, but rather an eccentric mélange. At the time of its release the film received mixed reviews, with many critics uncertain about its tonal digressions and the nuances of the Schrader brothers’ screenplay. Now decades removed from the auteurist boom of the New Hollywood era, Old Boyfriends feels fresh—pleasingly off-kilter and presented through the perspective of a female character who doesn’t fit into Hollywood cliché, the film seems more likely to be appreciated by a young audience primed to seek out...

When Greta Gerwig’s already-lauded “Lady Bird” hits limited release later this week, the actress-writer-director will join a long line of other female filmmakers who used their directorial debut (this one is Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, just for clarity’s sake) to not only launch their careers, but make a huge mark while doing it. Gerwig’s Saoirse Ronan-starring coming-of-age tale is an instant classic, and one that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has enjoyed Gerwig’s charming work as a screenwriter in recent years, bolstered by her ear for dialogue and her love of complicated and complex leading ladies.

While Hollywood still lags when it comes to offering up opportunities to its most talented female filmmakers, many of them have overcome the dismal stats to deliver compelling, interesting, and unique first features. In short, they’re good filmmakers who made good movies,...

Chicago – If one actress can represent an era of classic and cult movies, P.J. Soles is a pretty good candidate. Her string of roles in high profile and familiar films from the mid 1970s to early ‘80s including “Carrie,” “Halloween,” “Breaking Away.” “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” “Private Benjamin” and “Stripes.”

From rocking with The Ramones to getting the “Aunt Jemima Treatment” from a young Bill Murray, Soles stood out as a fun leading actress and best friend during a more innocent age of “Star Wars” Hollywood. She was born in Germany as Pamela Jayne Harden to an American mother and Dutch father, and in her father’s capacity working international insurance, lived all over the world. She ended up going to college at Briar Cliff in New York State, which led to an early modeling and acting career in Manhattan. She went by her initials, P.J., and has...

Kiss of the Spider Woman scribe Leonard Schrader has been named head of the AFI Conservatory's graduate screenwriting program. In his new post as senior filmmaker-in-residence: screenwriting, Schrader will oversee all screenwriting faculty at the Conservatory and teach both first- and second-year fellows. "We are thrilled to have such an outstanding member of the filmmaking and higher-education community as a member of the Conservatory's core faculty," Conservatory dean Sam Grogg said. "Len is a master of his art form, and screenwriting fellows will learn much under his tutelage." Schrader's professional career spans four decades and includes several projects on which he collaborated with his younger brother and AFI alumnus, writer-director Paul Schrader. The brothers collaborated on such films as The Yakuza, Blue Collar and Old Boyfriends. Leonard Schrader went on to write several successful Japanese films, including The Man Who Stole the Sun, before earning an Oscar nomination for Spider Woman in 1986. He made his directorial debut in 1991 with Naked Tango. As an educator, Schrader taught the screenwriting Master's thesis class at USC from 1996-99 and was an associate professor of film at Chapman University from 1999-2003.