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Point of No Return: Digital Nostalgia in Backrooms
Backrooms (2026)
Like the internet lore for which it is named, Backrooms (2026) encapsulates a paradox of embodiment and time. Kane Parsons’s feature film—an adaptation of his cult YouTube series of the same title—has its origins in a photograph of a former furniture store… Read more
With The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal Clumsily Exhumes 200 Years of Zombie Girls
The Bride!
Whether Doctor Frankenstein likes it or not, the zombie story has always belonged to women. Ever since teenaged political radical Mary Shelley (daughter of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft) poured her maternal anguish into the party game ghost story that eventually… Read more
Review: The New Nikon ZR Shoots RED RAW Footage on a Budget
The Nikon ZR in action
One year after camera giants Nikon and RED Digital Cinema merged, their first collaboration comes with the release of the Nikon ZR full-frame digital cinema camera. The ZR differentiates itself from its mirrorless competitors—whether Panasonic’s LUMIX line, Sony’s FX line… Read more
True Story: I Used My Jeopardy! Winnings to Finance My First Feature
Peter Johnston on Jeopardy!
“What is MAGIC TOWN?” For me, the clues that prompted this response took my whole life to uncover. Film, trivia, and magic have always been triple passions of mine. At 12 years old, my first paying job was as a… Read more
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How Phone-Camera Vérité Defeated Action-Flick Propaganda in the War to Define Minneapolis
As both a resident of Minneapolis and a film and TV critic, it’s been surreal to see my home city become, over the past few weeks, the kind of place you might see in an especially on-the-nose dystopian satire. As thousands of armed, masked ICE agents roam the streets, in SUVs or on foot, everyday Minnesotans have stepped forward to protect their communities. In the aftermath of horrible disasters, survivors often describe the events they witnessed as being like “something out of a movie.” Here, as the ICE occupation stretches week after week, with no meaningful de-escalation and no clear […]
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More 2026 Sundance Quick Takes
As Sundance 2026 wraps and the curtain drops on Park City, the Sundance 2026 awards have been announced. Films fortunate enough to be so honored by Sundance juries gain valuable visibility, boosting their chances at finding greater audiences. Several of the films mentioned in my first round of coverage won awards. However, many of the premieres at Sundance you will likely hear very little about. As director Eugene Hernandez commented at the awards ceremony, out of 16,000 submissions, 150 films were selected for this year’s Sundance. How many festival attendees, no less reviewers, are able to see more than 20-30 […]
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With His “Disrespectful” Remix of Pynchon’s Vineland, PTA Mastered the Art of Adaptation
Adapted Screenplay. It’s often an afterthought: an extra category on the Oscar ballot, an edge in your betting pool. Unlike the rest of the Academy, screenwriters get two shots at an award: one for original screenplay, one for adaptation. If you haven’t sacrificed your career to the cruel gods of screenwriting, “adapting” may seem less … impressive. Isn’t it easier to have a well-paved Autobahn to guide you, rather than hacking your way through virgin story wilderness? Can’t you just “cut-and-paste?” Do we need a whole other category for that? I’ll stop there before the WGA revokes my card. Every […]
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Sundance 2026 Quick Takes
While the East digs out from under feet of snow and ice, Park City is dry as a bone. Desiccated slopes encircling Main Street are gray and bare, devoid of powder or skiers. Meanwhile, Main Street, a pedestrian mall during the festival’s first weekend, is buzzier than ever, packed with Sundancers under sunny skies reveling at the festival’s last rodeo in Utah. The only precipitation in the forecast is another blizzard of great indie films. Last night’s premiere of Once Upon a Time in Harlem was the film’s first public screening ever, and it was met with two standing ovations. […]
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A Tech Writer’s Appreciation of Scott Macaulay
Scott Macaulay’s remarkable three-decade-plus tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Filmmaker, a magazine by and for indie filmmakers, coincided with momentous changes brought on by tech: the almost total supplantation of a century’s worth of film technologies—production, post-production, distribution, exhibition—by digital systems conferring high-end capabilities upon low-cost cameras and PCs, along with the birth of internet websites and online streaming. Scott, with his roaming intellect, taste for experimental theater and film, and open spirit, was the right person at the right time to captain Filmmaker magazine through these epochal transitions. I know, because my association with Filmmaker, the print magazine, and Scott […]
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Why Hedda, Roofman, and F1 Could Still Crash the Oscar Party
Today is the last day of Oscar nominations voting, which brings an end to “phase one” of campaigning. With the noms being announced next Thursday, January 22—at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m. PT—there will be barely enough time to relax before things kick into full gear once again. Now, I can’t imagine being an Academy member and waiting a whole week to fill out my ballot. But unlike us pundits, most voters haven’t spent the last few months obsessively tracking dozens of movies they did not work on. Academy members are hopefully busy making other movies! I can also […]
