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...

Latest Issue — Spring 2026

A pop star wearing an ornate headpiece and donning a long cape ascends a flight of stairs backstage; behind her are back-up dancers. They are all washed in blue and yellow stage lights, cast in shadow.

Facing the Music: David Lowery and Chloé Zhao Dig Into Mother Mary

David Lowery and Chloé Zhao have been friends and collaborators since January 2012, when they met as fellows in the annual Sundance Screenwriters Lab. In the years since, both directors have found artistic and commercial success. Much as Zhao has alternated between Nomadland and Hamnet on one hand and The Eternals on the other, Lowery has given us deeply personal films like The Green Knight as well as mainstream fare like Peter Pan & Wendy. In fact, it’s the delta between those two approaches to filmmaking, and the identity questions that arose while switching between them, that inspired his latest […]

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Features

A film crew sets up on the edge of a tall hill on Vancouver Island. The sun sets in the sky behind them.

Northern Exposure: Chandler Levack and Sophy Romvari Chat Mile End Kicks and Blue Heron

Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks and Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron make time travel feel possible. Levack retreats into the beer-drenched, laissez-faire vibe of Montreal’s indie rock scene circa 2011; Romvari reflects on her Hungarian immigrant family’s domestic struggles on Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. In Mile End Kicks (Sumerian Pictures), 23-year-old Grace (Barbie Ferreira) is an avatar for Levack, a music critic at a Toronto alt-weekly who leaves her bro-dominated publication for a creative summer in Montreal. She’s supposed to write a short book for the 33 ⅓ series about Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Instead, Grace loses herself […]

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  • A woman crouches in a wooded area; a plastic t-rex looms behind her. Talk Is Cheap: Radu Jude on Kontinental ’25

    From Pearl White’s Perils of Pauline to Antonioni’s aimless, quasi-somnambulant heroines, the wandering woman has a venerable history in cinema. The figure has given filmmakers a vehicle for formal experimentation and narrative risk and stories organized less around destination than duration, encounter, and drift. With Kontinental ’25, Radu Jude continues his exploration of wandering women, this time through Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff reeling after the suicide of her most recent evictee—a former athlete turned squatter living in abandoned buildings in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca. Guilt or shame? Humiliation or distress? Jude doesn’t delineate Orsolya’s feelings so much as […]

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  • A Black woman wears a brown vest over a yellow button-up and faces an older white man, who wears a denim jacket and a blue, green and black striped sweater and leans against a doorway in a room made of chipped, dark wood. Steven Soderbergh on Making The Christophers With Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen

    Twisty as a Hitchcock movie but not a thriller, Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a two-hander for two great actors. Michaela Coel plays Lori Butler, a serious painter with a side gig as an art forger. Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, an art world star in the 1960s and ’70s who hasn’t made any work of note in decades. Julian’s children, who hate him, concoct a scheme in which Lori is smuggled into Julian’s dilapidated five-story house as a temporary assistant. She is tasked with finding “The Christophers,” a series of portraits that Julian began in his prime but never finished. If […]

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  • A Black man with mutton chops and a tall red hat points to a camera he is holding down by his waist. A filmmaking crew is out of focus in the background behind him. Personal Effects: Boots Riley and His Collaborators on Crafting I Love Boosters

    Boots Riley has directed two movies and one TV show over the past decade, but he’s been telling stories through music for more than 30 years. “I usually think about my songs the same way I think about movies,” said Riley, whose Oakland-based hip hop group The Coup started 35 years ago. “Music was a way for me to cheaply make movies.”  Now, music fuels his movies in other ways, though he’s still on the lookout for inventive ways to stretch his budget. Riley officially transitioned into filmmaking around 2015, when his time at the Sundance Labs laid the groundwork […]

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Other articles

  • Woman wearing hijabs and long dresses stand in a circle. Their image is colored with a hazy yellow background and hazy purple foreground. Dreams Deferred: How Iranian Filmmakers Pursue Liberation Under Unbearable Constraints

    The people of Iran find themselves suspended in a historical moment of great uncertainty. On December 28, 2025, in the midst of a major economic crisis exacerbated in part by U.S. sanctions, shopkeepers and vendors in several commercial centers throughout the country went on strike. The protests grew larger in number, culminating in early January as Iran’s largest uprising since the 1979 Revolution. The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) responded by imposing an internet blackout to facilitate the indiscriminate murder of protesters and civilians alike. Thousands were killed in the largest massacre in the nation’s history, and the periodic protests […]

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  • Three men stand behind a concession stand with a collage of cinematic ephemera hung on the walls behind them. One on the left wears an orange parka and scoops popcorn into a bag. The one in the center wears an off-pink shirt and smiles, looking at the man scooping popcorn. A man in a blue pullover leans on the counter and smiles. How Ridgewood Became New York City’s Communal Cinema Hub

    A white, windowless storefront in Ridgewood, Queens, has the distinction of being the neighborhood’s first new cinema in nearly 100 years. Co-founded last year by filmmaker John Wilson alongside collaborators Davis Fowlkes and Cosmo Bjorkenheim, Low Cinema features 42 seats (sourced second-hand), digital and 16mm projection, and even a papier-mâché E.T. Handmade by Wilson, the cheerful alien hovers beneath the ceiling by the front door.  The day I visited the microcinema in late February, I was greeted by a veritable cinematic symphony. Corn was freshly popping, ticket holders poured in for an afternoon showing of Nirvanna the Band the Show […]

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  • An elderly man wears a bright pink shirt, glasses hanging around his neck. He stands among shelves of film prints in an archive. K. Austin Collins Salutes Frederick Wiseman

    I think of the work of Frederick Wiseman, and my mind is drawn, immediately, to the faces. The blank stare of a monkey whose head, stem still attached, has been painstakingly severed from its body, for the sake of science, in Primate (1974). Young Black and Latino students in Harlem parsing the immediate ramifications of the Rodney King beating in High School II (1994). The sinewed despair that confronts us as the working-class people of Titicut Follies (1967), Hospital (1970), Welfare (1975), Public Housing (1997), In Jackson Heights (2015), and so many other of Wiseman’s films navigate the life-and-death intricacies […]

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