MovieMaker

Climate of the Hunter director Mickey Reece never considered a move to Hollywood. A musician-turned-indie filmmaker, he started making at least two low-budget films a year, on average, with a cadre of friends from around Oklahoma City. "I'm just hanging out with people who are into the same things as me," he says. "It's like playing in a band." Reece has a wonderful way with understatement. His ha...

Charlie Kaufman's new film I'm Thinking of Ending Things returns to two of his most familiar subjects: the struggle to communicate clearly, and the failures of memory. "Obviously, we live in memory, and it's essential to our sense of self — to our understanding of the world and our understanding of ourselves — and it is elusive and it is inaccurate," he says. But Kaufman explains how inaccuracies...

Fugitive Dreams , the new film from Jason Neulander, is an allegorical road movie that follows two homeless people across a timeless American landscape. It touches on mental health, addiction — and love. Primarily black and white, the film is intended as a kind of Waiting for Godot . A large section of it takes place on board a train, and we talked with Neulander about all the challenges that that...

Chemical Hearts star and executive producer Lili Reinhart and writer-director Richard Tanne set out to make a quiet, meaningful high school film that isn't bubbly or past for short attention spans. The result is a teenage love story for introverts. In the film, based on a novel by Krystal Sutherland, a high school senior named Henry (played by Austin Abrams) is assigned to edit the school paper wi...

Spree director and co-writer Eugene Kotlyarenko says there's thing we all have in common: "We wake up in the morning, and we kind of look at our phones first thing to see if we got any notifications, any sort of news that could be pertinent to how much people care about us, right? It’s the perfect sort of like narcissism-like reflection machine. And it gives us dopamine hits we need to make us fee...

Before the Fire director Charlie Buhler and writer-star Jenna Lyng Adams didn't have millions of dollars for their sci-fi drama, but they did have access to a few things they knew could be very cinematic — planes, Humvees, a farm, and a house that needed burning down. In the purest DIY, indie filmmaking fashion, they reverse-engineered Adams' script, using what they had. And ended up predicting CO...

Daryl Davis is a Black musician who befriends white supremacists to try to get them to give up their old ways. He's led more than 200 to renounce racism, and more than 50 Klansmen have surrendered their robes to him. Years ago, he was playing piano in a Maryland truck stop when a man who turned out to be a Klansman said Davis was the first Black man he'd ever heard who could play like Jerry Lee Le...

The Rental , the directorial debut from actor Dave Franco, is about two couples who find a beautiful vacation rental that isn't as idyllic as it seems. There's a very engrossing build in the script, when things get almost impossibly suspenseful, and one of the reasons it's so effective is because of Dan Stevens and Sheila Vand, our guests today. They bring a grounded, can't-look-away dynamic to th...

Gina Prince-Bythewood broke through as a director 20 years ago with Love & Basketball , which us returning to drive-ins this summer. But she'd always wanted to make an action movie, and finally did it with Netflix's The Old Guard, starring Charlize Theron as the leader of a band of warriors trying to do good in the modern world. Spoiler alert: They're hundreds of years old. We talk about how Holly...

Joe and Anthony Russo are the hosts of Russo Brothers Pizza Fillm School — and the directors of Avengers: Endgame , the biggest movie ever. The Russo Brothers talk to us this episode about how the 1980 cult film Flash Gordon helped inspire them through a tough time for their hometown, Cleveland,. They also talk about how the film's very unconventional middle section made an impression that informe...

Werner Herzog has directed more than 70 films, but Family Romance LLC is the first he's directed in Japanese, a language he doesn't speak. The film is about a real-life Japanese company, Family Romance LLC, that rents out fathers and other loved ones to families in need. Herzog himself was fatherless from a very young age, but he says that isn't what attracted him to Family Romance LLC. In fact, h...

David Dobkins got back to his roots for Netflix's Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, in which Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams play an Icelandic musical duo who dream of winning Europe's continent-wide annual music competition. Dobkins got his first directing job on the video for Tupac Shakur's video for "I Get Around," and went on to shoot the Ridley Scott-produced Clay Pigeons , his...

Babyteeth, the new film from Shannon Murphy, sneaks up on you. The film follows Milla, a seriously ill teenager played by Eliza Scanlen, who falls for a small-time drug dealer and pill poppr named Moses — played by Toby Wallace, who perfectly captures the too-beautiful-for-this world charisma of so many addicts with a gravitational pull on those around them. Milla's parents are played by the excel...

With You Don't Nomi , filmmaker Jeffrey McHale uses thoughtful voiceover and deft editing to take Showgirls seriously. Is Paul Verhoeven's 1995 bomb, starring a very committed Elizabeth Berkley as aspiring topless dancer Nomi Malone, truly as bad as critics claimed at the time? Or is it a misunderstood satire? Or both? Whatever the case may be, McHale shows how Showgirls belongs now to its audienc...

Becky stars Lulu Wilson as a 13-year-old battling neo-Nazi prison escapees led by a very awful guy plays by Kevin James. It's not for everyone. We talked with directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion about what kinds of conversations you need to have when your lead actor is a child surrounded by cinematic gore. If you like this episode, or even if you don't, consider giving to these charities ....

"At the Drive-In," the new documentary from our guest Alexander Monelli, is about a band of movie lovers who saved a local drive-in. At the start of the story, the Mahoning Drive-In theater in Leighton, Pennsylvania, is dying because it can't afford a new $50,000 digital projector. Then a group of young movie lovers sweep in and start showing classic movies — often while dressed as their favorite...

Today our guest is Kyle MacLachlan, one of our favorite actors ever. He's one of the stars of Capone , in which Tom Hardy plays legendary gangster Alphone Capone, rendered almost helpless by the syphilis that racked his body and brain in his later years. Much has been made of how supposedly weird Capone is, with its extended fantasy sequences, courtesy of writer-director Josh Trank. But in terms o...

Blood Quantum , from writer-director Jeff Barnaby, is a crackling zombie set on tribal land — where indigenous people are immune from whatever is turning white people into zombies. It works as a straight-ahead, cheerfully grisly horror movie, or as a meditation on colonialism and capitalism. In this episode, Jeff discusses his influences, from Evil Dead to Night of the Living Dead , and how he use...

The late screenwriter Blake Snyder famously originated a concept called Save the Cat to describe the moment when a film's protagonist wins viewers over — when he or she saves a cat, for example. The creators of the new horror film 1BR are well-aware of the Save the Cat concept, and rejected it in almost every way possible. If you've seen the trailer for 1BR , (and if not, a minor spoiler ensues) y...

We're in the golden age of online film festivals: For the first time, movie lovers can watch brand-new, lovingly curated films from the comfort of home, without having to look for parking, stand in line, or beg for tickets. Are we looking for the bright side in a sad situation? Well, yeah. But if you're going to watch — or host — an online film festival, you'll want to be conscious of these online...

Extraction is the best action movie of the year. Granted, it's a weird year. But even in a normal one, it's hard to imagine a more impressive sequence that the 12-minute, seemingly continuous shot in Extraction in which Chris Hemsworth leads a young boy through unbelievable carnage, unbelievably quickly, doing stunts that would be impressive even with lots of editing and fixes in post. The reason...

When Rachel Mason was growing up in West Hollywood in the 1980s, her parents, Karen and Barry Mason, went to work each day at a bookstore — but not any bookstore. It was Circus of Books, which became an iconic LGBTQ location by selling erotica, magazines and sex toys at a time when homophobia ran rampant. At one point, her parents became targets of a Reagan Administration hellbent on locking peopl...

We Summon the Darkness and My Friend Dahmer , two of prolific director Marc Meyers latest films, unfurl almost opposite takes on serial killers. Dahmer is a sober, anti-sensationalist exploration of how a confused teen became a reviled cannibal. Darkness turns a Satanic Panic-era killing spree into a headbangers' ball of dark comedy. Meyers, as you can probably guess, has a lot of range. We Summon...

If you're getting through our global quarantine by playing video games, you're in good company: Alexandre Amancio, the former Ubisoft artistic director who headed up on Assassin's Creed: Revealations and Assassin's Creed: Unity , has been playing with fans online. Amancio spoke to us for the latest MovieMaker Interviews podcast, where he talked about his new company, Reflector Entertainment, and t...

Paul Scheer is one of the best people on screen ( Black Monday ! The Disaster Artist !) and in podcasting ( Unspooled ! How Did This Get Made ?) This week, he talks us through this crazy situation we're all in — and about how talking and a sense of humor will keep us sane. He's hosting a live episode of Unspooled with Amy Nicholson on Monday night at 8:30 p.m. PT/11:30 ET on Earwolf's YouTube chan...