The Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Photograph by Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Just after midnight on Friday, Boris Nemtsov, a fifty-five-year-old Russian opposition politician, was gunned down as he walked across a bridge just outside the Kremlin walls. A car drove past, shots rang out, and…

As John Boorman points out, feature films have been around for just over a century, and he’s been making them for half that span. Queen And Country , a sequel to his 1987 masterpiece Hope And Glory , will supposedly be his last—here’s hoping Boorman’s recently announced retirement is as porous as…

I n July, the American pharmaceutical giant AbbVie, maker of the world’s top-selling drug – the arthritis treatment Humira – reached a blockbuster deal to acquire European rival Shire, best known for the attention-deficit medication Adderall. The merger was cheered by Wall Street, not for what the…

Michael Friberg John Kane was on a hell of a winning streak. On July 3, 2009, he walked alone into the high-limit room at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas and sat down at a video poker machine called the Game King. Six minutes later the purple light on the top of the machine flashed, signaling a…

In Memoriam 1942 – 2013 “Roger Ebert loved movies.” RogerEbert.com Reviews Great Movies Chaz's Journal Blogs Far Flungers Channels Contributors Slender Man Nothing is scarier than bad filmmaking. Skate Kitchen A solid hangout movie as well as a band-of-buddies film. Other Reviews BlacKkKlansman A…

O n December 5, 2014, musician Childish Gambino was nominated for two Grammys, for his album Because the Internet (Best Rap Album) and song “3005” (Best Rap Performance). One week later, on December 12, FX ordered a pilot for actor Donald Glover’s comedy Atlanta . A month later, on January 13, the…

Business Insider/Mike Nudelman On Feb. 10, Jason Fyk received a strange Facebook message. "Bro." The message had been sent by someone who wasn't his friend on the social network, someone using the alias "Anthony.*" It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread. Minutes later, the traffic on his…

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site. The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as…

If writing is rewriting, then editing your feature film is really the final rewrite. The editing process is simply an extension of the writing process, only now with visuals and sound (and a lot more technical tools to help, or hinder, the work). Personally, I need some distance from the material to…

America's constitutional democracy is going to collapse. Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by…

Marrakech, 2001 or 2002, maybe, and Errol Morris wants camels. Real, spontaneous camels — the kind you see wandering across the desert in children’s books. In his documentaries, Morris is known for staging and re-creation, for artifice. But in this case, he’s shooting an ad, and in his ads, he has…

“ House of Cards ” Season 3 has only been available in full for a week now, but many have already gulped down the latest adventures of duplicitous politician Frank Underwood ( Kevin Spacey ) and wife Claire ( Robin Wright ) via Netflix. But Beau Willimon doesn’t mind if you don’t binge… At least,…

Last week, Adi Shankar, producer of Dredd and The Grey , released a short film, online, directed by Joseph Kahn, called Power/Rangers . It was, in Kahn’s words, a “de-boot” of the popular 1990s kids’ show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers . It blew up. Saban Entertainment, which owns the Power Rangers…

It’s hard to overstate what a central role Howard Stern’s marriage played in making his shtick palatable to a national audience in the early days of his career. Remove Stern’s oft-discussed association with a smart, serious social worker who deserves sainthood for her ability to put up with her…

As a journalistic essayist, the filmmaker Errol Morris has taken on, among other things, basic matters of truth: Do images lie? And if so, what can we learn from the lie? These are timeless questions that also happen to be timely. The world spent the end of last week, for instance, debating the…

Arm’s length: 45% of Japanese women aged 16-24 are ‘not interested in or despise sexual contact’. More than a quarter of men feel the same way. Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner A i Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first…

If my research of Kickstarter campaigns for film and video taught me anything, I learned the final days of most successful campaigns are wild rides. The Kickstarter for my upcoming feature film CENTS was no exception. Near the end of our Kickstarter, I shared lessons learned from the 15 story beats…

A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The…

For over three weeks, I have been fully immersed in one of the best adventures of my filmmaking career: the Kickstarter campaign for my first feature film, CENTS . Running this Kickstarter has been a full-time job with so many unexpected twists and turns, you wonder who exactly is writing this…

Ida Film Still.Photograph: PR R ecently, someone from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles asked Ewa Puszczynska , Ida’s Polish producer, to send them the script of our film so they could deposit it in their core library collection. Ewa rang me, worried: what exactly should…

At 35, Shimiken is the king of Japanese porn, a $20 billion industry that produces more than double the number of adult films that America does. The only problem: He's part of an endangered species—1 of only 70 (maybe just 30, by some estimates) male actors in a business that churns out thousands of…

Home Art Blog Events Community Programs About Us Membership . Search Home Art Blog Events Community What we do Programs About Us Membership Login . blog — mar 04, 2015 – Save Screenshot of Leonard Nimoy in Y2K Family Survival Guide (1999). In December, Perry Che n organized a panel discussion at the…

Movie: Noah Director: Darren Aronofsky Writer: Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel U.S. box office: $101.2 million (32nd best of 2014) Worldwide box office: $362.6 million Days in U.S. theatrical release: 84 Rotten Tomatoes rating: 77 Metacritic score: 68 Letterboxd average grade: 3/5 CinemaScore: C The…

S ome factual statements I can definitively make about Errol Morris as of the morning of February 9, 2015, four days after his 67th birthday: He met me in a room off the lobby of his hotel in Los Angeles. He was wearing black leather sneakers and gray socks that exposed a few inches of calf when he…

In 1983 a teenaged Andre Young ventured into a Hollywood punk rock club and West Coast hip-hop changed forever Aficionados of West Coast hip-hop like to think that our geographical brand is on every piece of rap product consumed between Atlanta and Sydney. Yet the essence of hip-hop culture in 1982…

William Powell, the author of The Anarchist Cookbook , in 1971 © JP Laffont/Sygma/Corbis O n September 10, 1976, during an evening flight from New York to Chicago, a bearded passenger handed a sealed envelope to an attendant. The note began: “One, this plane is hijacked.” In the rest of the letter,…

The Not Ready For Prime Time Players: Garrett Morris, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi (inside) Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and Jane Curtain This weekend, NBC aired a special to mark the occasion of Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary. I thought I’d republish an interview I conducted in…

With just an idea and an iPhone, I crowdsourced the entire recording process (and then some) on my quest for musical glory by Brett Goldstein aka Monte Del Monte I grew up genuinely believing that I would become a rock star. But then somewhere around sophomore year of high school, I became a…

Will Smith’s new movie, Focus , hits theaters this week. It is just the latest odd career choice for Smith (maybe the last, as he’s playing a major role in a superhero movie coming up). He is still among the biggest movie stars in the world, but I’m guessing most of the people reading this haven’t…

The slacker mirror sees what it wants to see. When that mirror is called “Boyhood,” it sees the makings of a masterpiece in the plot-free tale of a winsome pre-verbal child of 6 growing up in real time on camera into a winsome, slightly more verbal collegian who kind of likes photography, magic…

The way the shot is framed, you can only see Bill Belichick’s eyes. It’s the night of the Super Bowl and he is surrounded by the Patriots defense. The man who is publicly so reticent is yelling so loudly that he’s hoarse. “All right, fellas,” he shouts. “It’s the same thing we talked about in the…

Eight movies will vie for Best Picture this Sunday and not one of them was directed by David O. Russell. Given recent Oscar history, this seems a little weird. For three of the last four years, a Russell film — whether it was 2010’s The Fighter , 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook , or 2013’s American…

W ill Forte greets me outside the bathroom, extending his hand as I zip up my fly. We are at the production offices of his new television show on the far northwest side of the San Fernando Valley, and I’ve shown up early for our interview. It’s still 12 minutes until we’re scheduled to speak, but…