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Chris Wilcha has spent decades in the film industry, yet found his career taking unexpected turns. Starting in his twenties as an ambitious documentarian, he made “The Target Shoots First,” a well-received look at his job in music marketing. But making a living as an independent filmmaker was difficult, so commercial work soon followed. Over the years, Wilcha tried starting other documentary projects but rarely finished them.

In “Flipside,” Wilcha revisits this path with reflection and humor. The film centers around a New Jersey record store where he worked as a teen, Flipside Records, that now struggles to stay relevant. Wilcha’s goal was to document the store’s history as it faced an uncertain future. Yet the film becomes much more, exploring Wilcha’s own journey from those early days with high ideals to his current life with a family and career in television commercials.

We learn of unfinished...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Dead Don’t Hurt (Viggo Mortensen)

Though The Dead Don’t Hurt gradually becomes Vivienne’s story as Holger disappears to fight, his presence still defines the film in strange ways. While Mortensen certainly looks younger than 65 and I’m not one of those people who busts out a calculator to determine what is or isn’t an appropriate age-gap relationship, Mortensen casting himself opposite Krieps in the romantic (even action hero) lead role he’s clearly too old for (beyond maybe financing requirements) reeks of ego. Maybe this wouldn’t matter as much if he dramatized these proceedings in a way more compelling than just its interesting conceptual ideas of immigrants in the west going through the passage of time together.

Cardio is good. Sony Pictures Classics’ 4k rerelease of Run Lola Run had a healthy weekend, opening to an estimated $154k on 275 screens. This is the 25th anniversary of the U.S. debut of Tom Tykwer’s German experimental thriller that sees flame-haired Lola (Franka Potente) on the move in Berlin, pounding the pavement to come up with 100,000 Deutschmarks in 20 minutes to save her boyfriend’s life. (This was before the euro arrived). See Deadline interview here. A handful of rereleases/restorations have been box office stars post-Covid and this is another indie win.

A24’s Tuesday, a modern-day fairy tale with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, launched to $26k on two screens. Daina O. Pusic’s directorial debut premiered at Telluride. The modern-day fairy tale had sold out Q&As shows throughout the weekend and expands to a moderate nationwide footprint next week.

Utopia reunited with Shiva Baby (and Bottoms) star Rachel Sennott...

In A Violent Nature, an undead murderous monster’s slow striding through the woods, has generated IFC Films’ second-best opening ever since its indie horror hit Late Night With The Devil in March.

The artsy slasher written and directed by Chris Nash will see an estimated weekend gross of $2.1 million on 1,426 screens, IFC’s widest opening ever, and a no. 8 spot at the domestic box office.

Late Night, by Cameron and Colin Cairnes, which opened to $2.8 million at 1,034 locations, is pushing $10 million. It returns to theaters June 6 and runs through the weekend on about 500 screens.

In A Violent Nature “has been steadily making waves for redefining the classic slasher genre” since its Sundance premiere, said Scott Shooman, head of AMC Networks Film Group, calling Nash’s feature debut “a film that will have a lasting impact in the horror space.”

At 87% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, the film is one...

In “Flipside,” documentary filmmaker Chris Wilcha grapples with personal regrets and middle age through the lens of the documentary projects he started but never finished. The 96-minute doc, which premiered last year at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival, looks at those abandoned ideas including one about television writer David Milch and his connection to jazz photographer Herman Leonard; a passion project on the New Jersey record store where Wilcha worked as a teenager and a look at radio host Ira Glass’ attempts to make a musical.

Writer/director Judd Apatow executive produced “Flipside.” Apatow met Wilcha in 2009 when he hired him to make a behind-the-scenes movie about the making of “Funny People.” Wilcha moved his family of four from New York to Los Angeles to work on the project with the idea that he would become a successful documentary filmmaker. But when that career didn’t take off, Wilcha began a lucrative career making commercials.

Few big new studio wide releases, yes, but Viggo Mortensen’s latest is on 700 screens, plus limited openings for Chris Wilcha’s Flipside, Judd Apatow EP, and Spanish animated, Oscar-nominated Robot Dreams from Neon. Bleecker Street’s family drama Ezra and IFC Films’ arthouse slasher In A Violent Nature are technically wide but both well under 1,500 screens.

Viggo Mortensen directed, wrote and stars in Western The Dead Don’t Hurt presented by Shout! Studios on 730 screens. The story of star-crossed lovers on the western U.S. frontier in the 1860s sees Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps), a fiercely independent woman, settle in Nevada with Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Mortensen). But the outbreak of the Civil War separates them as Olsen goes to fight with the Union army, leaving Vivienne alone in a town full of corrupt officials. Premiered in Toronto, see Deadline review. It’s Mortensen’s second outing behind the camera since 2020’s Falling.

Image: Oscilloscope Laboratories You don’t have to be of a certain age to appreciate everything Chris Wilcha sets out to do in his new documentary Flipside, but it certainly helps. The way this project speaks to the Gen X experience, especially if you’ve ever thought of yourself as an artist,...

Image: Oscilloscope Laboratories

You don’t have to be of a certain age to appreciate everything Chris Wilcha sets out to do in his new documentary Flipside, but it certainly helps. The way this project speaks to the Gen X experience, especially if you’ve ever thought of yourself as an artist,...

With Chris Wilcha’s recommended documentary Flipside opening today — including at NYC’s IFC Center — from Oscilloscope, we’re reposting Vikram Murthri’s deep dive interview below. — Editor In his first feature, The Target Shoots First, Chris Wilcha documented his tenure at Columbia House, the mail-order music service whose ads famously promised “12 CDs for a penny.” Then a recent NYU philosophy graduate, Wilcha landed the job partly due to his familiarity with “alternative culture,” a burgeoning new market at the time (Nirvana’s In Utero was soon to be released), and brought a sardonic Gen X sensibility to chronicling his time […]

The post Hard Drives Full of Abandoned Projects: Chris Wilcha on Flipside first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

With Chris Wilcha’s recommended documentary Flipside opening today — including at NYC’s IFC Center — from Oscilloscope, we’re reposting Vikram Murthri’s deep dive interview below. — Editor In his first feature, The Target Shoots First, Chris Wilcha documented his tenure at Columbia House, the mail-order music service whose ads famously promised “12 CDs for a penny.” Then a recent NYU philosophy graduate, Wilcha landed the job partly due to his familiarity with “alternative culture,” a burgeoning new market at the time (Nirvana’s In Utero was soon to be released), and brought a sardonic Gen X sensibility to chronicling his time […]

The post Hard Drives Full of Abandoned Projects: Chris Wilcha on Flipside first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Fifteen years ago, writer/director Judd Apatow hired documentary filmmaker Chris Wilcha to film a behind-the-scenes movie about the making of “Funny People” and changed Wilcha’s life forever when the documentarian moved from New York to Los Angeles to work on the project. After he was done with the shoot, Wilcha had a hard time finding documentary work and ultimately settled into a life of directing commercials, returning to his first love of non-fiction filmmaking only sporadically as he accumulated hard drive after hard drive of footage from unfinished projects. Apatow was stunned to learn what an effect he had had on Wilcha’s life. “I didn’t even know that he moved to L.A. for the job,” Apatow told IndieWire, “and that his mom has been mad at me for decades.”

The unexpected connections between people and the unknown ways in which they affect each other are...

Chicago – The Audience is the determiner for the Award Winners of the 11th Chicago Film Critics Film Festival, which took play from May 3rd-9th, 2024. The recipients for the 2024 Rotten Tomatoes Audience Award Winners are for Narrative Feature “Ghostlight,’ directed by Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan, Documentary Feature “Flipside” by Christopher Wilcha and the Short Films “Bob’s Funeral” by Jack Dunphy and “Welcome to the Enclave” by Sarah Lasley.

The 11th Ccff

Photo credit: ChicagoCriticsFilmFestival.com

The 11th Chicago Critics Film Festival is the the only such festival in the country curated by film critics, and highlights the 2024 films from the early year festivals like Sundance, SXSW and more. Below is the Five Best Films from HollywoodChicago.com Editor and Film Critic/Writer Patrick McDonald.

Five Best Films of 2024 Ccff, Audio Overview by Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com

The Chicago Critics Film Festival Audience Awards are sponsored by Rotten...

Chicago – The 2024 Chicago Critics Film Festival Day Four – Monday, May 6th – presents a film about music dreams and a documentary on a music store. “Dandelion” is written and directed by Nicole Riegel and “Flipside” by Chris Wilcha are the centerpiece screenings. For the full schedule, info and tickets, click Ccff May 6th. For individual films, click titles below.

Dandelion

Dandelion

Photo credit: ChicagoCriticsFilmFestival.com

Dandelion (KiKi Layne) is a struggling Cincinnati singer-songwriter in a downward spiral, takes a last-ditch-effort gig at a motorcycle rally in South Dakota where she meets Casey (Thomas Doherty), a guitarist who walked away from his dream long ago. As Dandelion joins Casey’s nomadic group of struggling musicians, the kindred spirits make music together and strike up a whirlwind romance.

Capsule Review: This is a passionate meditation on young love and the sensitive artist trying to interpret it. The love is as much about the...

"It's beautiful and inspiring." Oscilloscope Labs has revealed an official trailer for a documentary film titled Flipside, which first premiered last year at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival. It's the latest creation from doc filmmaker Chris Wilcha, who worked for "This American Life" and also made a few docs, including Knock Knock It's Tig Notaro in 2015 and his breakout The Target Shoots First. Flipside is his comical attempt to save a New Jersey record store and confront a mid-life crisis. TIFF adds: "In the process of looking back, he gets inspired to revisit the half-finished documentaries that exist only on his hard drives. He pulls up old interviews that no one has seen with creative people who faced their own crossroads, including radio host Ira Glass, writer Starlee Kine, jazz photographer Herman Leonard, and television writer David Milch. The passage of time brings a deeper poignancy to their testimonies... His quest may be personal,...

Premiering at TIFF last fall, Flipside follows filmmaker Chris Wilcha as he reflects on his past and what it means to live a life of creativity. Picked up by Oscilloscope Laboratories for a North American release, featuring Judd Apatow on board as executive producer, the first trailer has now landed ahead of a May 31 debut.

Here’s the synopsis: “When filmmaker Chris Wilcha revisits the record store he worked in as a teenager in New Jersey, he finds the once-thriving bastion of music and weirdness from his youth slowly falling apart and out of touch with the times. Flipside documents his tragicomic attempt to revive the store while revisiting the abandoned documentary projects that have marked his career. In the process, he captures “The American Life” icon Ira Glass in the midst of a creative rebirth, discovers the origin story of David Bowie’s ode to a local New Jersey cable television hero,...

Documentarian Chris Wilcha is stepping back through time for his latest feature “Flipside.”

Wilcha revisits his own shelved past projects including capturing “This American Life” icon Ira Glass in the midst of a creative rebirth, an origin story of David Bowie’s ode to a local New Jersey cable television hero, and an unlikely connection between jazz photographer Herman Leonard and TV writer David Milch.

The film is the product of Wilcha returning to the record store where he worked as a teenager in New Jersey and realizing that the staple of his youth is now out of touch with the times. Per the official synopsis, “Flipside” documents Wilcha’s “tragicomic attempt to revive the store while revisiting other documentary projects he has abandoned over the years. This disparate collection of stories coheres into something strange and expansive — a moving meditation on music, work, and the sacrifices and satisfaction of...

The Chattanooga Film Festival returns for its eleventh year, unleashing another summer camp for cinephiles from June 21-28, 2024. While the fest already teased exciting events for their 2024 event, the first wave of feature programming promises even more genre fun.

From the press release: “In filmmaker Michael Turney’s RetroTech Romance Video Vision, a woman unlocks a dark dimension through an old Vcr, combining romance, horror, and analog technology in unique and spellbinding ways.

“Video Vision in both vibes and execution perfectly embodies the genre-blending spirit of the Chattanooga Film Festival and serves as its opening night film selection for the year. Because of the festival’s ongoing commitment to accessibility for its 2024 edition, the Cff team endeavored to find filmmakers and partners who understand the importance of this issue, and audience members will have the option of tuning into this world premiere on-site and virtually (US residents only). This theme...

Exclusive: Oscilloscope Laboratories has taken North America on Flipside, a new documentary from filmmaker Chris Wilcha, which world premiered at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. Exec produced by Judd Apatow, the film is slated for release in theaters this year.

Flipside sees Wilcha revisit the New Jersey record store he worked at as a teenager, finding the once-thriving bastion of music and weirdness slowly falling apart and out of touch with the times. The film chronicles his tragicomic attempt to revive the store while revisiting other documentary projects he has abandoned over the years. In the process, Wilcha captures This American Life icon Ira Glass in the midst of a creative rebirth, discovers the origin story of David Bowie’s ode to a local New Jersey cable television hero, and uncovers the unlikely connection between jazz photographer Herman Leonard and TV writer David Milch. This disparate collection of stories...

Nearly 24 years ago, Chris Wilcha premiered his debut feature documentary, Target Shoots First, a fascinating personal essay shot on a Hi8 camera gifted to him by his parents. The NYU philosophy grad leveraged his experience working at Flipside Records in my hometown of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, to score a position at Columbia House Records, where he was tasked with selling the subscription service to Gen X. Decades (and many ups and downs) later, Wilcha has returned to explore his life’s creative journey with the self-reflective Flipside, a TIFF selection which recently had its U.S. premiere at Doc NYC.

As Christopher Schobert said in our TIFF review, “Flipside starts as one thing and becomes something very different––a study of regret, the failures of nostalgia, and the value of seeing and (occasionally) preserving.

We spoke with Wilcha after the film’s U.S. premiere about capturing his personal journey,...

The 2023 Doc NYC lineup has officially been announced.

The program for the 14th annual festival includes opening night selection “The Contestant,” a real-life “Truman Show”-esque story of a Japanese comedian who was trapped alone and naked in an apartment for 15 months as part of a reality TV show. The only twist? The comedian had no idea he was being filmed. Clair Titley directs the stranger-than-fiction documentary which premiered at TIFF.

Doc NYC runs from November 8 through 26, featuring 30 world premieres and 26 U.S. premieres with more than 200 films programmed. New films from Wim Wenders, Penny Lane, Dawn Porter, and Jeff Zimbalist are among the lineup for America’s largest documentary festival, with screenings at New York City’s IFC Center, Sva Theatre, and Village East by Angelika. In-person screenings take place November 8 through 16, with online selections available through November 26.

The centerpiece screening is the world premiere of D.W. Young’s...

It may start like a slightly scrappy miscellany, with what feels like far too much voice-over, but don’t be put off by the first few minutes of this latest documentary from Chris Wilcha, which builds to a surprisingly affecting meditation on ageing, what we mean by accomplishment and the memories we collect, and lose, along the way. Even its dad-rock vibe is fitting, since the closer to middle age you are, the deeper the note it is likely to strike with you.

In some ways, it’s a celebration of failure, or at least an acknowledgement of it, as Wilcha outlines how after a flush of first success as a documentarian with The Target Shoots First back in 2020, he slipped into the realm of advertising and sort of got stuck there - if you can call having a healthy bank balance with which to raise your kids getting stuck.

Introducing his third feature, Nowhere Near, Miko Revereza said that his first, the train travelogue No Data Plan, was shot in three days and edited in about a month, fooling him into thinking every movie would be as easy. Instead, Nowhere Near took seven years and five or six entirely different cuts to compose itself. Similarly contemplating a mountain of longitudinally acquired footage, Chris Wilcha’s Flipside is assembled from work shot over nearly three decades. Their approaches and intentions are entirely different, but the two films work well together. Wilcha is the maker of 2000’s The Target Shoots First, an immaculate workplace comedy about his mid-’90s […]

The post TIFF 2023: Flipside, Nowhere Near first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Introducing his third feature, Nowhere Near, Miko Revereza said that his first, the train travelogue No Data Plan, was shot in three days and edited in about a month, fooling him into thinking every movie would be as easy. Instead, Nowhere Near took seven years and five or six entirely different cuts to compose itself. Similarly contemplating a mountain of longitudinally acquired footage, Chris Wilcha’s Flipside is assembled from work shot over nearly three decades. Their approaches and intentions are entirely different, but the two films work well together. Wilcha is the maker of 2000’s The Target Shoots First, an immaculate workplace comedy about his mid-’90s […]

The post TIFF 2023: Flipside, Nowhere Near first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It’s easy to measure your life in accomplishments, to look at the accumulation of honors and accolades, of personal and professional victories, and to say, “This accumulation represents empirical success.”

It’s harder to measure your life not necessarily in failures but in potentials left unfulfilled, in half-completed tasks or the stashed items left unused, and to say, “Despite or perhaps even because of this, there is still success.”

Chris Wilcha’s new documentary, Flipside, takes on the second challenge to deliver an autobiographical portrait of how a life seemingly of disappointments and failures can be a life well lived. Glimpse Flipside in the wrong moment or from the wrong angle and it can feel a little solipsistic, albeit in a way that will be relatable to many viewers. But taken in totality and with some reflection, it’s a borderline-profound and philosophical expression of satisfaction with everything that is unfinished in life.

Chances are potentially relatively high that all of us, at some point or another, have abandoned a project or two that could revolve around almost any task, from upgrades to one’s home to that yet-unfinished memoir to a rusty car in dire need of some TLC, still occupying space in an out of the way carport ready for that day when motivation strikes and the time comes to get back to work. It is this theme, that of unfinished work, which fuels the majority of “The Flipside,” a unique entry into the world of documentary filmmaking that explores this dilemma, touches on the creative side of documentary construction as a whole, and somehow manages to serve as a musing on the passage of time in a way that the end result finds all its ingredients working well together when all logic, as well as the words spoken in narration by director Chris Wilcha,...

“Flipside,” an endearing, dizzying documentary about the crushing convergence between art and commerce, begins with a common cold open. What we presume to be our enigmatic subject, the late legendary jazz photographer Herman Leonard, offers us a few pearls of wisdom that have led to his success. An array of close-ups of the singular, black and white portraits he took of Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole, from a retrospective exhibition of his work, further instills his importance to an unknowing audience. These are also Leonard’s final days. He’s dying from cancer. From the opening, we think “Flipside” will be a “great man you must know more about” story.

But this documentary isn’t about the jazz photographer. At least, not directly. There are other stories: A woman writer battling writer’s block, “This American Life” creator Ira Glass’ musical, and the documentary’s primary inspiration,...

If you go by the title, which comes from the name of a New Jersey record store, and you look at the main photo, which pictures the outside of that store, you might think that you know what the documentary “Flipside” is.

But within the first 20 minutes of the film, which opened on Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival, you will have heard about an aging jazz photographer, the Columbia Record Club, “This American Life” and Judd Apatow’s “Funny People.” And you’ll know that this is not the movie you thought it would be.

Instead, Chris Wilcha’s “Flipside” is a doc assembled out of loose ends and false starts, a jumble that can be maddening until suddenly it’s moving, thanks at least partly to David Bowie. It’s confounding and self-centered but damn it if it doesn’t work.

The opening stretches of the movie...

There is no surprise twist in Chris Wilcha’s Flipside, a documentary making its world premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. This is not a true-crime doc or a story of unearthed family secrets. (Although there is lots of ephemera excavated after years of quasi-hoarding.) Instead of a twist, though, there is an audience awakening, one that takes a rather standard there-are-places-i-remember doc into surprisingly resonant territory. Ultimately, Flipside is a moving, funny, inventive film that may cause viewers to follow Wilcha’s lead and ask tough questions about their own lives. That is no small feat for a documentarian.

Of course, Wilcha is no novice. His first success, 1999’s The Target Shoots First, brought him rave reviews and modest fame. Wilcha shot it while working at Columbia House Records––yes, the “8 CDs for a penny” mail-order service many remember with great fondness. In Flipside, Wilcha shows the viewer his early-20s self,...

Next Goal Wins (Taika Waititi, 2023).The lineup is being unveiled for the 2023 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, starting with 60 selections from the Gala and Special Presentations programs. The festival takes place from September 7–17, 2023.Gala PRESENTATIONSConcrete Utopia (Um Tae-Hwa)Dumb Money (Craig Gillespie)Fair Play (Chloe Domont)Flora and Son (John Carney)Hate to Love: Nickelback (Leigh Brooks)Lee (Ellen Kuras)Next Goal Wins (Taika Waititi)Nyad (Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin)Punjab ’95 (Honey Trehan)Solo (Sophie Dupuis)The End We Start From (Mahalia Belo)The Movie Emperor (Ning Hao)The New Boy (Warwick Thornton) The Royal Hotel (Kitty Green)The Holdovers.Special Presentationsa Difficult Year (Éric Toledano, Olivier Nakache)A Normal Family (Hur Jin-ho)American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)Close to You (Dominic Savage)Days of Happiness (Chloé Robichaud)The Rescue (Daniela Goggi)Ezra (Tony Goldwyn)Fingernails (Christos Nikou)Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania...

Following the Galas and Special Presentations line-up at Toronto International Film Festival, they’ve now unveiled their documentary lineup, which includes Frederick Wiseman’s restaurant doc Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Errol Morris’ John le Carré film The Pigeon Tunnel, Raoul Peck’s Silver Dollar Road, Roger Ross Williams’ Stamped From the Beginning, and more.

“There’s no question it’s been a very challenging year and I think we’re waiting for the moment, for the market to correct itself for people to realize that their viewers are going to need something more than just celebrity profiles and true crime [docs],” Powers told Deadline. “There’s quite a few sales titles this year that are coming in with strong representation from companies like CAA, UTA, Submarine, Dogwoof, Cinephil, et cetera,” Powers noted. “I think that’s a sign of the strength of what these companies hope are going to have some broad appeal of these films.

Programme opens with world premiere of Copa 71 from Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine.

Toronto has announced its TIFF Docs line-up, a crop of 22 features at time of writing which includes premieres of new work by Lucy Walker, Errol Morris, and Raoul Peck.

The section opens with the world premiere of Copa 71 from Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine, a timely tale about a 1971 international women’s football tournament in Mexico City which drew record crowds and has been largely erased from sports history.

Walker’s Mountain Queen: The Summits Of Lhakpa Sherpa gets its world premiere and profiles a single mother...

The soccer documentary Copa 71, from executive producers Serena Williams and Venus Williams, is set to open the Toronto Film Festival’s Docs sidebar as it recounts the 1971 Women’s World Cup tournament in Mexico City.

The documentary from directors Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine will have its world premiere at TIFF. New Black Films, Dogwoof and Westbrook Studios are producing.

Toronto also booked world premieres for Raoul Peck’s Silver Dollar Road, about a Black family fighting to save their North Carolina property from land-grabbing developers; Anand Patwardhan’s The World is Family, which recounts the director’s parents helping lead India’s independence movement; and Karim Amer’s Defiant, about Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba and his battle against disinformation.

There’s also a world premiere for Caroline Suh and Cara Mones’ Sorry/Not Sorry, a portrait of women who accused comedy giant Louis C.K. of sexual harassment,...

New films from legendary documentarians Frederick Wiseman and Errol Morris and new work from directors Raoul Peck, Lucy Walker, Roger Ross Williams and Karim Amer will screen at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, which announced its TIFF Docs lineup on Wednesday.

The 93-year-old Wiseman will present the North American premiere of “Menus – Plaisirs Les Troisgros,” a four-hour deep dive into a fabled Michelin-starred restaurant in France. Morris will have the international premiere of “The Pigeon Tunnel,” which is built around a Morris interview with John le Carre that turned out to be the last interview the espionage novelist gave before his death in 2020.

The 22 films announced on Wednesday include 10 world premieres, including Amer’s “Defiant,” Walker’s “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa,” Peck’s “Silver Dollar Road,” Williams’ “Stamped From the Beginning” and Caroline Suh and Cara Mones’ “Sorry/Not Sorry.” Of the 26 directors represented by those films,...

This year, non-fiction titles will be front and center at the Toronto International Film Festival, as many writers and actors will not be on hand due to the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

Opening night at the 2023 festival brings a documentary world premiere, Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine’s “Copa 71” (seller: Dogwoof), about an historic international women’s soccer tournament lost to sports history. The filmmakers bring us back to the record-setting crowds assembled in Mexico City in 1971. U.S. soccer star Alice Morgan and athletes Venus and Serena Williams are among the film’s executive producers.

That’s the sort of unexpected story that veteran TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers sought for this year’s documentary program of 22 titles from 12 countries. While it’s always painful to whittle down the selection from 800 feature submissions (the post-pandemic production boom continues), Powers looked at giving a boost to sales titles...

“Before Dylan... There Was Davis”

By Raymond Benson

The first Coen Brothers feature to be given the “Criterion treatment” is, oddly, their most recent release—Inside Llewyn Davis, which received (mostly) critical praise upon its release in late 2013. Kudos were especially heaped upon the film’s relatively new star, Oscar Isaac. Sadly, while the picture recouped its investment and made a little money, it wasn’t as widely embraced by audiences as it should have been. This is probably because the Coen Brothers typically don’t make movies for the masses. The auteur siblings create art that appeals mostly to intelligent, hip audiences willing to enter a strange, sometimes disturbing, always surprising, universe that is distinctly Coen-land.

Inside Llewyn Davis is presented as a comedy, but in the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre, “comedy” can mean many things. It can be wild and wacky (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski) or it can...

Given the news that Columbia House — the mail-order CD club that famously promised eight CDs for a penny — is filing for bankruptcy, there’s no better time to (re)watch Chris Wilcha’s The Target Shoots First, his 2000 documentary about his time working there in the ’90s. What once played as a blackly funny portrait of trying to stay sane while working in a cynical corporate culture is now oddly nostalgic, given the relatively relaxed working environment. For more context, it’s well worth reading this Av Club piece by Annie Zaleski, in which she interviews four former Columbia House employees (including Wilcha) about […]...

Given the news that Columbia House — the mail-order CD club that famously promised eight CDs for a penny — is filing for bankruptcy, there’s no better time to (re)watch Chris Wilcha’s The Target Shoots First, his 2000 documentary about his time working there in the ’90s. What once played as a blackly funny portrait of trying to stay sane while working in a cynical corporate culture is now oddly nostalgic, given the relatively relaxed working environment. For more context, it’s well worth reading this Av Club piece by Annie Zaleski, in which she interviews four former Columbia House employees (including Wilcha) about […]...

Now that the busy winter fest schedule of Sundance, Rotterdam and the Berlinale has concluded, we’ve now got our eyes on the likes of True/False and SXSW. While, True/False does not specialize in attention grabbing world premieres, it does provide a late winter haven for cream of the crop non-fiction fare from all the previously mentioned fests and a selection of overlooked genre blending films presented in a down home setting. This year will mark my first trip to the Columbia, Missouri based fest, where I hope to catch a little of everything, from their hush-hush secret screenings, to selections from their Neither/Nor series, this year featuring chimeric Polish cinema of decades past, to a spotlight of Adam Curtis’s incisive oeuvre. But truth be told, it is SXSW, with its slew of high profile world premieres being announced, such as Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs...

Amy Schumer and Bill Hader in TrainwreckPhoto: Universal Pictures With Sundance just wrapping up and Berlin starting up in a few days, we are now immersed in the year-long barrage of film festivals. One such festival in South By Southwest. A few weeks back they announced the first seven films of their program, including the opening night film Brand: A Second Coming. Today, they have revealed the rest of the features to be shown in March (except for the midnight program), and some of it has me very excited. The bigger titles announced do not do much for me. Paul Feig's Spy, starring Melissa McCarthy, and the Will Ferrell/Kevin Hart starrer Get Hard leave a lot to be desired in terms of anticipation, as does a work in progress cut of Judd Apatow's latest film Trainwreck. I'm guessing an Apatow work in progress is probably around three and a half hours.

South by Southwest, the multi-faceted film, music and technology festival held annually in Austin, TX will feature such upcoming films as Paul Feig’s Spy, David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, and Ondi Timoner’s Russell Brand profile Brand: A Second Coming as headliners in this year’s film festival lineup.

SXSW runs from March 13 to 21 in Austin and is now in its 22nd year. Variety has details of the 145 films and 100 world premieres bowing at this year’s festival. Brand, as previously reported, will be the festival’s opening night film.

Other notable titles on the list are the Will Ferrell/Kevin Hart comedy Get Hard, a rough cut of Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck, the directorial debut of 28 Days Later screenwriter Alex Garland, Ex Machina, and a new comedy by Michael Showalter, Hello, My Name is Doris.

On the small screen,...

May 2, 2014

Blue Ruin

Director: Jeremy Saulnier

Starring: Macon Blair, Devin Ratray, Amy Hargreaves

Running time: 90 mins

Certificate: 15

Brick Mansions

Director: Camille DeLamarre

Starring: Paul Walker, David Belle, Rza

Running time: 91 mins

Certificate: 15

Tarzan 3D

Director: Reinhard Klooss

Starring: Kellan Lutz, Spencer Locke, Robert Capron

Running time: 99 mins

Certificate: PG

May 9

Bad Neighbours

Director: Nicholas Stoller

Starring: Seth Rogen, Zac Efron, Dave Franco

Running time: 97 mins

Certificate: 15

Sabotage

Director: David Ayer

Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Worthington

Running time: 109 mins

Certificate: 15

The Canyons

Director: Paul Schrader

Starring: Lindsay Lohan, James Deen

Running time: 96

Certificate: 18

Frank

Director: Lenny Abrahamson

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Domhnall Gleeson

Running time: 95 mins

Certificate: 15

The Wind Rises

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Krasinski, Emily Blunt

Running time: 127 mins

Certificate: PG

May 16

Godzilla

Director: Gareth Edwards

Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston

Running time: 123 mins

Certificate: 12A

In Secret

Director: Charlie Stratton

Starring: Elizabeth Olsen, Oscar Isaac, Tom Felton...

In a Q&A after a recent screening of Another Day/Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis, T Bone Burnett was asked why he wanted to create a four hour concert celebrating the music of Joel and Ethan Coen‘s latest film, and Burnett simply replied that he wanted to “keep the movie alive.” To which he quickly added, “Even though that seemed lame.” But Another Day/Another Time is anything but lame — it’s a true celebration of the music featured in, and inspired by, the Coen brothers’ folk odyssey. Burnett, along with Marcus Mumford (who served as an associate music producer on Inside Llewyn Davis and who also appears on the soundtrack), brought together a variety of musicians to put on a concert at New York City’s Town Hall, which director Christopher Wilcha then turned into a documentary by filming the days leading up to the concert along with the concert...

Its awkward title notwithstanding, Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of “Inside Llewyn Davis” does an admirable job of giving the viewer the feeling of what it was like to have been at September’s star-studded concert at New York City’s Town Hall. Christopher Wilcha’s documentary effectively combines well-chosen performance footage from the three-hour show with enough fly-on-the-wall rehearsal peeks to provide an intriguing insider’s view. It also happens to serve as an excellent promo for the current theatrical release of the highly acclaimed Coen Brothers’ movie celebrating the Greenwich Village folk scene of

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Durham - Once more The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is a four day film festival that plays like it should last a week They show so many films that it’s impossible to even come close to seeing them all. Five theaters are going at once and the only repeats are the award winning movies. It’s hard to pick while going through the schedule. I’ve yet to hear anyone complain about the movie they saw so much as wishing they could have seen two or three of the other ones that were showing concurrently. This is the best festival for documentary film viewers. The 2010 edition kept up the lofty standards with films about basketball, pork, pastries, scoundrels, nomads and undiscovered superstars.

Steve James created the greatest film about the dirty business of Chicago high school basketball in Hoop Dreams. Espn gave him a chance to look into...

It's a good day for funny people, especially if your name is Tina Fey or Seth MacFarlane.

Fey's series, 30 Rock, was handed 22 Emmy nominations this morning, which stands as a record for a comedy series. She and Alec Baldwin were also nominated for acting awards. Plus, for the first time some of the other actors on NBC's laffer were recognized. Jane Krakowski, Jack McBrayer and Tracy Morgan all picked up supporting nominations.

MacFarlane's Family Guy was also nominated for best comedy series, the first time an animated show has cracked that category since The Flintstones in 1961. Two years ago MacFarlane decided to pull his show from contention in the animated series category to have it considered for best comedy.

Mad Men, the drama about the advertising world in the sixties, picked up 16 nominations in the drama categories, including a best actor nod for Jon Hamm. Hamm is also nominated as...

The International Documentary Assn. will present special awards to When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Sputnik Mania, This American Life and The Supreme Court.

Director Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke will receive the IDA's Pare Lorentz Award, which is given to the film that best represents the activist spirit and lyrical vision of filmmaker Lorentz. The film is an intimate portrait of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the floods. The HBO documentary tells the personal stories of those who endured the ordeal and survived to share tragic and triumphant tales.

The continuing series winner, Showtime's American Life, was created by Ira Glass and Chicago Public Radio and directed by Chris Wilcha. Inspired by the Chicago public radio show of the same name, the 30-minute program looks at stories culled from all over the country.

The limited series winner, Supreme Court, was directed by Thomas Lennon, produced by Mark Zwonitzer and executive produced by Jody Sheff. The four-part PBS series focuses on the history, impact and drama of America's highest court.