Independent films
fromThe New Yorker
1 day agoNew Directors, New Films
The New Directors/New Films series showcases diverse films with innovative narratives, including 'Variations on a Theme' and 'Next Life'.
The app is incredibly simple. I made use of the wonderful SimpleCSS for my design and then made use of the TMDB API. The TMDB APIs are pretty easy to use, but finding out how to get this information did take a bit of digging.
Anticolonialism, Ontology, and Semiotics draws upon Africana anticolonial philosophy-especially the work of Frantz Fanon and two of his most influential interpreters, Eldridge Cleaver and Sylvia Wynter-to develop a basic analytical model for doing anticolonial political theory. I wanted to show that there is something distinctive, something special, to be found in this tradition of thought that has not been fully appreciated by philosophers and theorists in other fields.
Set on the blossom tree-lined fringes of Hyde Park in London, Herbert Wilcox's black-and-white rom-com blows in like a fresh spring breeze. The film charts the will-they-won't-they romance between Richard (Michael Wilding), a wealthy lord masquerading as a butler, and Judy (Anna Neagle), the niece of the family who employs him.
The inquiry was like thousands of others. Somebody had potentially cool films they thought might interest the Library of Congress. But it was brand new for Jason Evans Groth... In September, he stepped outside the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to meet Bill and Mary McFarland, who had driven from Michigan with about 40 strips of celluloid that had once belonged to Bill's great-grandfather.
10 Cloverfield Lane Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr are locked in an underground bunker for the majority of this left-field sequel to Cloverfield, with thrilling results. In the film's final throes, Winstead's character exits the bunker, and finds that her captor was telling the truth about an alien invasion above - a twist that completely and ruinously dissipates the hard-earned tension that came before.
A quarter-century later, it's safe to say that those days have come to an end. Not only does the streaming-only Netflix of the twenty-twenties no longer transmit movies on DVD through the mail (a service its younger users have trouble even imagining), it ranks approximately nowhere as a preferred cinephile destination. That has to do with a selection much diminished since the DVD days
In recent years, there's one word you hear again and again from movie distributors and pundits: event. Making a great movie is nice. But creating a culture-shaking event is what's required in the current boom-bust film landscape. It's something everyone has known for a long time, but in 2026 it seems like studios are really beginning to grasp what it actually means. From Tom Cruise in an auteur-driven comedy to the sequels to Devil Wears Prada and The Social Network
Even in an era of CGI and AI, nothing is more vivid than the intimacy and imagination of radio or more direct than the connection radio has with listeners. I remember when the legendary Stan Freberg drained Lake Michigan and filled it with hot chocolate, a 700-foot mountain of whipped cream, and a 10-ton maraschino cherry. We didn't have to see it. We heard it on the radio. It was Freberg's demonstration of what radio can do better than television.