People more than ever before pull out a smartphone or tablet to watch video. It’s at the point where the TV is on in the room, but so is a Kindle, a laptop and maybe a cell phone with a pretty sizable screen. We handle more than one thing at a time. In fact, most [...]

Has it come to this so soon in our wondrous and new tech-driven world? YouTube apparently telling musicians on independent labels that they’ll have to remove work from the site if they don’t agree to unfair royalty terms. That’s the way it seemingly stands as YouTube prepares to launch a Spotify-like music streaming service sometime [...]

Among all the problems in the world, “too many films…” is certainly not one of them. Let’s think about this for a moment. Are there too many pieces of music — not just contemporary or pop music in all its many genres, but music? Are there too many books on too many different subjects and [...]

The best documentaries usually take a while to produce. It took four years and lots of international travel to make “Pulling John,” and all of that work shows up on the screen. At a lean 72 minutes, every frame of this film delivers either key character development or is part of a tension build for [...]

The Cannes Film Festival, which opened this week, will include a special screening of the Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” in memory of its late director, Malik Bendjelloul. Bendjelloul, 36, committed suicide and was found dead in his Stockholm apartment on Tuesday. His brother, Johar Bendjelloul, confirmed the manner of death and told the [...]

  HR Giger, the Swiss artist who innovated the lexicon of conceptual design for Hollywood films, has died today. He was 74. The preternatural visions that live on have been germinating, serpentine, for the last 35 years in a cinephiliac collective unconscious.  One can say the artist’s work was an artificial channel for conducting nightmares [...]

    Our recent acquisition, “528 New York” (2014) is a short film about a disconnected group of individuals living in the bustling metropolis known as the Big Apple. It is an objective, clinical study of how varying ethnic communities – specifically the Korean, African-American, Causasian and Middle-Eastern groups interact – or fail to communicate [...]

It takes a certain level of conviction to stay true to one’s roots when balancing the demands of a bustling metropolis. The filmmaker  Yared Zeleke is an Ethiopian storyteller who swims against the current, making films that detail his experiences back home and abroad. His first feature, currently in development, was selected as one of [...]

Ted Hope asks: When did “independent” become a negative word?Ted Hope writes: “I hereby declare my independence”Ted Hope proposes: “a sustainable film culture built on creative and financial independence” But How is that going to happen? Apparently stung by an individual who did not want to be called an “independent filmmaker”, an individual who said [...]

Petri Kotwica is a Finnish film director and screenwriter, best known for his feature film directorial efforts in Black Ice (2007) and Homesickness (2005). This year, Kotwica’s feature film title Rat King (2012) was selected for the Tribeca Film Festival Cinemania section which offers a small selection of thrilling, largely international, narrative films.  Rat King [...]