Cool selection of inspirations, including a game (“Portal”), tv show (“Mr Robot”) and films, including Romanek’s “One Hour Photo” and Watkins’s “Punishment Park.” // Backrooms Director Kane Parsons Breaks Down His Inspirations

Backrooms Director Kane Parsons Breaks Down His Inspirations

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Why did Anthropic name its new model "Mythos"? Fascinating take by Om Malik with assists from Augustus and Nietzsche.

The Myth, the Mythos and the Man

For a while I have been wondering why Anthropic named its most powerful AI model Mythos. A safety company. A company whose entire justification for existing is that someone needs to tell the truth …

om.co

With “Chronovisor” playing today at Prismatic Ground at Anthology Film Archives, here’s my interview with the directors of this ingenious, engrossing film that’s also a productive model for ultra-low-budget production.

"Chronovisor": A Thrilling, Bibliophilic, Doc-Adjacent Sci-Fi Mystery

Filmmakers Kevin Walker and Jack Auen on their ingeniously conceived debut feature

open.substack.com

“What’s an example of a good lookbook? It’s a question I get asked all the time by directors, so I shared some images Sean Dunn created for “The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford.” This lookbook helped a lot during financing and preproduction!

A Lookbook's Role in the Making of a Film

On defining the tone of Sean Dunn's "The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford"

open.substack.com

News! www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie...

Vanessa Kirby and Lewis Pullman Team Up for Kitty Green’s Sci-Fi Thriller ‘The Spacesuit’

International sales for 'The Spacesuit,' following an astronaut (Kirby) forced to make an impossible decision after her co-pilot compromises the mission, will launch at Cannes.

hollywoodreporter.com

Happy Avril 14, all.

Richard@ricrus77.bsky.social · 4mo ago

#SweetKeys Day 14: Aphex Twin - Avril 14th When he’s not scaring the shit out of us by saying he will eat our souls, or twisting our ears with mutant r ‘n’ b, or mixing with sandpaper, Richard D. James is bringing us beautiful piano pieces like this. He is a big softie at heart…

Sirat WAS ROBBBED

Big respect. “You lose your country with countless small acts of complicity.”

Remembering Tom Noonan, missed in the Academy In Memoriam tonight.

Hey, congrats Alexandre and Natalie for winning Best Short! My profile of the "Two People Exchanging Saliva" directors for Filmmaker's 25 New Faces last year. filmmakermagazine.com/people/alexa.... #oscars

Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata

A profile of Alexandre Singh and Natalia Musteata (Two People Exchanging Saliva).

filmmakermagazine.com

RIP Habermas, whose death follows that of his beloved Public Sphere

The Associated Press@apnews.com · 5mo ago

Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96.

Excited by today’s return of the feminist film journal @another-gaze.bsky.social with the first of its new biannual digital issues.

Really love this rich discussion of Tom and his work.

The Film Stage@thefilmstage.com · 5mo ago

Nick Newman and Keith Uhlich discuss the life and career of the late, great Tom Noonan on a special episode of Emulsion. Tune in:

Extremely exciting news: We're hiring a full-time film critic to come work with me at The A.V. Club! You probably have an idea if you're qualified for this, but if there's something that's not in the job listing, I'm sure I can answer Qs www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/43...

Less than 6 months ago @discord.com had a data breach exposing ID’s of 70,000 + of its users but …apparently hasn’t learned anything? ID checks don’t make the internet safer, they make us all more vulnerable. www.theverge.com/tech/875309/...

Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

Age verification for all.

theverge.com

If they can do this to find a dog, they can do this to find anyone. That’s terrifying.

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Here's that Ring #SuperBowl commercial:

Minneapolis filmmakers asking international production community to boycott Enterprise over their supplying of vehicles to ICE. Read their letter here and consider signing if you are able. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

ENTERPRISE BOYCOTT - Film Industry and Beyond

Please enter your name to pledge to boycott Enterprise and its subsidiary brands National and Alamo, and to include your name in the open letter to Enterprise below. You may sign as an individual, com...

docs.google.com

www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...

Video: New Video Analysis Reveals Flawed and Fatal Decisions in Shooting of Pretti

A frame-by-frame assessment of actions by Alex Pretti and the two officers who fired 10 times shows how lethal force came to be used against a target who didn’t pose a threat.

nytimes.com

TikTok has been under new leadership for like a day and I made a slideshow with posts from the ICE rally today and it immediately got out under review and is not being published. Incredible.

It is genuinely incredible how quickly Ellison and co have made TikTok almost completely useless by immediately and preemptively censoring content that could be seen as critical of the regime

Eileen Clancy 🧿@clancyny.bsky.social · 6mo ago

AYFKM? Like a Philip K. Dick novel. Vladeck is a strait-laced law professor, aka the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Federal Courts (Georgetown). Video is on the Constitution (right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses etc.) TikTok: Not so sure you can talk about that.

A favorite film writer on a favorite podcast. A great listen, needless to say.

Ordinary Unhappiness@unhappinesspod.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🚨NEW EPISODE🚨 The great film critic and author @hamrahrama.bsky.social joins us to talk movies, moviegoing, moviemaking, and the significance of cinema itself in our era of streaming, "second screen content," and a dystopian landscape made possible by reality TV. www.buzzsprout.com/2131830/epis...

Seeing Republicans shift into "the gun is the problem" when it suits their fucked up bizarro-world worldview, can we pass some kind of restrictions real quick before they shift back?

Don Moynihan@donmoyn.bsky.social · 6mo ago

From the NY Post. You know they are really scrambling when they are running "The gun was no angel" stories.

There is a precedent for a person getting someone else's Nobel Prize. In 1943, the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, gave his Nobel Prize in literature to Joseph Goebbels uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295...

Knut Hamsun

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) was a towering figure of Norwegian letters. He was also a Nazi sympathizer and supp...

uwapress.uw.edu

Big news! David's name has been bandied about for a while, and he's a good choice. Previous stints include Participant, Universal and Good Machine.

Sundance Institute@sundance.org · 7mo ago

We’re thrilled to announce David Linde will join Sundance Institute as CEO beginning February 2026 — a longtime advocate for artist-driven storytelling, his work has been intrinsically linked to our own throughout his time as the former CEO of Participant, Co-Founder of Focus Features, and more.

Tmw is my last day at Filmmaker, and it’s also the last day for our estimable director of editorial operations Vadim Rizov, who has been a valued partner for 11 of my 33 years. Here, he curates some of his best work that we’ve had the privilege of publishing. filmmakermagazine.com/132962-vadim...

My Best Work as (Mostly) an Editor

When I realized I’d be laid off (via: restructuring) from the publication I’ve worked at for 11+ years, I went back through the print archives to round up work I was proud of as an interviewer and…

filmmakermagazine.com

Leaving The Gotham today for the last time holding my final issue of Filmmaker magazine. On newsstands now/soon, it’s a banger.

For Filmmaker’s new print issue, director Jaime Levinas writes about learning from Amos Poe, who passed away yesterday in New York City. R.I.P. Amos. filmmakermagazine.com/132695-learn...

Learning From Amos Poe

The following essay about Amos Poe appears in Filmmaker’s Winter, 2026 print edition in a section, Reflections, that looks back on 33 years of American independent film and Filmmaker Magazine.

filmmakermagazine.com

At Filmmaker, I just posted the Sundance 2026 lineup.

Sundance Film Festival Announces 2026 Lineup

The Sundance Film Festival announced today the 97 films and episodic programs that will screen at the 2026 edition, the final one in Park City, UT.

filmmakermagazine.com

This article of is 7 years old, but it’s an evergreen one, especially Thanksgiving week.

So You Didn’t Get Into Sundance, Redux

“So you didn’t get into Sundance.” That’s the title of a 2009 blog post I wrote for Filmmaker’s website that gets a flurry of hits each December as, yes, a lot of people don’t get into Sundance.

filmmakermagazine.com

Super excited about this @metrographnyc.bsky.social event on Dec . 6 — short films from Filmmaker’s 2025 25 New Faces. I will be doing the Q&As in what will be my Filmmaker event swan song. Hope to see some of you there. metrograph.com/filmmaker-ma...