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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Thursday revealed the 276 feature films that are eligible for consideration at the 94rd Oscars, which are set to air live March 27 on ABC from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

The number is 90 fewer than last year’s 366, but this year’s eligibility period was only 10 months.

To be eligible for Best Picture consideration, films must have submitted a confidential Academy Representation and Inclusion Standards entry as part of the submission requirements. Nominations voting begins January 27 and concludes on February 1. The Oscar nominations will be revealed on Tuesday, February 8.

Today’s news comes about a month after the Academy released its shortlists in the International Film, Documentary Feature, Original Score, Original Song, Makeup & Hairstyling, Visual Effects, Sound and the Live-Action, Documentary and Animated Shorts categories.

Here is the full list of films eligible for Best Picture at the 94rd annual Academy Awards,...

On a sunny afternoon in L.A., Bryn Mooser, CEO of Xtr, folds his long frame into a patio chair perched above the headquarters of his growing documentary company. His green eyes scan the hilly enclaves of Silver Lake and Los Feliz, spotting landmarks: the Griffith Observatory in the distance, Hyperion Avenue below.

He points down the slope. “This is the Gelson’s right there, where Walt Disney bought that piece of land and built the first Disney studio. Mickey Mouse and Snow White were created in–what’s now a parking lot.”

His index finger inches west along the horizon, indicating bungalows with pitched roofs. “You can see the top of that house right there. It’s called the Snow White Cottages,” he says. “Snow White was based on those cottages. Anyway, I love early Disney stuff.”

Nearly a century after Disney laid the groundwork for his entertainment kingdom in the same vicinity,...

The Oscar shortlists hit Hollywood on Dec. 21, with filmmakers and artisans alike waiting to see if their pics have made it. It’s another Covid-challenged year, with theaters still not running at full capacity and screening links de rigueur even as widespread vaccinations boost the confidence in getting back in a cinema. The films below have been gaining traction on the awards circuit so far, but given the contours of kudos campaigns, surprises can and will emerge. Critics groups are beginning to weigh in and some guild nominations are imminent. Oscar nominations will be announced Feb. 8, with the ceremony taking place March 27.

Documentary Feature

This category once again offers up an embarrassment of riches, with films such as Denmark’s “Flee” leading the pack — the Sundance winner recently won a Gotham award. “Flee” can also grab noms in animation and international feature. NatGeo’s lineup includes John Hoffman and Janet Tobias’ “Fauci,...

The 12th edition of Doc NYC kicks off today — exactly one month before the AMPAS documentary branch begins voting to determine the 2022 Oscar documentary shortlist.

The nine-day affair, which runs until Nov. 18, will feature over 125 short docus and 127 feature-length nonfiction films that will screen at New York City’s IFC Center, Sva Theater and Cinépolis Chelsea. (The fest will be available online until Nov. 28)

Penny Lane’s “Listening to Kenny G,” will serve as the opening night film while Matthew Heineman’s “The First Wave” will close the festival. Sam Pollard and Rex Miller’s “Citizen Ashe” and Dave Wooley and David Heilbroner’s “Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over” are both fest Centerpiece docs.

Festivities commence with the fest’s annual Visionaries Tribute Honoree luncheon at Gotham Hall. While kudos will be given to cinematographer Joan Churchill, Oscar nominated director Raoul Peck (“I Am Not Your Negro”), Emmy Award-winning...

Topic Studios president Maria Zuckerman is a canny executive who can see over the horizon. In 2019, the New Yorker figured out that the Hollywood universe was expanding at such a rate that it was time to become a bicoastal content provider instead of a distributor-buyer. She left producing at HBO, where she had been happily ensconced for almost 20 years, and moved over to independent Topic Studios. She quickly saw a route to diversifying and expanding the company’s lineup, by backing, funding, and producing (at different levels) a wide range of independent features, building on the Oscar-winning “Spotlight” toward this past weekend’s opener, Pablo Larraín’s surreal Princess Diana drama “Spencer” (Neon), starring Oscar frontrunner Kristen Stewart.

“It’s a fiercely independent company,” Zuckerman said in an interview with IndieWire. That’s because owner First Look Media (Oscar-winning “Spotlight”) created a two-sided entity: the not-for-profit and the studio. “Our mission is to be profitable,...

Topic Studios president Maria Zuckerman is a canny executive who can see over the horizon. In 2019, the New Yorker figured out that the Hollywood universe was expanding at such a rate that it was time to become a bicoastal content provider instead of a distributor-buyer. She left producing at HBO, where she had been happily ensconced for almost 20 years, and moved over to independent Topic Studios. She quickly saw a route to diversifying and expanding the company’s lineup, by backing, funding, and producing (at different levels) a wide range of independent features, building on the Oscar-winning “Spotlight” toward this past weekend’s opener, Pablo Larraín’s surreal Princess Diana drama “Spencer” (Neon), starring Oscar frontrunner Kristen Stewart.

“It’s a fiercely independent company,” Zuckerman said in an interview with IndieWire. That’s because owner First Look Media (Oscar-winning “Spotlight”) created a two-sided entity: the not-for-profit and the studio. “Our mission is to be profitable,...

Doc NYC Artistic Director Thom Powers with Anne-Katrin Titze on Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Joan Churchill: “We’re really pleased to be able to put a spotlight on her important work.”

The afternoon before the Short List selections were announced, Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s Julia on Julia Child, Liz Garbus’s Becoming Cousteau, Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, Lucy Walker’s Bring Your Own Brigade, and Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground on Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Nico) Doc NYC Artistic Director Thom Powers spoke with me about the 12th edition being back in cinemas. In addition, films will be available online “to reach people who aren’t able to be at the theater.”

In the first instalment Thom and I discussed the Visionaries Tribute Lifetime Achievement Award honorees Raoul Peck and Joan Churchill, the new juried sections in the festival,...

Exclusive: Nathalie Seaver has been promoted to Executive Vice President at Jamie Wolf’s award-winning production company, Foothill Productions.

In her new role, she will continue to work closely with Wolf to expand Foothill’s presence in upcoming feature films and documentaries, while supporting filmmakers under the Foothill banner.

“Our goal has always been to support extraordinary films, and Nathalie has been crucial in expanding our ability to be a great partner to and resource for filmmakers,” said Wolf. “I’m thrilled to have her continuing this important work at Foothill.”

Seaver joined Foothill in 2018 as a Creative and Marketing consultant, and has worked there on projects including Emmy and Peabody-nominated documentary Be Natural; Jessica Earnshaw’s Jacinta, which won the Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival; and Mapplethorpe, The Director’s Cut, Ondi Timoner’s scripted portrait of the iconic photographer, among others.

Title: Bring Your Own Brigade Director: Lucy Walker As the Dixie Fire presently rages on in northern California, having now consumed over 600,000 acres of land, the tragic and ongoing relevance of Lucy Walker’s new nonfiction offering Bring Your Own Brigade, available to stream on Paramount+ and Cbsn alongside its theatrical engagements, is only cast into […]

The post Bring Your Own Brigade Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

It rather famously only takes a few minutes for Pixar’s animated classic “Up” to reduce audiences to tears, a record which could be broken by Lucy Walker’s brutal new documentary “Bring Your Own Brigade.” After a brief introduction to a survivor of a horrifying California wildfire, the film cuts to similar apocalyptic blazes all over the world, and in particular the image of a helpless koala bear on fire, crying out in pain, until it’s saved by human hands.

Walker’s documentary sometimes spares us the gruesome details and terrifying life-or-death despair of wildfire victims. But “Bring Your Own Brigade” also spends much of its first act immersed in the inferno of California’s Camp Fire of 2018, with cell-phone footage of citizens unable to escape gridlock as their cars begin to overheat in the surrounding flames. Panic is in the air, everyone seems to be about to die,...

This weekly feature is in addition to TVLine’s daily What to Watch listings and monthly guide to What’s on Streaming.

With nearly 500 scripted shows now airing across broadcast, cable and streaming, it’s easy to forget that a favorite comedy is returning, or that the new “prestige drama” you anticipated is about to debut. So consider this our reminder to set your DVR, order a Season Pass, pop a fresh Memorex into the Vcr… however it is you roll.

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It was a triumphant second weekend for indie Stillwater from Focus Features, which hit the $10 million mark in 2,611 theatres (up by 80) and 233 Dma’s in North America, where it was no. 5. The Matt Damon-starrer held up strongly from its debut, dipping 45% — compared with a 64% drop for The Green Knight and a 55% decline for Jungle Cruise. Stillwater’s run may not be not specialty-small, but deserves a shout-out here for a standout performance. The complex drama garnered Damon a standing ovation in Cannes but had some concerned at the film’s theatrical prospects in a wide-release battle against big studio franchises on one hand and smaller arthouse fare on the other.

Damon plays an unemployed Oklahoma oil rig worker who travels to Marseille to help his daughter (Abigail Breslin) who’s in prison for murder. The film continued to resonate in the South and Midwest with the top five highest-grossing...

In Bring Your Own Brigade, British film-maker Lucy Walker takes us back to the California tragedies of 2018 and a crisis that continues to rage on

“In the Christian imagination,” says Lucy Walker’s voiceover, “hell is fire pits, it’s being burned alive. These are the very worst things we could imagine. When we came up with the idea of hell, it was fire that we imagined and that’s what we’re creating for ourselves.”

Walker is our guide into a modern Dante’s Inferno in her excruciatingly timely film Bring Your Own Brigade, which examines a world on fire by focusing on the savage blazes that tore through the California cities of Malibu and Paradise in November 2018.

First Look Media has tapped Maria Zuckerman to serve as president of Topic Studios, a major promotion for the executive who joined the company in May 2019.

“I’m thrilled to recognize Maria’s role in growing Topic Studios with her promotion to president,” said Michael Bloom, First Look Media’s CEO. ”Maria and her team have built the studio into a major creative force, giving new and established voices the opportunity to collaborate and produce truly extraordinary work. I know the studio will continue to thrive under her leadership, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.”

Over the last two years as executive vice president and head of Topic Studios, Zuckerman has worked to raise the company’s profile with movies like “The Mauritanian”; Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin’s “The Climb” (distributed by Sony Pictures Classics); and seven projects at the Sundance Film Festival, including...

Maria Zuckerman has been promoted to president of Topic Studios, First Look Media announced Wednesday.

Zuckerman joined Topic in May 2019 as EVP and head of Topic Studios and will now continue to report to the company’s CEO, Michael Bloom. She will continue to lead the studio’s creative vision and overall strategy, including development, financing and production across feature films, documentaries, television and podcasts.

“I’m thrilled to recognize Maria’s role in growing Topic Studios with her promotion to President. Maria and her team have built the Studio into a major creative force, giving new and established voices the opportunity to collaborate and produce truly extraordinary work. I know the Studio will continue to thrive under her leadership, and I can’t wait to see what’s next,” Bloom said in a statement.

“It has been thrilling over the past two years to grow Topic Studios’ reach and slate of productions.

"We're surrounded by fire." CBS and Paramount+ have unveiled the official trailer for a documentary film titled Bring Your Own Brigade, the latest work from Oscar-nominated doc filmmaker Lucy Walker. This first premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and will be available both in theaters and streaming later in August this summer. Walker's documentary captures the horror and heroism of the deadliest week of wildfires in California history and explores the causes and solutions of a global crisis that is quite literally burning our world to the ground. An investigation into our landscape's hidden fire stories and on-the-ground experiences of firefighters and residents struggling through deadly fires. Sundance adds that the film "cogently exposes our out-of-balance relationship with nature and explores what it will take to restore this delicate equilibrium." This is the kind of incisive, tough filmmaking I like to see! It seems like a brutally...

It’s difficult to know where to begin when telling a story as vast as California’s wildfires, which with stunning frequency seem to have an impact on two very different wooded mountain-top communities: the working-class Northern California enclave of Paradise and Southern California’s posh Malibu where the wealthiest residents have the means to hire private fire brigades. Lucy Walker’s Bring Your Own Brigade is a deep exploration into multiple aspects of the crisis from climate change to the personal toll of losing one’s house and community to the politics of fire codes. She also focuses on the history and chemistry of fire itself from the traditional keepers of the land to fire historian Steven Payne, who is convinced humans are themselves the ultimate fire creature.

By design, the film finds more sympathy with those in Paradise including Brad Weldon, one of the luckier ones who was...

Wildfires have simply become a part of Californians’ new, climate-altered reality. But for London-expat filmmaker Lucy Walker, she had a feeling that there’s more to the fires than just hotter, drier weather. Her search led to the documentary “Bring Your Own Brigade,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

“I lived in London and New York previously, and we’ve solved open fires some time ago, so it was a shock when I came here and the hills were on fire and the ash would rain down on you and smoke was in your nostrils,” Walker said at TheWrap’s Sundance Studio presented by National Geographic and Nfs.

In many respects, “Bring Your Own Brigade,” was Walker’s way of presenting what she learned about the many human-caused factors behind the worsening wildfires. It’s not just climate change. It’s also how human beings, their government...

Bring Your Own Brigade isn’t the first cinematic report on the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, in 2018, or even the first one to screen at Sundance (Ron Howard’s Rebuilding Paradise played at the festival in 2020). It almost certainly won’t be the last film about the devastation wrought by uncontrolled wildfires, particularly in California, by a long shot.

But it’s probably the smartest, most interesting documentary so far on the subject as it adroitly balances views of survivors, first responders and observers while sifting in an accessible way through the complex science that causes such ...

Bring Your Own Brigade isn’t the first cinematic report on the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, in 2018, or even the first one to screen at Sundance (Ron Howard’s Rebuilding Paradise played at the festival in 2020). It almost certainly won’t be the last film about the devastation wrought by uncontrolled wildfires, particularly in California, by a long shot.

But it’s probably the smartest, most interesting documentary so far on the subject as it adroitly balances views of survivors, first responders and observers while sifting in an accessible way through the complex science that causes such ...

On its website, Xtr describes itself as “a premium nonfiction film and television studio serving the booming documentary film space.” The company is attached to eight feature titles at this year’s Sundance, all but one of which (Faya Dayi) credit the late Tony Hsieh’s name as an executive producer. The Zappos CEO died in November, nearly two months after investing $17.5 million in Xtr; his name unites Ailey, At the Ready, Bring Your Own Brigade, Homeroom, Try Harder!, Rebel Hearts and Natalia Almada’s Users—the last sporting an end credits dedication in Hsieh’s memory. I haven’t seen Almada’s previous work, so can’t speak to how Users’s often enjoyably giganticist […]

The post Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 4 (Vadim Rizov): Users, At the Ready first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

On its website, Xtr describes itself as “a premium nonfiction film and television studio serving the booming documentary film space.” The company is attached to eight feature titles at this year’s Sundance, all but one of which (Faya Dayi) credit the late Tony Hsieh’s name as an executive producer. The Zappos CEO died in November, nearly two months after investing $17.5 million in Xtr; his name unites Ailey, At the Ready, Bring Your Own Brigade, Homeroom, Try Harder!, Rebel Hearts and Natalia Almada’s Users—the last sporting an end credits dedication in Hsieh’s memory. I haven’t seen Almada’s previous work, so can’t speak to how Users’s often enjoyably giganticist […]

The post Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 4 (Vadim Rizov): Users, At the Ready first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, which was forced to take place largely online, with scattered outdoor screenings and socially-distanced events in cities around the country. But the pandemic has also impacted Sundance creatively, leading to an opening four days in which filmmakers have used a variety of techniques and genres to grapple with the issues of a virus that was just beginning to surface when the last in-person Sundance took place in Park City a year ago.

The most obvious example is the opening-night documentary “In the Same Breath” from Chinese-born director Nanfu Wang, who came to Park City straight from China in January 2020, and then found she couldn’t rejoin her husband and son there because of the pandemic lockdown. Her film includes wrenching footage from Wuhan in the early days of the virus but expands to look at the Chinese...

The year 2018 was a hellish one for Californians, as seemingly at any given time there was at least one wildfire blazing up and down the coast. Two such natural disasters, the Camp Fire in Paradise, Northern California, and the Woolsey Fire in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, proved to be among the most destructive in the state’s history, and they’re given a sweeping, almost epic overview from “Crash Reel” filmmaker Lucy Walker with “Bring Your Own Brigade.” The film tries to distill all of California’s current wildfire crisis — with the state serving as a microcosm for the world — into a whopping near two hour and 10 minutes.

The result is , as the film moves so quickly from one talking point to the next almost to the point of inducing whiplash. Still, the insane archival footage of the infernos as they happened makes for an occasionally arresting viewing experience.

For the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, IndieWire is again partnering with Canada Goose for a series of events to celebrate the female filmmakers showing new films at this year’s fest, including a private virtual version of our annual sit-down dinner honoring filmmakers. While this year’s mixer will look a little bit different than years past, the Zoom-based event promises to bring together some of indie film’s best and brightest, albeit through virtual means.

At this year’s Sundance, female filmmakers aren’t in short supply: 50 percent were directed by one or more women. Their projects include some of the hottest at the festival, including Rebecca Hall’s “Passing,” Robin Wright’s “Land,” Sian Heder’s “Coda,” Nanfu Wang’s “In the Same Breath,” and Mona Fastvold’s “The World to Come.”

And that’s just one piece of Sundance’s offerings, as some of the best films of...

If you’re looking for sure bets at the Sundance Film Festival, the smart money says you should look to the documentary programming. The festival’s lineup of narrative films, after all, is always hit-or-miss: For every “Minari” or “The Farewell” or “Beasts of the Southern Wild” that comes out of Park City to become a hit in theaters or on the awards circuit, there are dozens of movies that disappear, or that find that the rapturous reaction they received at 7,000 feet is considerably more tepid at sea level.

But Sundance’s documentaries rarely disappoint. Almost every year, more than half the nonfiction films that make the shortlist in the Oscars Best Documentary Feature category are films that premiered at Sundance — and when this year’s shortlist is announced on Feb. 9, there’s no question that it will be filled with Sundance’s Class of 2020.

Among the docs that premiered...

It’s a familiar refrain these days: this year’s Sundance Film Festival will look a fair bit different than years past, but the same depth of filmmaking talent appears to still be on offer. And now, for the first time ever, film fans can stream all of the festival’s slate in the safety and comfort of their own homes.

This year’s robust lineup features plenty of familiar names and faces, including Edgar Wright, Lucy Walker, Robin Wright, Betsy West and Julie Cohen, Siân Heder, Sion Sono, Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones, Ana Katz, Kevin Macdonald, and many more. More than half the lineup is first-time filmmakers, and they range from established names like Rebecca Hall and Jerrod Carmichael to newcomers like Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. and Carlson Young.

From the slate, we’ve selected 15 of the films we’re most excited to see at this year’s Sundance,...