IndieWire

“There’s this question when editing most any movie,” editor Kurt Walker said about his work on Canadian writer/director Sophy Romvari‘s feature debut, the semi-autobiographical family drama “Blue Heron. “Is this gonna work?” The challenge that Walker and Romvari needed to make work in the edit was time — specifically, finding a cinematic language for the formally and structurally ambitious way “Blue Heron” treats time.

Morgan Neville’s “Lorne,” his new documentary about Lorne Michaels, opens with the admission that Michaels has “inadvertently” agreed to have a documentary made about him. Then, we see Michaels, inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where both the studio and offices of his “Saturday Night Live” reside, shuffling away in an attempt to avoid Neville’s cameras. How can this even be possible? Wouldn’t Michaels, at some point, have to say “yes” or “no”?

A lot of jokes have been made at the director’s expense because of it, but if Lee Cronin’s “The Mummy” hadn’t been released as “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” it would be extremely difficult to tell who made it. Maybe the wet gore would give it away? The word “slop” doesn’t come to mind for once (bland as it is, Cronin’s film is far too effortful for that), but goop is its only defining touch.

Editor’s note: This is the third chapter of “A Producer’s Path,” an ongoing column for IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking from independent producer Daren Smith. Read the first chapter here. “I wish you would have called us a year ago…” The exact words a distributor told us when we showed them our film. They would have suggested different actors, a different budget, and some changes to the story that would help them bring the film to market.

NBC really wanted a spinoff of “The Office.” The network gave American “Office” creator Greg Daniels carte blanche to make a show, get it on the air, and premiere it immediately following the 2009 Super Bowl, a prime launching pad. But as Daniels and “Office” writer Michael Schur brainstormed, they began to sour on the idea of a spinoff. Taking a character off of TV’s hottest comedy at the time would leave a gaping hole, or risk ruining a side character who couldn’t hold a show of their own.

David Lowery describes his magnificently strange “Mother Mary” as a film about “how art can take something terrible and turn it into something beautiful,” and he would know.

[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “DTF St. Louis” Episode 7, “Nobody’s Normal. It Just Looks That Way From Across the Street” — the finale.] One of the most revealing moments in the very revealing “DTF St. Louis” finale is also one of the most forgettable.

Composer Colin Stetson’s music has unsettled audiences in everything from “Hereditary” to “The Menu” and the “Red Dead Redemption” video games, but he tries never to step in the same haunted well twice.

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An honest, if cynical, understanding of Hollywood’s streaming-era obsession with revivals and reboots is that their metric for success isn’t the same as other shows. These continuations don’t have to go on forever; they don’t even have to get renewed; they just have to exist long enough to hook subscribers on the old shows again. After all, if you sample, say, “Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair” and get nostalgic for the original, all 151 episodes are right there waiting for you on Hulu.