Film Forum

A lifetime of beautifully captured images of his family allows filmmaker Ross McElwee to craft a heartfelt love letter to his late son Adrian, who struggled with mental illness and addiction. With the premise of chronicling the process of turning his acclaimed 1986 documentary SHERMAN’S MARCH into a fictional movie, McElwee picks up the threads of all his previous films—family, love, death, legacy, time—to expertly weave a portrait that moves between reflection and revelation, exploring the tensions between commercial cinema and artistic integrity, and simultaneously creating and recording the bond between father and son. McElwee’s first film in 14 years, REMAKE “continues in the vein of the filmmaker’s best work, albeit with more emotional weight than ever before.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

2025     114 MIN.     USA     MUSIC BOX FILMS

Open Caption (OC) Screenings
Monday, July 20, 8:00 show
Tuesday, July 21, 12:30 show
Saturday, July 25, 2:20 show
Sunday, July 26, 2:20 show
Monday, July 27, 2:20 show
Tuesday, July 2, 8:50 show

Trailer

Reviews

“McElwee is a practitioner of cinema at its most elemental. He’s a man with a movie camera, pointing it at whatever or whoever is around him—which for many years included Adrian—and finding wellsprings of humor, truth, surprise... REMAKE shows him still to be a formidable artist in the face of tragedy, and one whose comically askew sensibility remains intact.”
– Zachary Barnes, The Wall Street Journal

“Extraordinarily clear-eyed for a work so broken-hearted: at once a home movie, an intimate diary, and an expansive study of the filmmaker’s purpose, constantly disrupting its own conclusions with expressions of anger, amusement, and still-unresolved confusion.”
– Guy Lodge, Variety  

“Incorporation of his late son’s own footage elevates this beautiful, tragic movie from powerful to profound... Each of Ross McElwee’s deeply personal documentaries is built directly atop a fault line that separates—or connects—the microcosmic and the universal. But few films could be more unsparingly intimate than REMAKE.”
– Elizabeth Weitzman, The Wrap

“Emotionally piercing... meaningful and poignant.”
–Warren Cantrell, The Playlist
 
“A complex, layered contemplation of grief, memory, family ties and the meaning of filmmaking as a profoundly personal activity, REMAKE is a richly rewarding experience—emotionally, narratively and philosophically.”
– Jonathan Romney, Screen International