In advance of the release of Criterion’s 4K restoration of Blood Simple, photographer Grant Delin created a video essay which compares scenes from the finished film to the original storyboards. With commentary by the Coens, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, and actor Frances McDormand, this glimpse into their creative process highlights the meticulous planning and elaborate storyboards behind the film’s signature aesthetic. The restored version of the Coens’ 1984 debut feature will be available in both Blu-ray and DVD editions beginning on September 20. Find out more here. You can also watch the Coen Brothers’ pitch trailer for the low-budget classic here.
For his first film since his directorial debut A Single Man in 2009, Tom Ford has adapted Austin Wright’s 1993 novel “Tony and Susan.” The resulting thriller, Nocturnal Animals stars Amy Adams as Susan, an L.A. art-gallery owner whose ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) writes a violent novel (called “Nocturnal Animals”) based on their former relationship. “I did something horrible to him,” Susan confesses in the (above) trailer for the film, which also stars Armie Hammer, Michael Shannon, Isla Fisher, Laura Linney, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. After winning the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, and screening recently at the Toronto Film […]
Filmmaker Michel Gondry recently surprised The White Stripes with the simple, but mesmerizing (above) video for “City Lights.” “On his own and without anyone’s knowledge, the legendary filmmaker shot a video for ‘City Lights,’ which he sent them the other night,” according to Third Man Records. The video marks Gondry’s fifth visual collaboration with The White Stripes.
In honor of Janus Films’ new restoration of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog, now playing in limited release, Fandor Keyframe shared this video essay about the ten hour-long films bound together by the Ten Commandments. Originally made for Polish television in 1988, the ten films focus on the residents of a housing complex in late-Communist Warsaw, Poland. Their lives intertwine as they face moral, ethical, and emotional dilemmas. Though the series was shot by nine different cinematographers, as the above essay shows, the overall vision was unified.
The above video essay provides an excellent introduction to the French New Wave, which helped re-invigorate French cinema post-WWII. Spawned by Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and other Cahiers du cinéma critics-turned-filmmakers, the film movement introduced the notion of the director as auteur. A collaboration by Press Play and No Film School, this video essay is the second in a series on film movements, their histories and their enduring influence. You can watch the first film in the series, on German Expressionism, here.
This is fun: Andrew Bujalski, who was a student of Chantal Akerman’s at Harvard, speaks before an Austin Film Society screening of Je, Tu, Il, Elle, recalling his initial, intimidating encounters with her and noting Jim Jarmusch’s debt to this film in particular.
Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women made its debut earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival where it received excellent reviews and was quickly acquired by IFC Films. In advance of its upcoming screenings at both the Toronto and New York film festivals, the film, which stars Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, and Michelle Williams, has its first trailer (above). Based on Maile Meloy’s short-story collection “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It,” the Montana-set film follows three women in an intertwining narrative. In his review of the film out of Sundance, Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov wrote, “Reichardt’s films take place in an atmosphere of heightened quiet, […]
Set in Los Angeles, The Greasy Strangler follows Big Ronnie, a man who runs a disco walking tour along with his son, Brayden. When a sexy, alluring woman named Janet comes to take the tour, it begins a competition between father and son. It also brings about the appearance of an oily, slimy, inhuman maniac who stalks the streets at night and strangles the innocent — soon dubbed “the Greasy Strangler.” The off-kilter feature film debut by writer/director Jim Hosking features performances by Michael St. Michaels, Sky Elobar, and Elizabeth De Razzo as well as prominent genre film producers including Theo Brooks, […]
In Zach Clark’s Little Sister, which premiered earlier this year at SXSW, Colleen (Addison Timlin), a young nun and former goth, returns to her childhood home in Asheville, North Carolina where she faces her estranged dysfunctional family. During Colleen’s visit, things intensify with a little help from Halloween, pot cupcakes, and GWAR. The ensemble cast features Ally Sheedy, Peter Hedges, Keith Poulson, Barbara Crampton, and Kristin Slaysman. In a review of the film in Filmmaker, Howard Feinstein called Little Sister “an unaffected masterpiece,” writing that “Clark balances the melancholy with outsized bursts of joy.” Little Sister opens at The Metrograph in New York on October 14th and […]
This video from the Now You See It account gets into the mechanics of the precise timing, cutting and framing it takes to create truly effective scares in horror movies by comparing two versions of the same scene from Lights Out: staged first in the short film, then in the recent feature film expanded from it.