Lena Dunham recently wrote a piece on the late Nora Ephron for The New Yorker, has an article about her college boyfriend in the current issue, and has further strengthened her relationship with the magazine by directing this fun little short film — starring herself, her Girls and Tiny Furniture costar Alex Karpovsky, and Jon Hamm — to promote their new iPhone app.
by Nick Dawson on Aug 9, 2012A month or so, we featured T-Rex — the debut doc directed by 2012 “25 New Faces” alums Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari — on our Kickstarter page. The currently shooting film is all about Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, a 17-year-old African-American boxer from Flint, Michigan. “It’s the first time in 2,000 years that women boxers will compete at the games,” Cooper said when Vadim Rizov interviewed him for the pair’s “25 New Faces” profile. “It’s pretty much the only thing we talk about these days.” And now the film got a whole lot more interesting. Earlier today, the young fighter won a […]
by Nick Dawson on Aug 9, 2012Oscilloscope Pictures has added to its consistently strong catalog of films by snapping up Only the Young, the debut feature from documentarians Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims. The film made its debut at True/False earlier this year and won Silverdocs shortly afterwards, while its directors made it onto our “25 New Faces” list for 2012. In his profile of Tippet and Mims, Scott wrote the following aboutOnly the Young: One day, [Tippet and Mims] met high school seniors Kevin Conway and Garrison Saenz at a skate park in Canyon Country, an economically ravaged town located within Santa Clarita, Calif. Skaters, Christians […]
by Nick Dawson on Aug 8, 2012Tim League’s Drafthouse Films yesterday acquired the Sundance 2012 title Wrong, the latest film from French director Quentin Dupieux (aka dance music star Mr Oizo), the man responsible for last year‘s Rubber and the forthcoming Wrong Cops, starring Marilyn Manson. So now’s as good a time as any to post what is one of the most insane trailers I’ve seen in a long time. Even if the film doesn’t turn out to be fantastic, it certainly seems like it will be, at the very least, distinctively different. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
by Nick Dawson on Aug 8, 2012There’s really not a lot of actual footage or dialogue in this teaser trailer for director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal’s follow-up to their Best Picture Academy Award-winning The Hurt Locker — instead what we have here is suggestive, and very much style over content. The film about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden — which comes out on December 19 — is not set to play fall fests and is still in postproduction, and it seems from this teaser that Columbia Pictures wants to keep as much of the material under wraps as possible, at least for now. […]
by Nick Dawson on Aug 6, 2012Cory McAbee, the ingenious, idiosyncratic talent behind The American Astronaut and Stingray Sam, is on the festival circuit at the moment with his most recent film, the 50-odd-minute Crazy and Thief. (This sweet portrait of childhood, starring McAbee’s children, Willa Vy McAbee and John Huck McAbee, premiered at LAFF last month, moving on to BAMcinemaFest shortly afterwards.) Despite having just put one new work out in the world, McAbee has already launched his next creative project, the very intriguing Captain Ahab’s Motorcycle Club. Here’s how its website describes it: Captain Ahab’s Motorcycle Club was conceived by filmmaker/musician Cory McAbee. The club […]
by Nick Dawson on Jul 26, 2012A few days ago, Scott posted on the blog about Julia Pott, one of our new crop of “25 New Faces,” putting her wonderful, latest short, Belly, online. (On that subject, you should also check out a really excellent article on Pott and Belly over at Motionographer.) Also now showcasing work online is another of this year’s “New Faces,” Ian Clark. Until August 13, you can watch Clark’s gorgeous 25-minute film Searching for Yellow (which I described in his “25 New Faces” profile as “hauntingly lovely, simultaneously intimate and expansive”) and his naturalistic 64-minute portrait of small-town life, Country Story. […]
by Nick Dawson on Jul 26, 2012Today two recent festival favorites, Bob Byington’s Somebody Up There Likes Me and Brian Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s Francine, found distribution. Somebody, which stars Parks and Recreation‘s Nick Offerman and former “25 New Face” Jess Weixler, premiered at SXSW earlier this year and has now been picked up by Tribeca Film, to be released in Spring 2013. The fifth feature from Byington (Harmony and Me, RSO [Registered Sex Offender]), it is about a trio of friends (Offerman, Weixler and regular Byington collaborator Keith Poulson) who waste their lives on meaningless relationships as time ebbs away. Geoff Gilmore, the former Sundance head […]
by Nick Dawson on Jul 25, 2012Last week we announced our 2012 list of “25 New Faces,” a group that numbered 37 as a result of a large number of filmmaking duos, but was expanded even more by a six-man production collective. Ornana, the collective in question, made the playful and funny SXSW-winning animation (notes on) biology and are in postproduction on Euphonia, a live-action narrative feature that is radically different from biology and further underlines the talent as well as the versatility of these young men. (You can read more about both films on their 25 New Faces page.) The gang are currently looking ahead […]
by Nick Dawson on Jul 24, 2012I’ve had wind of this for a while, via both filmmaker Kentucker Audley and programmer Miriam Bale (who has a feature on Beasts of the Southern Wild in our current issue), but now the news is public. On September 14 and 15, the 92Y Tribeca will host the first La Di Da film festival, which takes a look at the recent work of a group of post-Mumblecore figures, including Amy Seimetz, the Safdies, Sean Price Williams, Dustin Guy Defa, Alex Karpovsky, Kate Lyn Sheil, Eléonore Hendricks and Audley. In the press release explaining the genesis of the event, Bale says, […]
by Nick Dawson on Jul 23, 2012