Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Sundance Announces Premieres and Doc Premieres Strands
Traditionally, the Premieres section at Sundance is a bit of a mixed bag, with some films by good directors but with a premium put on star power over actual quality. The 2014 Premieres lineup announced today is, however, packed with movies that, at least on paper, are genuinely exciting. There’s Calvary, the latest from The Guard‘s writer/director John Michael McDonagh, Ira Sachs’ Love is Strange, starring Alfred Molina and John Lithgow as longtime lovers who finally tie the knot, and Mike Cahill’s followup to Another Earth, the sci-fi I Origins. “25 New Face” Sara Colangelo’s debut feature Little Accidents (starring […]
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“The Line Blurs” at DCTV
Tomorrow evening at 7:30 pm, DCTV will be hosting “The Line Blurs: Shifting Narratives in Filmmaking,” a panel on the increasingly ambiguous division between fiction and nonfiction in filmmaking. It is a timely discussion, one that will probe questions as to whether or not a delineation between the two forms has ever existed, and why viewers and critics alike are bent on categorization. The panel will feature filmmakers Josephine Decker, Keith Miller, Lynne Sachs and Caveh Zahedi, with Nathan Silver in the moderator’s chair. Silver, director of Soft In The Head and Exit Elena, shoots without a script, mining the people […]
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Sundance Announce Spotlight, Midnight, Kids and New Frontier Titles
Yesterday Sundance released its initial slate and today the second burst of titles emerges. In Spotlight, which houses fest favorites (many by alumni of the festival and/or the labs), there’s only one title that’s new to me, namely R100, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s wild erotic comedy about a “mild-mannered family man with a secret taste for S&M” who “finds himself pursued by a gang of ruthless dominatrices—each with a unique talent.” That’s definitely one to check out. In the Midnight section, new films from Adam Wingard and Taika Waititi (who reunites with his Eagle vs Shark star Jemaine Clement in a vampire mockumentary) are definitely […]
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James Gray Blasts Film Critic Peter Bradshaw Over Immigrant Review (and Bradshaw Responds)
At the Marrakech International Film Festival, American director James Gray fired a broadside at British critics who reviewed his new film, The Immigrant, out of the Cannes Film Festival, singling out the much-respected and acclaimed film critic of The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw. Speaking to a group of international journalists on a roundtable he called The Guardian review, “The dumbest review I’ve ever read.” Without referring to Bradshaw by name, but citing the review extensively, he called Bradshaw, “a failure as a critic,” and “corrupt.” Gray turned on British critics when he was asked by Finnish journalist Kalle Kinnunen about the […]
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Sundance 2014 Competition and NEXT Titles Announced
Slamdance was yesterday, and now it’s the Sundance Film Festival who are putting out their initial competition slates. There’s no single opening movie anymore, but instead Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Todd Miller’s doc Dinosaur 13, Hong Khaou’s narrative feature Lilting and Nadav Schirman’s Israeli doc The Green Prince kick off things on January 16. I’m always excited to see lineups that have a mixture of work by familiar faces and names that are as yet unfamiliar to me, and this is definitely one of those. In the U.S. Dramatic Competition, there are films from Joe Swanberg, Jim Mickle, Craig Johnson, Carter Smith and the Zellner brothers plus debuts […]
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IFP Guest Curates “One Million Square Feet of Culture” in Miami
Alongside Miami’s Art Basel — the international art show that runs through Saturday — IFP has teamed with One Million Square Feet of Culture to guest curate a series of technology-centric events. Installed at the Wynwood Cigar Factory across (more precisely) 3,045 square feet are three programs: Emotional Arcade, The 78 Project, and BlabDroids. Designed by Brent Hoff and Alex Reben, modified EEG headsets are the tricks of the trade in the Emotional Arcade, where unchecked emotions are a game-winning currency. Alex Steyermark and Lavinia Jones Wright view The 78 Project as an opportunity to record today’s music with yesterday’s technology. Using […]
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Documentary Shortlist Announced for 2013 Academy Awards
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced the shortlist of 15 films from the five nominees for Best Documentary will be chosen. That announcement comes on January 16, but until then we can pore over a pretty strong list, featuring Gotham winner The Act of Killing plus new films from such vets as Alex Gibney, Alan Berliner, Lucy Walker and Jehane Noujaim plus crowd favorites from newcomers such as Zachary Heinzerling (Cutie and the Boxer) and Gabriela Cowperthwaite (Blackfish). There are also inevitably a number of notable absentees, such as Lana Wilson and Martha Shane’s After Tiller, […]
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Slamdance 2014 Lineup Announced
The main competition lineup for the 2014 Slamdance Film Festival was announced today for the event which runs, parallel to Sundance, in Park City between January 17 and 23. The two titles two particularly catch my eye in the Narrative section are Copenhagen by Mark Raso, and Jay Alvarez’s I Play With The Phrase Each Other. Raso, a Student Academy Award winner in 2012, blogged for Filmmaker during the making of his low-budget feature debut (you can read those posts here), while Alvarez — also a first-time director — has ambitiously crafted a black-and-white film which is made up entirely […]
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The Other Moments of the 2013 Gotham Awards
Almost a decade ago, I was assigned to cover an LA-based awards show by The London Times. I was attending as the guest of an employee of the organization which put on the show and so was afforded access that a journalist might not get. I remember sitting up in the gods, watching the show, getting the same experience one would get watching on television, except from a great distance. During the second commercial break, after watching the usually hilarious host stumble through some mostly unfunny material, I realized that I had literally nothing to write about and that the […]
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Inside Llewyn Davis, Fruitvale Station Take Top Prizes at the Gotham Awards
Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers’ sly fable of the artist’s life set in the ’60s Greenwich Village folk scene, was awarded the Best Feature prize at last night’s IFP Gotham Awards, held at Cipriani Wall Street. The film was something of a surprise winner, with many predicting Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave to take the top prize. Also scoring at the Gothams was Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, which won the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director and Breakthrough Actor for Coogler and Michael B. Jordan, respectively. The Best Documentary Award went to Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and Anonymous’s The Act […]
