Conventional wisdom says to wait until a foreign trailer has subtitles before posting, but the gist is apparent enough in this first snippet from Alice Rohrwacher’s Cannes Competition entry Le Meraviglie. Set in the Umbrian countryside, the film centers on the eldest daughter of a provincial bee-keeping family, whose summer is upended by the arrival of a young German boy and local television competition, headed by none other than Monica Bellucci. Already silly/offensive conjectures are being batted around about Rohrwacher’s chances given the fact that both she and jury president Jane Campion are women, but we’ll see if they’re at all warranted in the ensuing weeks.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center recently announced, along with their all-star Summer calendar, that they’ll be hosting a Lav Diaz retrospective, set to run from June 2014 through February 2015. That’s not quite as drastic as it sounds: beginning with his latest, Norte, The End of History, the Film Society will screen one Diaz per month in a cheeky nod to the Filipino auteur’s generous running times. (2004’s Evolution of a Filipino Family clocks in at 540 minutes.) In conjunction with said announcement, Cinema Guild has released the official trailer to Norte, which is billed as “an epic reimagining of Crime and Punishment.” The film […]
“Open that cow’s ass so I can look inside” is just one of the bizarro takeaway lines from this trailer for Bruno Dumont’s first-ever miniseries. P’tit Quinquin (the French title scans less awkwardly than the archaically phrased suggested English title, L’il Quinquin) is 200 minutes of rural murder mystery, and by the looks of it it combines the usual Dumont staples — surly villagers, casual racism, banal brutality — with a seemingly newly discovered sense of (odd) humor. The title presumably comes from the French lullaby (translation: “Little child”), which can be investigated in full here. Dumont evidently likes “Quinquin” […]
Eventually we’ll stop posting about Under The Skin but today is not that day. Last month, I ran a featurette from A24 about the film’s guerrilla style execution. The production rigged Johansson’s vehicle with eight hidden cameras, recording her improvised interactions with any given passerby in real time and with maximum coverage. Now, we have yet another featurette that gets into the specifications of said cameras, called “One-Cams,” which were developed especially for the occasion. For the van sequences, the VFX studio One of Us rigged a CCD camera (about the size of a GoPro) with anamorphic super 16 lenses. Though the rest of the […]
“I’m the best damn filmmaker in the world who has never made one entirely good, entirely satisfactory film,” so said Nicholas Ray, according to his friend Dennis Hopper. In a bit for Turner Classic Movies in 1997, Hopper reflected on Ray’s work and their relationship, which began during his debut role as Goon in the filmmaker’s iconic Rebel Without a Cause. At the time, Hopper remembers thinking “that James Dean was directing [the] film, he had so much input in his character and lines, even deciding how a scene would be shot,” later to realize that Ray “gave Dean the freedom he needed…[he] […]
Trailer cutting is an art in itself and more often than not the results undersell or miss-sell the very package they promote. So goes this slightly corny bumper for Richard Linklater’s masterpiece, Boyhood, though as I recall from my knee jerk reaction to the Coldplay-scored opening sequence, any glimpse of heavy handedness in the film is not worth fretting over. It’s simply one of the most profound viewing experiences I’ve ever had and the less you know going into it, the better. That one of the more holistic family portraits in film has earned an R from the MPAA is an egregious error. IFC Films […]
Author George Saunders’ 2013 Syracuse University commencement address dealt with the subject of kindness. Much in the same way that David Foster Wallace’s This is Water was turned into both an animated short as well as a tasteful stocking stuffer, so too Saunders’ rueful musings. Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness is the name of the 64-page book, and an excerpt has been nicely animated by the folks at Serious Lunch.
Corneliu Porumboiu’s fifth film The Second Game just screened as part of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real series, but his fourth, When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism, is still nearing theaters. While several of Porumboiu’s contemporaries of New Romanian Cinema train their eye on domestic disturbances — of both the absurdist and pragmatic variety — Metabolism pulls back the curtain on a filmmaker’s mid-shoot inner turmoil. Plagued by some sort of imaginary condition (the absurd), he falls into an affair with his lead actress (the pragmatic) and suffers a crisis of doubt. Meticulously crafted, each scene is comprised of a single long take. […]
I was a big fan of David Michôd’s familial crime drama Animal Kingdom, and not just because I saw it on an airplane. If his follow-up The Rover looks to try on a rather generic premise — a hero on the hunt for what’s rightfully his — that’s hopefully not much cause for concern: Animal Kingdom found its strength not in plot, but in its characterization and pacing. Reteaming with the always reliable Guy Pierce, Michôd trades in the rest of his local ensemble for the dubious star wattage of Robert Pattinson, performing an indiscernible accent as a discarded gang member. Premiering in […]
Recent Grand Jury Prize recipient at the Sarasota Film Festival and a FIPRESCI winner in Toronto, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida tells the story of a would-be nun who haphazardly uncovers her Jewish background. Set in 1960s Poland, the discovery leads the eponymous Ida through a tear in her family’s history, stretching as far back as the Nazi occupation. Music Box Films releases the formally and emotionally stunning Ida on May 2.