Filmmaker Videos
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Now Online: Hannah Fidell’s A Gathering Squall
Last year, watching The Gathering Squall, based on a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, alerted me to the talent of the film’s writer/director, Hannah Fidell. Seeing shortly afterward a rough cut of her debut feature, A Teacher, confirmed that considerable talent. A Teacher is being put out theatrically by Oscilloscope this Friday, and to help promote the release The Gathering Squall is now on Vimeo, where it is a Staff Pick. Fidell was one of our “25 New Faces” last year, and Squall was shot by another New Face, Andrew Droz Palermo, who also shot A Teacher and Adam Wingard’s […]
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First Clip from Alex Gibney’s The Armstrong Lie
Despite what its title might suggest, The Armstrong Lie is a film which Alex Gibney made with full cooperation from disgraced cycling cheat Lance Armstrong. Errol Morris’ Rumsfeld doc The Unknown Known somewhat disappointed when it screened at Telluride, so maybe this will be the season’s definitive doc about a high-profile American male owning up to his deceit and misdeeds? Here’s the first clip from the film, which shows Armstrong talking to Gibney directly after filming his mea culpa interview with Oprah Winfrey.
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Trailer Watch: Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin
The word from Telluride is rather mixed on Jonathan Glazer’s long-waited third feature, Under the Skin, a (by definition) very ambitious adaptation of Michel Faber’s remarkable novel about an alluring female alien (Scarlett Johansson) picking off hapless hitchhikers in the Scottish highlands. This teaser for the film — which plays today in Venice, and in Toronto later in the week — gives us little to go on in terms of plot but strongly indicates that Glazer has created a dark, brooding vision seemingly untroubled by commercial concerns. Johansson, an apt choice in the role of the extraterrestrial temptress, is (fittingly) the […]
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A Trailer in Clips: Lars von Trier’s Curious Nymphomaniac Rollout
Oh, Lars, what are you playing at? The court jester of Cannes has remained uncharacteristically tightlipped about his next film, the pornographic two-part epic Nymphomaniac, having sworn off the press following that infamous Melancholia conference. In lieu of his usual stops on the festival circuit, von Trier has taken to releasing “appetizers” from each of the film’s eight chapters. Trailers are for the merely conventional. The first clip, entitled “The Compleat Angler,” appeared on June 28th, and introduced us to Young Joe, the adolescent iteration of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s protagonist. The hallmark handheld sways in unison with the train car where […]
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First Look at Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known
Errol Morris’ Donald Rumsfeld doc The Unknown Known played at Telluride last night (to somewhat mixed reactions), and today Vice has the first clip from the film. Delving into almost 50 years of Rumsfeld’s memos, which he refers to as “snowflakes,” the film obviously harkens back to Morris’ Oscar-winning The Fog of War — also an intimate examination of a failed U.S. war with the Secretary of Defense who oversaw it — but with a difference. Whereas Robert S. McNamara was looking back 40 years after the fact on his handling of the Vietnam war, Rumsfeld is here talking about a […]
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Now Online: Devyn Waitt’s Not Waving But Drowning
Just a quick heads up that Devyn Waitt’s 2012 festival title Not Waving But Drowning, an NYC-set 20something drama starring Adam Driver (Girls) and Vanessa Ray (Pretty Little Liars), has debuted for free on YouTube, playing alongside a short also directed by Waitt, The Most Girl Part of You. It’s an interesting approach to take, as opposed to going the VOD route, and presumably is seen as the simplest and most direct way to connect with the film’s young demographic. And, of course, in contrast with VOD, where the numbers are tightly guarded by distributors, here the filmmakers will have […]
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The Intersection of Film and Live Music: Jem Cohen’s We Have an Anchor
Jem Cohen is back at BAM with the New York premiere of We Have an Anchor — a hybrid documentary that blends projections of landscapes in a variety of formats (Super 8, 16mm, HD), poetry and newspaper clippings to the sounds of a live score by an indie rock supergroup featuring members of Fugazi, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and more. A spiritual sequel to 2008’s Evening’s Civil Twilight in Empires of Tin, We Have an Anchor is an exploration of place (specifically Nova Scotia, more specifically Cape Breton) utilizing footage Cohen has shot over the last 10 years. Cohen departs […]
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Trailer Watch: Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club
Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has had a curiously diverse career so far, going from the flamboyant coming-of-age dramedy C.R.A.Z.Y. to the historical romance of Young Victoria. The connective tissue between those two movies is that they are both period pieces, and so Vallee is presumably bringing a keen sense of the times to Dallas Buyers Club, a mid-198os AIDS drama starring Matthew McConaughey as a dying Texan electrician infected with the virus who helped others in a similarly grave situation gain access to medicines yet to be approved by the FDA. This is yet another film that firmly repositions McConaughey as […]
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Destin Daniel Cretton, Brie Larson, John Gallagher, Jr. and the Cast Talk Short Term 12
Winner of the 2013 SXSW Narrative Grand Jury Prize, Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12 is the entirely successful feature expansion of the writer/director’s excellent 2009 short about counselors and youth at a residential facility for at-risk teens. Flipping the gender of his protagonist from the short to the feature, Short Term 12 stars Brie Larson (a recent Actor winner at the Locarno Film Festival) as a savvy counselor whose spirit hasn’t yet been crushed by the bureaucrats above her. Of course, she’s challenged, not just by troubled teenagers but also by life changes and self-worth issues, the latter stemming from […]
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Trailer Watch: Tim Sutton’s Memphis
Here’s a look at Memphis, Tim Sutton’s follow-up to Pavilion which has been developed in tandem with the Venice Biennale Film College, as one of the first three projects to emerge from the program’s first year. The film, which shot in the early part of the summer in the city of its title, has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 31, and via The Dissolve we have a trailer for the film. It looks gorgeous and the story about a Memphis-based musician who is “surrounded by beautiful women, legendary musicians, a stone-cold-hustler, a righteous preacher, and a […]
