Jeff Garlin may be best known as Larry David’s right hand man on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, but there’s more to this Second City alum than his deadpan humor. Along with doing stand up and developing new TV shows when Curb isn’t taping, he’s also been trying to get his feature films made. His first is I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With, which premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival to rave reviews and then suddenly lost its momentum and collected dust for over a year until finding distribution through IFC Film’s First Take banner and The Weinstein Company. […]

It’s a rainy mid-day in late August — the wetness welcome, following an intolerably hot week, even by New York City summer standards. At night during that unpleasant spell the postmodern auteur Wong Kar-wai — the master of lush visuals and unpredictable soundtracks, the absolute perfectionist concerned with memory, loss, loneliness, and the subjectivity of time — had been shooting scenes downtown on the West Side of Manhattan, on SoHo’s funky Grand Street, for My Blueberry Nights, his first movie in English and the out-of-competition opening night presentation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (The Weinstein Company will release the […]

Andrea Arnold’s beautifully crafted first feature, Red Road, the follow-up to her Oscar-winning short film, Wasp, was shot on digital video and exploits a fresh, bold palette in telling the story of Jackie (Kate Dickie), an alienated Glasgow policewoman whose job is to watch Glasgow’s banks on surveillance monitors. One day, she notices a man behaving unusually and, becoming fixated on him, crosses a line. Stepping out from behind her monitors, she follows him towards the dangerous housing project called Red Road… Why is she so obsessed with this figure, a man she first glimpses as a shadow, almost a […]

The marriage ceremony in Danish director Susanne Bier’s haunting After the Wedding, penned by frequent collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen and one of this year’s five nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, greatly alters more lives than those of the young heiress bride, Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen), and her betrothed. Indeed, the film could be entitled Before, During, and After the Wedding. Anna’s father, burly, big-bucks exec Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), invites Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), an expat Dane whose energy is totally tied up with the orphanage for street children he works at in Bombay, but who is reluctantly in […]

300 COURTESY WARNER BROS. Zack Snyder brings Frank Miller’s ultraviolent graphic novel, 300, to life with amazing special effects and non-stop action. It’s been two years since Sin City introduced audiences to the world of Frank Miller. Under the direction of Robert Rodriguez, who shot actors using blue screen technology and then added the computer-generated backgrounds in post, Miller’s graphic novel made it to celluloid as a depraved trio of vignettes that both updated film noir and pointed towards a new way of making motion pictures. Now director Zack Snyder (2004’s Dawn of the Dead), employing the same production method […]

YEAR OF THE FISH. This article is part of Filmmaker’s Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. A veteran of Sundance with his short films — including the cryptic, menacing fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hood (starring Christina Ricci and Quentin Crisp!), Little Suck-A-Thumb, and The Frog King — which are regularly shown to film students as examples of exemplary short-form filmmaking, David Kaplan returns to the festival with his first feature, Year of the Fish. At once a singular New York immigrant story, as well as a re-imagining of the fairy tale (Kaplan’s real-world, adult conception of children’s stories can bring to […]

CLIVE OWEN AND JULIANNE MOORE IN CHILDREN OF MEN. Set in 2027, Alfonso Cuarón’s latest picture, Children of Men, takes place in a bleak England where it’s been 19 years since the last baby was born. Mankind’s future seems grim, and most of the world has devolved into anarchy. Random security checks and bombings have become an everyday occurrence as Great Britain franticly tries to protect its island from illegal immigrants. Theo, played by Clive Owen, spends his days in a drunken haze, often escaping the city to smoke pot with his old hippie-friend Jasper (Michael Caine) in the country. […]

The team behind the award-winning documentary Boys of Baraka are back with a new film that focuses on Evangelical children training to be “soldiers in God’s Army.” Early on in Jesus Camp, Pentecostal minister Becky Fischer asks an auditorium full of children and parents: “Do you believe God can do anything?” A young mother grabs her child’s arm and raises it. LEVI IN HEIDI EWING AND RACHEL GRADY’S JESUS CAMP. This is just one of many provocative moments that give Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s latest documentary its haunting power. As enthralling as the religious rallies it reveals, Jesus Camp […]

Director Nicolas Winding Refn on “The Pusher Trilogy” KIM BODNIA IN “PUSHER” Halfway through “Pusher,” Nicolas Winding Refn’s first installment in what would ultimately become an epic trilogy, the director faced a predicament. Suddenly, the genre marked by guns and car chases held no interest. He abandoned the beatings and foot chases from the film’s early scenes, and went for a haunting, harrowing character study. “I realized I wasn’t interested in gangsters and crime,” the Danish filmmaker explains of his 1996 film. “I was really interested in the morality of the characters, and their emotional descents into hell.” “The Pusher […]

Co-director Keith Fulton reveals how to create an unlikely filmic Frankenstein like Brothers of the Head, welding a bizarre story of conjoined rock stars onto a fake-documentary framework. HARRY TREADAWAY AND LUKE TREADAWAY IN KEITH FULTON AND LOUIS PEPE’S BROTHERS OF THE HEAD. Ever heard of Tom and Barry Howe, conjoined twin frontmen from seminal seventies punk rock band Bang Bang? Remember “Two Way Romeo,” their signature live hit, when Barry would pull up his shirt and display the shared flesh-band that forever connected them at the midsection? No recollection? Then what about the British band “Spinal Tap,” with the […]