Since his 2009 debut Down Terrace, a pitch-black comedy about a Brighton crime family in decline, the fearless writer/director Ben Wheatley has gripped audiences with his brutally bleak take on British life. His follow-up, the hitman horror Kill List, entered even more terrifying territory, but Wheatley is now back to comedy with his third feature, Sightseers. After playing at Cannes, Toronto and Sundance, Sightseers hits U.S. screens this spring through IFC Films. It may be his lightest work yet, but Sightseers’ subject matter is still pretty grisly by normal standards: It’s a blood-soaked romcom about two vacationing 30-something lovers (co-writers […]
Back to reality. That may be the best way to describe both the status of our global economy and the previous 12 months in independent film. Little irrational exuberance; no breakout blockbusters; but a few profitable indie films, perhaps countable on one hand, that stand out as carrots for hundreds of others to try to reach out and emulate. Calmer heads prevailed at Sundance 2012 as sellers and buyers got down to the more complicated business of the current indie marketplace, with its delicate mix of theatrical and VOD platform releasing. No one was throwing money around like it was […]
Flicklist The Digital Age is a double-edged sword in terms of creative content: it has exponentially increased the accessibility of creation and consumption but also led to a flooded and overwhelming marketplace. Co-founded by Ted Hope, Brian Newman and Antonio Kaplan, Flicklist is a new iPhone app aimed at streamlining the search for films that you’ll love. Simultaneously allowing you to compile your own lists of cinematic recommendations, as well as follow the tastes of people whose opinions you trust, Flicklist creates an interactive social-media platform around movies and then alerts you to their availability, whether online or at your […]
The credits roll, there is applause, and not too many people walked out. The festival premiere of your debut film is over. You relax, a year’s worth of stress magically departing your body. Sure, there will be tough times ahead; distribution is difficult. But, for the moment, you congratulate yourself on a job well done. But don’t relax too much, warn a trio of festival heads. Your next big job as a director looms sooner than you think. The audience Q&A you’ll lead in just a minute or two is surprisingly important when it comes to your film’s future life. […]
Editing is older than motion pictures. The ordering and pacing of dialogues, scenes, entrances and exits to build conflict and resolution have long defined Western theater, from Aeschylus’s Oresteia to Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung [Der Ring Des Nibelungen]. It was the insertion of first-person thoughts into dialogue and plot that modernized 18th- and 19th-century novels and clever sequencing of mechanically animated magic lantern glass slides that thrilled Victorian audiences to popular epics like Ben-Hur.
With Marie Losier’s retrospective, Just a Million Dreams, now running at New York’s MoMA through November 11, we’re reposting our interview with Losier from our Winter, 2012 print issue. The film discussed here, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, screens tomorrow, November 3. What should one expect when one artist turns their camera on another? Although the “portrait of the artist” doc is one of nonfiction filmmaking’s most durable sub-genres, audiences often expect the least from it. In the presence of a great painter, musician or author, directors are frequently expected to sublimate their own styles in favor of […]
Filmmaker last interviewed Marion Cotillard in 2007, just prior to the release of the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie En Rose. Cotillard’s stunning performance as the legendary French singer won her numerous Best Actress accolades, including a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. She was subsequently inundated with Hollywood offers, which lead to Cotillard working with a string of great directors, including Michael Mann (Public Enemies), Christopher Nolan (Inception and The Dark Knight Rises), Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) and Steven Soderbergh (Contagion). All of the above-listed films have boasted all-star ensemble casts, but Cotillard has failed to […]
The future of editing may not lie in the tools editors use but the new formats that feature their work.
Dree Hemingway is a sweet porn star and Besedka Johnson — Best Actress winner at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival — is the mysteriously bitter older woman she befriends in Sean Baker’s sun-streaked relationship drama, Starlet. Interview by Scott Macaulay.
What to say of a film festival at which the most highly anticipated — and, as it turns out, best — entry is an 83-minute-long documentary about fishermen with no real dialogue or narration that was shot on a dozen GoPro cameras, many of them tethered to a commercial fishing boat? A number of things come to mind, all of them complimentary, but what first bears mention is how well matched the 65th Festival del Film Locarno and Leviathan were for one another. Had it premiered at Cannes or Toronto, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s film would likely have been […]