Few documentary filmmakers’ careers are as fascinating to follow as that of Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and that’s not just because of the consistent quality of his films, but because of the astonishing rate at which he produces them. In the midst of three other projects — an untitled Wikileaks documentary in pre-production; The Road Back, about Lance Armstrong, in post-production; and the newly completed Magic Bus, about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters — Gibney was at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival with his sports documentary Catching Hell, which […]
Now up on our VOD Calendar are the titles available in May. Some of the highlights include Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine, John Carney‘s Zonad, Mark Ruffalo‘s directorial debut Sympathy for Delicious (which is also in select theaters now, read our interview with Ruffalo), Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu‘s Biutiful and the premiere of the Adrien Brody/Penélope Cruz starrer A Madator’s Mistress. To find titles from other months go to our VOD Calendar homepage.
In other places I’ve talked about our process for trying to vet a story ahead of time. We’ve had script readings, we’ve made small test videos expressing the tone we would shoot for in the feature. We’ve shot shorts with the characters from the feature. Now in the rough cut phase, we’re about to have a test screening of my feature film, The Lost Children, on May 4th. This screening is generously provided by Cinema Speakeasy out in L.A. The purpose of this screening is to show a rough cut and get some audience feedback before we lock. We will […]
Attempting to wrap your mind around a film festival’s totality is an exercise of dubious value. Still, the dubious can be exceedingly difficult to resist. It seems to me that the documentary films at the Tribeca Film Festival are of a consistently higher quality than the narratives. But what doc rat doesn’t believe this at every festival? Still, there are extremely few stinker docs at Tribeca, and forget the bombs. After the screenings the descriptive word that I hear the most from the audience members is “good,” occasionally “outstanding,” but never “bad.” Stinker docs need not apply. The universal […]
Tonight at the W Hotel Union Square the winners of the 10th Tribeca Film Festival‘s competition categories were announced, with the grand prize in the international narrative competition going to Lisa Aschan‘s She Monkeys (pictured), an evocative Swedish thriller about the burgeoning, sexually explosive rivalry between a pair of teenage girls engrossed in the world of competitive equestrian acrobatics. Both a daring coming of age tale and an increasingly tense thriller, the Danish born Aschan’s directorial debut made its North American premiere at Tribeca after winning the best new Nordic film prize at last year’s Goteberg Film Festival. Alma Har’el stunningly […]
From Focus Features comes this on-set interview with author Nick Flynn, whose book Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is being turned into a movie by director Paul Weitz. Here he talks about recreating his Boston youth in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and what it’s like to have Robert De Niro playing his dad and Paul Dano playing himself.
In this part two of a two-part interview with David Raycroft, co-founder and Vice-President of Product and Operations of Milyoni, the company responsible for streaming Warner Bros’ The Dark Knight and Harry Potter titles through Facebook, Raycroft talks about the company’s Video on Demand streaming solution. Also check out part 1 he talks about their iFanStore, which allows the easy set up of a storefront on Facebook that integrates with your own fan page. Filmmaker: How has the Warner Brothers Dark Knight experiment been going? How would Milyoni measure the success of that project? How would Warner Brothers? Raycroft: We […]
“Time heals all wounds,” goes an old adage with which everyone involved in The Arbor would likely take issue. Clio Barnard’s cinematic assemblage on English playwright Andrea Dunbar is certainly a document of sorts, but to call it a documentary would be to slight it: The Arbor is equal parts fact, reenactment, and archival footage. Adding to the genre-blending is a series of audio interviews recorded with Dunbar’s siblings, children (particularly Lorraine, in many ways the main “character” of the film), and acquaintances which Barnard then had actors lip-synch onscreen. The result is at first off-putting, eventually immersive, and unlike any […]
As someone who is couch surfing with family and non-blood relatives throughout Europe and the States since I can no longer afford to pay rent, staying in high-end digs on a beautiful beach and lounging around in 80-plus weather during the day while covering the Miami International Film Festival recently was equal parts ironic and surreal. So it was something of a happy accident that while visiting my Tucson-residing best friend from high school I stumbled upon a poster advertising the Arizona International Film Festival. Since I was in town anyhow I figured I might as well check out a […]
Although Clio Barnard’s new film The Arbor chronicles the rough-and-tumble life of celebrated British playwright Andrea Dunbar (Rita, Sue and Bob Too), an alcoholic who died from a brain hemorrhage at age 29, it is anything but conventional in its aims and methodology. Shot in and around Brafferton Arbor, a street on the Buttershaw Estate in Bradford, Yorkshire, where Dunbar lived and worked while raising her three children, The Arbor reconstructs the late writer’s gritty milieu through the testimony of her eldest daughter Lorraine and other family members, whose words are lip-synched by professional actors in evocative set-designed environments. Barnard, […]