Documentary Fortnight, MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media, kicked off its 10th season last night with the world premiere of Self Made. The film, a first for British artist (and Turner Prize winner) turned filmmaker Gillian Wearing, takes the audience through the cathartic process of a Method Acting class populated by a small group of hand-picked non-professionals and led by acting teacher, Sam Rumbelow. The movie shows how strong performances can result from emotional excavation. It’s a raw and emotionally powerful film and one that makes clear that Method Acting, first invented by Stanislavski over a hundred years […]
Brent Green is one of Filmmaker‘s favorite young artists, a wholly original animator and performer who has become something of an art world star on the basis of his idiosyncratic, low-fi short films and live events. Tonight and tomorrow he brings the full evening live version of Gravity is Everywhere Back Then to New York’s The Kitchen. From The Kitchen’s website: Inspired by the real actions of the eccentric Leonard Wood, filmmaker Brent Green brings to life this love story like no other in his first feature-length film. Shot entirely on the full-scale town he built in his backyard, Green […]
Brent Green is a self taught filmmaker and artist who lives and works in the Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania. His unique hand drawn and stop motion short films have played venues including the Sundance Film Festival, the L.A. Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. He was also one of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces in 2005. Recently he wrapped up filming his first feature-length film, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Shot entirely in stop motion using human beings, the film tells the true story of Leonard and Mary Wood, two people joyously brought together but separated through forces far […]
Via Nowness comes Film 1, a short by Martin de Thurah for designer Johan Lindeberg. De Thurah is best known for his Fever Ray and James Blake music videos, and his latest stars Iva Gocheva, Bogdan Kwiatkowski and Kate Lyn Sheil. It’s shot by Kaspar Tuxen, one of Filmmaker‘s 2010 “25 New Faces.” From the site: Today’s digital premiere of Martin de Thurah’s Film I spotlights Johan Lindeberg’s new BLK DNM line and takes cues from the designer’s personal life. “I went through a recent break-up and wanted to use my own dynamic to inspire the film,” Lindeberg says. “I […]
AICN thinks this trailer for the zombie game Dead Island might be better than most movie trailers, and I tend to agree. More Dead Island Videos
In We Are What We Are, first time Mexican helmer Jorge Michel Grau creates a deeply unsettling portrait of contemporary Mexican urban life which steady grows into many things all at once: a sincere family drama, an earnest exploration of the moral implications of cannibalism and a ribald satire of the seemingly intractable political and economic corruption that is haunting present day Mexico. All moody nighttime vistas and grim, claustrophobic interiors, Grau’s film manages both social commentary and grisly, bone-chilling terror the old-fashioned way, but it still manages to have a depth of human feeling that isn’t the stock and […]
In a release sent out today the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the full lineup for the 40th edition of New Directors/New Films, which will take place March 23 – April 3. Highlighting 28 feature films (24 narrative, 4 documentaries) from 22 countries, ND/NF will open with J.C. Chandor‘s investment banker drama, Margin Call. His debut feature stars Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci and Jeremy Irons. Closing the festival will be Maryam Keshavarz‘s Circumstance, which looks at today’s Iranian youth culture through the eyes of two teenage girls. The film […]
Today we, along with seemingly everyone else in the film blogosphere, announced Criterion’s exclusive deal with Hulu, which will see some 800 Criterion titles stream to viewers on the Hulu Plus service. And, like everyone else, we had to add a small update when we realized that Hulu’s gain is Netflix’s loss. The Criterion titles we Netflix subscribers are used to watching (just last week, for example, I saw Agnes Varda’s Cleo from Five to Seven) will soon be leaving the service. Over at Hulu, Criterion President Peter Becker launches a blog with this declaration of love for the label’s […]
Back in the day, Richard Kern did many of our covers — Robert Duvall, Kim Pierce/Chloe Sevigny/Hilary Swank, and Michelle Rodriguez, for example. Recently he gave us a shot of Sasha Grey for The Girlfriend Experience that is only in our print edition. But the truly well-viewed will remember Kern’s string of New York underground and transgressive films from the 1980s, movies like The Right Side of My Brain, Submit to Me, and Goodbye 42nd St. This new Kern music video of the band Dentata is more straight-up performance, but it still boasts his great eye and specific vibe. Dentata […]
A couple of years ago at a film panel discussion I had to smile at the irony of a $600/hour entertainment attorney solemnly intoning to an audience questioner that his indie-film revenue issues would be solved if he embraced “the Radiohead model.” That is, if the filmmaker decided, like the English superstar band did with their album In Rainbows, to allow fans to pay what they want, even if that was only a penny. But that was back when free was the thing. Indeed, while others had previously experimented with such pricing models, that Radiohead did so with one of […]