One of the award contenders I’m most looking forward to checking out is Young Adult, the Charlize Theron dark comedy that reteams Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody. From the looks of the trailer, and these three clips below, this certainly isn’t Juno, but I’m interested to see Theron try out her comedic chops with Cody’s material. The film has been making its rounds across the country doing surprise screenings and when it played at the New Beverly in LA earlier this month reaction seemed to be positive, according to In Contention. The awards blog also gave high marks to Patton […]
In his films, Werner Herzog has traveled the Amazon, journeyed to Antarctica and, most recently, descended through time into the caves of France to uncover centuries-old cave paintings. So, his trip to a small town in Texas awaiting the capital punishment of a young murderer might have been less epic were it not for the moral dilemmas, lingering anguish and genuine strangeness he finds there. Eschewing the tropes of typical capital punishment documentaries, Herzog, with his German-accented voice jutting from behind the camera, lends an empathetic ear to the words of not only the killer but his accomplice, the victims’ […]
Originally published in the Spring 2011 issue. Terri is nominated for Breakthrough Actor. There’s a lot of time to talk when you’re driving a U-Haul from Los Angeles to Portland. And when Azazel Jacobs decided to tag along with his friend, the novelist Patrick deWitt, for the multi-state road trip in 2008, it was only a matter of time between rest stops, refills and a break from traveling to ride ATVs that the topic of deWitt’s latest manuscript would come up. What neither knew then was that deWitt’s story about an overweight high school kid would open new possibilities in […]
The living room-sized lobby of the IFC Center was teeming with people over the past two weeks as DOC NYC concluded its second year. With more days, more films, more panels and more filmmakers in attendance, the festival was a veritable feast of documentaries. Among the faces passing through the crowd — including Albert Maysles, Werner Herzog, D.A. Pennebaker and Barbara Kopple — were those of festival directors Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen. Wearing the titles of artistic director and executive director, respectively, the husband and wife team conceived DOC NYC from their Manhattan apartment. Though involved in their own […]
Over at the Shadow and Act blog Tambay Obenson has post two clips from one of the favorites from this past Sundance, Dee Rees‘ Pariah. Opening Dec. 28 through Focus Features, the film highlights the impressive talents — and relentlessness — of its writer-director (who along with being a 25 New Faces alum is nominated for Breakthrough Director at this year’s Gotham Awards) and star Adepero Oduye; as you’ll see in the clips and the trailer below. If you’re a reader of this site you already know a lot about Pariah. One of my favorite pieces on the film is […]
On its simplest level Cindy Meehl’s documentary Buck tells the story of the cowboy Buck Brannaman, a horseman who travels the United States conducting clinics for “horses with people problems.” First-time director Cindy Meehl met Buck at one of his clinics, and wanted to share his wisdom with a wider circle than the ardent fans he’s built among “horse people.” A wise cowboy, eh? It doesn’t help that the film opens with iconographic Western shots: a cattle herd, a yellow sun, and galloping cowboys, all underlined by David Robbins’ thrumming score. I admit I was a bit skeptical. The census […]
In a release sent out today, the IFP has announced that actors Oliver Platt and Edie Falco will serve as co-hosts for this year’s Gotham Independent Film Awards, which take place this year on Nov. 28 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. This is the second straight year two actors known for their work in indie films will be hosting the event. Last year Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson did the honors. Also announced today are the five finalists for this year’s Gotham Independent Film Audience Award. Comprising 29 audience award winners from the top 50 US and […]
American independent director Christopher Munch has been making movies now for over 30 years — longer if you count the award-winning short he directed for a PBS affiliate at age 15 about the San Diego Zoo — carving a niche for himself on the international festival circuit as a shape-shifting film artist with a highly idiosyncratic voice. In 1992, Munch won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for his 57-minute black-and-white feature The Hours and Times, a talky, speculative film about an erotically charged weekend that John Lennon and his manager Brian Epstein purportedly spent in Barcelona […]
I’m covering the Thessaloniki International Film Festival for Filmmaker right now, and some images from the March documentary event seem prescient in the light of the hour-by-hour unfolding of events in Greece, where the fall of a government could affect all of Europe, the world economy, and by extension, filmmaking everywhere. Here are some of my photos. Thessaloniki is a palimpsest, a city written upon other cities, incarnation atop incarnation. The history of this far northern Greek city since first dredged from the sea by Alexander the Great has been one of fall and rise, of fire and […]