A often stunning and certainly never less than riveting meditation on the coming of age of an Arab/Corsican criminal in the unforgiving French penal system, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet is that rare bird that feels utterly at home as an art house blockbuster (its pedigree includes the Grand Prix in Cannes, multiple European Film Awards and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film) and as a potential crossover hit. It follows a young prisoner named Malik (a terrific Tahar Rahim), who enters jail as little more than a homeless petty thief, but after being taken under the wing of […]
B-side Entertainment, the Austin-based tech and distribution company that provides website services to film festivals, is closing. The company, which launched a New York-based distribution arm just 13 months ago, lost its funding from venture capital fund Valhalla Partners in late 2009. “We have spent the last four or five months looking for a [financing] alternative,” B-Side CEO and founder Chris Hyams told Filmmaker. “But we reached the end of our cash before we could secure new investment. We had to shut the company down.” B-Side laid off the majority of its staff last week and throughout the weekend notified […]
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Burma VJ director Anders Østergaard for our Director Interviews section of the Website. Burma VJ is nominated for Best Documentary. Danish cinema currently has numerous talented fiction directors – everybody from Lars von Trier, Christopher Boe, Ole Bornedal, and Susanne Bier to Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, Nicolas Winding Refn and Lone Scherfig – and now Anders Østergaard is bringing attention to the country’s documentary output. Born in Copenhagen […]
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Ira Sachs interviewed The Messenger co-writer-director Oren Moverman for our Fall 2009 issue. The Messenger is nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Woody Harrelson) and Best Original Screenplay (Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman). The two Iraq war soldiers played by Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson in Oren Moverman’s astonishing directorial debut, The Messenger, serve in a different kind of military theater. It’s not in the Middle East but at home, here in […]
Returning to the Anthology Film Archives following an opening night event at Kush Lounge is Cinekink NYC. No rebel posturing here, just an eclectic selection of docs, fiction and experimental works dealing with some form of alternative sexuality. This year’s fest kicks off tonight at Kush Lounge with an opening party and screenings of JX Williams 1964 short, The 400 Blow Jobs. According to the catalogue, “While banished to the Hollywood blacklist, JX Williams wrote and directed over 200 stag films in the 1950s and 60s, including this wicked homage to Francois Truffaut.” Also on the bill: Loretta Hintz’s Sheep […]
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed In the Loop co-writer-director Armando Iannucci for our Director Interviews section of the Website. In the Loop is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay (Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche). Scottish writer-director Armando Iannucci has made a slow and steady progression toward becoming a film director. The Glasgow-born Italian Scot originally was planning to become a priest (like Martin Scorsese) but the lure of the entertainment world […]
Television has been blamed for the dumbing down of the American public since the ascendance of the boob tube in the 1950s. But in Italy, where scandal-plagued prime minister Silvio Berlusconi controls the flow of information through his monopolistic holdings in that nation’s biggest media conglomerates, there is a more insidious aspect to the chronic press muzzling at RAI and trashy tits-and-ass programming that predominate on his Mediaset channels. If you want to get a sense of how the billionaire entrepreneur’s televisual imagination has transformed the political and mass-media landscape in Italy, Erik Gandini’s cunningly choreographed documentary Videocracy provides plenty […]
The following interview of Quentin Tarantino originally appeared as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Summer, 2009 edition. Quentin Tarantino fans have been waiting for almost a decade now for a project he’s discussed in interviews — a World War II-set, Dirty Dozen-style “men on a mission” movie. Big-name actors have been brought up, an epic-length storyline has been mentioned, and many imagined this project to be a return to the macho camaraderie of Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs, with the warehouse expanded into the world at war. Of course this project’s journey to the screen has had as many plot […]
The South by Southwest Film Festival unveiled its lineup for this year’s fest, which will take place in Austin, Texas March 12-20. Out of the 119 titles shown this year some of the highlights will be the opening night film, fanboy fav Kick-Ass, as well as Mark and Jay Duplass’s Cyrus, Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything Is Going Fine, Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart and Bernard Rose’s Mr. Nice (pictured). The full list of films are below. HEADLINERS CyrusDirectors and Screenwriters: Jay and Mark DuplassWith John’s social life at a standstill and his ex-wife about to get remarried, a […]
Ernst Aebi, the subject of Martina Egi’s keenly observed new documentary Barefoot to Timbuktu, is something of a renaissance man. Artist, SoHo real estate pioneer and social activist, he is full of paradoxes: easy going yet driven, humble yet self-assured, a man of much wealth who nonetheless spends his leisure time among the dispossessed. Egi profiles Ernst with affection, but she doesn’t shy away from examining the effects of his restless nature on his family and friends. His often rocky family life, along as his many guises and activities, are only the preamble to Egi’s portrait of the subjects very […]