This powerful adaptation of a 1994 book by French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam of the same title exposes the inhuman practice of stoning women accused of adultery, which supposedly continues to this day. Jim Caviezel stars as Sahebjam, who after his car breaks down is towed to a small Iranian village where he’s approached by Soraya’s aunt (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who reveals to him the village’s dark secret. The film then is told in a flashback as we follow Soraya (Mozhan Marno) as she attempts to provide for her two sons and two daughters though she receives no support from her husband, […]
One of the most puzzling moments from last night’s Oscars came during the Best Documentary acceptance speech. When it came time for The Cove director Louie Psihoyos to speak he found himself in front of a dead mic. Here’s Psihoyos’s acceptance speech, which AJ Schnack at All These Wonderful Things (always on top of the doc news) posted. We made this film to give the oceans a voice. We told the story of The Cove because we witnessed a crime. Not just a crime against nature, but a crime against humanity. We made this movie because through plundering, pollution and […]
A big congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, and the team behind The Hurt Locker for their well-deserved Academy Awards tonight. (I’m pretty sure it’s the first Filmmaker mag cover film to ever win Best Picture and Bigelow the first cover director to win Best Director.) For any newcomers to Bigelow out there, here’s a quick history courtesy of YouTube. (Missing, unfortunately, is her 20-minute Columbia University student film The Set-Up. According to the New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis, it portrays “two men […] fighting each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over.”) […]
Here’s an eerie and visually stunning short film that’s a promo for the design house Rodarte. From Nowness, where you can find other similarly compelling fashion, art and culture-oriented material and produced by the Director’s Bureau, it’s directed by Todd Cole, shot by Shawn Kim, and scored by No Age. From Nowness: Guinevere van Seenus stars in Aanteni, a high-fashion techno-thriller from CFDA award-winning design sisters Rodarte, shot by their friend and frequent collaborator, the photographer and video artist Todd Cole. Set in the deserted grounds of Paypal founder Elon Musk’s Space X jet lab in Hawthorne, California, the film […]
UPDATE#2: 17 minutes into the show Cablevision subscribers get back ABC. UPDATE: Sounds like there will be no 11th hour apologies. Nikki Finke at Deadline says Cablevision is giving its customers free On Demand tonight and will have someone tweeting and liveblogging at the Oscars. If you’re one of the 3 million Cablevision customers in New York’s tri-state area who awoke this morning to find their ABC affiliate blacked out you may be asking: “How the f*** do I watch the Oscars tonight?” Over at Moviefone, they have a list of sites where you can get updates throughout the […]
Twitch has got the goods on Srdjan Spasojevic’s button-pushing A Serbian Movie, the story of a retired porn-star lured back into the biz for that one last job with an insane director on what looks like the set of Hostel. “This is graphic, brutal, wildly transgressive stuff,” Twitch’s Todd Brown writes. “And that Spasojevic’s film has some brains to back up all the shocking imagery only serves to make it all that much more appalling.” The trailer below is over-18 and very much NSFW.
Via Harry Knowles at AICN, here’s a trailer for what looks like one of the more interestingly odd films on the indie circuit at the moment: Eve’s Necklace. It’s playing tonight in Austin at the Alamo Drafthouse Village, and while the on-screen actors may seem a little stiff, their voices are provided by John Hawkes, co-star of the Sundance Grand Prize-winning Winter’s Bone, and Cyndi Williams, lead actress in Kyle Henry’s The Room. This is director Daniel Erickson’s first movie in 20 years. He’s an Austin-based music video director whose two previous feature credits are the independent Scary Movie and […]
It was a big night for Lee Daniels’ Precious at the 2010 Spirit Awards. The film picked up awards for Best First Screenplay (Geoffrey Fletcher), Supporting Actress (Mo’Nique), Actress (Gabourey Sidibe), Director (Lee Daniels) and Picture. The only other film to win more than one award was Crazy Heart, which picked up Best First Screenplay and Actor (Jeff Bridges). Hosted by Eddie Izzard and presented by Film Independent, the awards were the first Spirits held in downtown L.A. on a Friday night rather than Saturday afternoon at the Santa Monica beach. The Spirits’ gently irreverent tone remained the same — […]
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 The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow for our Spring 2009 issue. The Hurt Locker is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Bigelow), Best Actor (Jeremy Renner), Original Screenplay (Mark Boal), Best Cinematography (Barry Ackroyd), Best Editing (Bob Murawski and Chris Innis), Best Original Score (Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders), Best Sound Editing (Paul N.J. Ottosson) and Best Sound Mixing (Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett). Now that the […]
Every Thursday I pen an Editor’s Note that goes out to subscribers of our email newsletter (you can subscribe for free here) that is usually not also posted on the blog. I’m reposting today’s newsletter below because some kind of software glitch stripped out most of the punctuation from the copy as well as certain key words. Apologies if you received it and it was less than elegant. Here it is again: The big news in the independent world this week was Tribeca Enterprise’s announcement that it would launch a “virtual film festival” alongside this Spring’s Tribeca Film Festival event. […]