A lot of the film industry has been sitting around waiting for things to return to “normal,” a normal that seems to be receding further away by the day. None of the films on my list I saw in a theater and access was both easier (some faraway fests I could attend from my bathtub for the price of a regular movie theater ticket) and harder (geo-blocking, ticket caps, outrageous virtual pass prices). Even in the face of all of this, the number of women working in the film industry continued a steady incline. Though many long for normal, remember: […]
TIFF co-heads Cameron Bailey and Joana Vicente have announced the 50 films that will comprise the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. Necessarily due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s TIFF is very different edition — the film count is down from 2019’s 300+, and most press and industry will attend virtually — but there are still many anticipated world premieres and diverse international offerings. “We began this year planning for a 45th Festival much like our previous editions,” said Bailey, Artistic Director and Co-Head of TIFF, in a press release, “but along the way we had to rethink just about […]
Access, access, access — be it physical, emotional, or preferably both — is the doc filmmaker’s equivalent of location. And Brazilian director Petra Costa manages to get it in spades. Currently streaming on Netflix, her Oscar-nominated epic The Edge of Democracy, the third film in a personal, award-winning trilogy that began with the 2009 short Undertow Eyes, followed by her debut feature Elena three years later, is easily Costa’s most ambitious to date. With fly-on-the-wall camerawork, and guided by her eloquent voiceover narration, Costa captures up close and in real time the democratic car wreck of recent corruption scandals in Brazil that led to the […]
New films by American independents Benny and Josh Safdie, Todd Haynes, Sofia Coppola and Noah Baumbach will all premiere in Competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The official selection’s full slate includes the Safdie brothers’s Robert Pattinson-starring Good Time, Haynes’s Amazon-financed childrens picture Wonderstruck, and the latest from Baumbach, the Netflix-acquired, Adam Sander-starring The Meyerowitz Stories. International auteurs include Lynne Ramsay’s collaboration with Joaquin Phoenix, You Were Never Really Here; Michael Haneke’s Happy End, dealing with the European refugee crisis; and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, one of four festival films featuring Nicole Kidman. Also noteworthy […]
How does one measure a film festival’s success? Through the number of world premieres, red-carpet events, and sold-out screenings? Or possibly it’s something that occurs beyond the screen, in terms of how a festival supports its community and helps nurture its local film culture. Turning a respectable 35 this past November, the Hawaii International Film Festival attempted to do both. It kept its usual youthful swagger with a strong lineup of world and international premieres and some glamorous events featuring the likes of Japanese star Tadanobu Asano and Hong Kong director Mabel Cheung, yet made sure to spotlight key new […]
Cannes Film Festival 2014 by Aaron Hillis Ken Loach. Olivier Assayas. Atom Egoyan. The Dardenne Brothers. The world’s most prestigious film festival may have asked the first-ever female Palme d’Or winner (Jane Campion, for 1993’s The Piano) to head up the jury, but Cannes’ main competition was disappointingly chock-full of the usual suspects, i.e., older, white male auteurs on a return visit. At least this year’s top honor went to Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose three-hour-plus drama Winter Sleep will be released stateside in time for awards season. The characteristically Chekhovian, uncharacteristically talky epic stars Haluk Bilginer as a […]
That’s Cannes, man. The red carpet’s rolled and stashed; you don’t have to go home but you can’t afford to stay here. Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s three-hour-plus, mixed-reviewed Winter Sleep pocketed the Palme d’Or. Sorry, Naomi Kawase with your so-called “masterpiece” and Xavier Dolan, who said he “deserved” to win top honors, juries are subjective. The more burning issue is when undistributed landmarks like Adieu Au Langage and The Tribe will find their way to your eyes and ears. Until my final take on the 2014 edition of Cannes appears in the next issue of Filmmaker, here are my […]
There were few surprises to be had at this morning’s announcement of the Competition, Un Certain Regard and Special Screenings sections for the 2014 Cannes Film Festival — perhaps barring Fremaux’s proud, misleading assurance that a whopping 15 female directors were included in the lineup, which is evidently French for eight. Familiar faces returning to the Croisette include Assayas, Cronenberg, Zvyaginstev, Bilge Ceylan, Hazanavicius, Egoyan, Loach, Leigh and the Dardennes, whose Two Days, One Night may prove to be Marion Cotillard’s successful shot at the Best Actress title, after snubs for Rust and Bone and The Immigrant. The two American titles in Competition […]
The 33rd edition of the PIA festival wrapped on Friday, September 30. A week and an half in the rather dowdy National Film Theatre saw a slew of hipsters, film students, pedants, critics and film fans making their annual pilgrimage to check out the newest of the new – with hopes of discovering the newest and best of the Japanese film scene. PIA has played host to the first-time efforts of such folks as enfant terrible Sono Shion as well as the more gentle international festival favorite, Naomi Kawase. Recently they’ve been nurturing the career of whipsmart indie wunderkind, Yuya […]
The line up for the 64th Cannes Film Festival was announced today in Paris. Some of the familiar faces headed to the South of France this year include the Dardenne brothers, Nicolas Winding Refn, Pedro Almodovar and Terrence Malick who all have films in competition. Jodi Foster‘s The Beaver and Rob Marshall‘s installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise will play out of competition. While Gus Van Stant, Bruno Dumont and Sean Durkin will have films in Un Certain Regard. The complete list of titles are below. The Cannes Film Festival will take place May 11-22. Competition: “La […]