Muscular and involving, Christopher Smith’s medieval adventure film Black Death is a satisfying throwback of sorts — a tense, character-driven period piece that is at once an action film and an act of historical reexamination, with a dash of slow burn horror and spiritual rumination to boot. Eddie Redmayne plays Osmund, a monk in a small bubonic plague-ridden hamlet in rural England. Cloistered from the decimation somewhat, he carries on a forbidden love affair with a young woman (Kimberley Nixon) from his home town. After dispatching her back to their village in order to escape the plague, Osmund is tasked with […]
EDITOR’S NOTE, May 28, 2012: At the time of this blog post, all the below 25 films were available on Amazon Prime. Now, a year later, we have been informed by our readers that a number of them are no longer listed on the service. We apologize for any inconvenience, but, as we are learning, streaming windows can be short, and films can rotate on and off the various services. It’s thus possible that missing titles could return in the near future. In the meantime, we’ll work on another post with an entirely up-to-date selection of films. Amazon has dipped […]
The Tribeca Film Festival today announced their 2011 world narrative and documentary lineup as well as introducing a new out-of- competition sidebar, Viewpoints, which highlights international cinema. A total of 45 features were unveiled for the 10th edition, taking place April 20-May 1, from a record number of over 5,600 submissions. The fest also introduced at a press conference today, according to indieWIRE, new awards that will be handed out this year from the competition slate: achievements in cinematography, screenwriting, editing and Best New Director awards for narrative and doc sections. The remaining features will be announced next week. Last […]
Ah, there’s nothing quite like the smell of pitches in the morning. This past Saturday, the IFP kicked off its annual Script to Screen Conference with five brave writers pitching their scripts to a panel of producers and agents. Although all the panelists agreed that it was useful for writers to compare their projects to other films (a practice known as “using comps”) Peter Van Steemburg, the Director of Acquisitions at Magnolia Pictures, warned against using obvious ones such as “Juno or Napoleon Dynamite,” recommending that if you are pitching something that’s a lot like another movie, you should […]
Director and producer Gary Winick, a friend and mentor to many in the independent film community, died Sunday afternoon in New York at the age of 49. The cause was brain cancer, a friend told Indiewire. As the comments in that Indiewire piece — “an amazing mentor,” “a generous visionary,” “one of the finest human beings in our industry”— attest, Winick was a rare soul in the world of independent film. He was a smart, compassionate and truly giving person, and, even as his Hollywood career took off, he never forgot his roots. While he was crafting smart and heartfelt […]
Josh Radnor, the writer-director-actor of, happythankyoumoreplease, has a day job: he stars on the hit CBS sitcom, How I Met Your Mother. (Radnor plays the titular “I”— perhaps the most famous “I” in pop-culture since Withnail & I.) happythankyoumoreplease is an immensely likeable New York ensemble film about young people trying to negotiate love and responsibility, and its Audience Award win at Sundance in 2010 marks Radnor, who makes his directorial debut with the movie, as a filmmaker to watch. happythankyoumoreplease features a number of outstanding performances by actors including Malin Akerman, Tony Hale, Zoe Kazan, Kate Mara, Pablo Schreiber, […]
When it comes to James Franco’s Oscar-hosting performance, which has been described as squinty and blasé, I’m not going to pile on for two reasons. The first is that I’d suck at hosting something like this. Panels, Q&A’s, I’m fine, but hosting a nearly four-hour show, even with an amped-up cohost? My hat’s off to anyone who tries. (Especially anyone who tries with less than top-notch writing… what was up with that?) The other reason? Well, I recognize too well that frozen smile, that seemingly focused but actually distracted into-the-distance gaze. It’s not like Franco didn’t want to be there. […]
Originally posted online on July 7, 2010. The Kids Are All Right is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Annette Bening), Best Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo) and Best Original Screenplay (Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg). It’s been eight years since Lisa Cholodenko’s last feature film (six if you count her TV adaptation of Dorothy Allison’s novel Cavedweller), but for the 46-year-old writer-director of 1998’s High Art (winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance) and 2002’s Laurel Canyon (starring Frances McDormand and Christian Bale) the time has, if anything, only sharpened her wits and powers of empathic observation, not […]
This piece was originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue. 127 Hours is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (James Franco), Best Adapted Screenplay (Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy), Best Editing (Jon Harris), Best Original Score (A.R. Rahman) and Best Original Song. When Werner Herzog made his 1982 true-life inspired tale of a Peruvian capitalist transporting a giant steamer across dry land, Fitzcarraldo, he famously replicated the ordeal, lugging with his crew an even bigger ship across the Amazon jungle in one of the most strenuous and demanding movie shoots of all time. Before its release, Francis Ford Coppola said […]
This piece was originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue. Black Swan is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Darren Aronofsky), Best Actress (Natalie Portman), Best Cinematography (Matthew Libatique), Best Editing (Andrew Weisblum). Darren Aronofsky was developing a project based on Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella, The Double, when he happened to go to a production of another Russian work, Swan Lake, the 1875 ballet composed by Peter Tchaikovsky. Seeing the ballet’s White Swan and Black Swan played by the same ballerina, Aronofsky experienced what he called a “Eureka” moment, realizing that The Double’s themes of splintering identity and […]