animal kingdom
-
The Clock is Ticking: Filmmakers on Surviving Through the Pandemic
Time may be running out for independent filmmakers. Sure, even as the pandemic has completely disrupted their entire workflows and business models, they’re a scrappy and resourceful bunch. Like restaurants pivoting to drive-thru, delivery and take-out to outlast our current infectious plague, filmmakers are moving forward in myriad ways, whether in post-production on already completed films, developing new scripts or trying to produce new films self-insured by funders with scaled-down crews and robust coronavirus prevention measures in place. But survival is tricky right now and dogged perseverance may only work for so long. To stay afloat, for example, one New […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Oct 28, 2020 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Tramps Writer/Director Adam Leon
Adam Leon’s fleet-footed Gimme the Loot was a giddy discovery out of SXSW in 2012. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize there, it went on to Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and announced Leon as a promising new voice in American independent film, one who married specificity of character and location with keen storytelling chops. Four years later, Leon has made a follow-up feature, Tramps, which premieres in Toronto in the Contemporary World Cinema section. Once more, there’s a man and a woman — in this case, rising stars Callum Turner and Grace Van Patten — and a peripatetic caper. Here, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2016 -
The Secret History of Blue-Tongue Films
Blue-Tongue Films’ name appears before such films as Animal Kingdom, Hesher, The Square and Kieran Darcy-Smith’s Wish You Were Here, released this week by eONE Films, but it’s not a production company. Rather, Blue-Tongue Films calls itself a “production collective,” with its members including one American and seven Australian filmmakers. It started in 1996 when a grainy black-and-white five-minute film introduced them to no one in particular, certainly not the world. Nash Edgerton was working as a stuntman — or at least trying to. The group’s first short film, Loaded, started as a chase sequence meant to be a show […]
by Keith BieryGolick on Jun 7, 2013 -
DAVID MICHOD, “ANIMAL KINGDOM”
Originally posted online on August 11, 2010. Animal Kingdom is nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Jacki Weaver). Like his stunning short films Netherland Dwarf and Crossbow, David Michod’s terrific and terrifying feature debut, the 2010 Sundance World Dramatic Competition winner Animal Kingdom, is a smoothly photographed, moodily scored tale of a trapped, dim and docile young man who suffers at the hands of a careless and, in this case, criminal family. As in his previous work, Michod relies on an insistent voiceover to provide biting interiority while the unrelentingly grim working-class Melbourne milieu is strikingly depicted in slow-motion shots and […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 26, 2011 -
“ANIMAL KINGDOM” | writer-director, David Michod
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] Casting 17-year-old James Frecheville in the lead role. He’d never done a movie before; he was just one of 500 kids who came to a massive open casting. He was bigger and tougher than I’d ever imagined the character being and he was going to have to sit at the center of a big ensemble cast of some of the best and most intimidating actors in Australia. If he didn’t work, the movie wouldn’t work. But something about the natural detail in his audition performances just made me […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
