Bleecker Street
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(Redband) Trailer Watch: The Zellner Brothers’s Sasquatch Sunset
“You know animals are hairy?,” sang the Talking Heads David Byrne. “They say animals don’t worry…” Well, in David and Nathan Zellner’s Sasquatch Sunset, forthcoming from Bleecker Street Pictures, the latter statement is definitely not correct as the filmmakers — Filmmaker 25 New Faces from back in 2008 — wring wonder and joy but also anxiety and fear of encroaching humankind in their story of a family of Sasquatch living undetected in the wilds of Colorado. Bleecker Street’s redband trailer leans hard into Sasquatch sex while cleverly underlining that there’s name talent (Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough) in this movie. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2024 -
Trailer Watch: Laurel Parmet’s The Starling Girl
The trailer has arrived for writer-director Laurel Parmet’s debut feature, The Starling Girl, which will have its limited theatrical release this spring. A favorite from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the film follows 17-year-old Jem (Eliza Scanlen) as she tries to find her place within a fundamentalist Christian community in rural Kentucky. In an intro ahead of his interview with Parmet and producer Kara Durrett out of Sundance, Erik Luers summed up the plot quite nicely: Parmet first began writing the screenplay in 2017, soon after the premiere of one of her shorts and the wrap of another. Like her previous work, The […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 17, 2023 -
Trailer Watch: Michel Franco’s Sundown
Michel Franco’s Sundown is unsettling tale of existential drift, one that upends the way in which the concept of family is often thematized in narrative films. It’s now given a suitably eerie trailer by its distributor, Bleecker Street. The story involves a brother (Tim Roth) and sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) vacationing at a Mexican resort when sad news arrives from abroad. The sister leaves, the brother stays, and the film’s mysteries concern the brother’s inscrutable motivations. Spasms of violence are expected in any film by the New Order director; those are hinted at by the trailer’s concluding sequence of flash cuts […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 4, 2022 -
“Sending Your Script to Someone is Like Asking Them to Never Speak to You Again”: Fran Kranz on the Making of His Grief and Reconciliation Drama, Mass
Two sets of parents enter a plain, drab room located down the hallway of an unassuming Episcopalian church. Their reason for meeting pertains to their respective sons, both of whom have died. One set of parents have lost their son to a mass shooter at his high school, the other set’s son was himself the mass shooter. That is the basis for Fran Kranz’s emotionally raw debut feature, Mass, a film that is necessarily an actors’ showcase but also an exercise in pared-down filmmaking that finds tension and release in the subtlest of camera gestures. As the parents debate everything […]
by Erik Luers on Oct 15, 2021 -
Market Timing: Sales Agents Glen Basner and Ryan Kampe Talk the History and Current State of Independent Film Sales
Independent film has always had a funny relationship with the world of foreign sales. In the ’80s, it wasn’t uncommon for a certain breed of hip, black-clad downtown New York filmmaker to find most or all of his or her funding from a besotted West German TV-commissioning editor. By the late ’80s and early ’90s, following the model of Jim Jarmusch, independent film produced auteurs like Hal Hartley who developed real audiences — and financing — in territories like France, Germany and Japan. But for a myriad of reasons — and, indeed, like the rest of the film business — […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017 -
Hits & Misses: The Theatrical Performance of the Sundance Class of ’16
How do you measure success these days? When more than two million people vote for you over the other guy and you still lose? When you receive no endorsements from a single major newspaper, your party’s leadership practically ignores you, and you still win? Or, perhaps, when your heralded Sundance acquisition earns a whopping $15.8 million at the box office, but you spend more than twice that in acquisition fees and prints and advertising costs to release it? (i.e., The Birth of a Nation). How about if your film isn’t released in theaters at all, but Netflix paid $5 million […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 18, 2017
