David Michod
-
Trailer Watch: David Michôd’s The Rover
I was a big fan of David Michôd’s familial crime drama Animal Kingdom, and not just because I saw it on an airplane. If his follow-up The Rover looks to try on a rather generic premise — a hero on the hunt for what’s rightfully his — that’s hopefully not much cause for concern: Animal Kingdom found its strength not in plot, but in its characterization and pacing. Reteaming with the always reliable Guy Pierce, Michôd trades in the rest of his local ensemble for the dubious star wattage of Robert Pattinson, performing an indiscernible accent as a discarded gang member. Premiering in […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 17, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: David Michôd’s The Rover
The awesome upstarts at A24 Films made three smart pickups at Sundance (Obvious Child, Laggies and Life After Beth), and have a pretty formidable slate of films upcoming include Denis Villenueve’s Enemy, Steven Knight’s Locke, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and, maybe most excitingly, David Michôd’s The Rover. The follow-up to the superlative Animal Kingdom, this outback thriller looks to be a departure from the urban crime drama of the Australian director’s feature debut. (According to A24, the plot is as follows: “10 years following the collapse of society, a man will go to any lengths to take back the one thing that still matters to him.”) In […]
by Nick Dawson on Jan 29, 2014 -
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
