Film Trailer
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Trailer Watch: Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman
With The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones follows his directorial debut, the 2005 neo-western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, with a feminist riff on the same genre. Jones stars alongside Hilary Swank as a drifter who is recruited to smuggle three hysterical women from Nebraska to Iowa. Premiering to mixed reviews at Cannes, the film nonetheless exhibits an interesting inversion of the machismo outlaw, and the helpless damsels in distress, who intimate a threatening aura of their own. Roadside Attractions opens The Homesman on November 14.
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 11, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Barry Levinson’s The Humbling
Out of Venice, reviews for The Humbling seem to once again suggest that the biting wit of Philip Roth’s cannon is not exactly adaptable to the filmic format. Poorly received on the heels of the raved opener Birdman, which treads similar aging acting territory, Barry Levinson’s latest sees the adrift Al Pacino falling head first into a love affair with an ex (?) lesbian and daughter of his close friends, played by Greta Gerwig. The film does not yet have a distributor, although I imagine on the strength of the cast alone, it shouldn’t be long.
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 3, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Jesse Moss’s The Overnighters
I was flat out floored when I saw The Overnighters a few months back. It’s a documentary that unravels with the jagged edges of a thriller, while managing to be both an individual character study and comprehensive portrait of blue collar middle America and the nation’s economic and environmental crises. Still, it is somewhat unsurprising that many critics are calling out the film’s so-called manipulative treatment of its subjects, in a manner not unlike The Act of Killing‘s dissenters. I’d recommend seeing it for yourself and coming to your own conclusions when it opens on October 10. In the meantime, there’s the first trailer for […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 28, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Tim Sutton’s Memphis
Tim Sutton’s Memphis is a sort of ethnographic rendering of slow cinema, at once alluring and incomplete. The Brooklyn-based director’s second film stars non-actor Willis Earl Beal in a quietly transfixing performance as a mysterious, errant musician, who slinks about the city, with little mind for his work. For its many hypnotic elements (the soundtrack not least among them), Memphis is at its most electrifying when Beal is allowed to lay into some unsuspected sycophant or do-gooder with exacting cool remove. Unfortunately, it’s a remove that often bleeds into the narrative, whose fragments leave the viewer with little to cling to. Kino Lorber will release the […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 22, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: David Wnendt’s Wetlands
Perhaps I’m being contrarian, jaded and/or anti-clickbait, but David Wnendt’s Wetlands isn’t as wildly gross out as it’s cracked up to be. I have a harder time digesting, say, Pink Flamingos. There’s substance behind the film’s good humored gags, coalescing as they do around the liberated but fundamentally unhappy protagonist, Helen. Which brings me to another bargaining chip amongst all its provocations: one of the most enjoyable performances of late, courtesy of the emotionally acrobatic Carla Juri. Brandon Harris and I at least agreed on that in our respective takes from Treefort and SXSW. In any event, Strand Releasing has the film slated for a September 5 release […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 15, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Starred Up
David Mackenzie’s Starred Up is more or less an exemplary entry in the prison drama genre. Narratively speaking, there isn’t anything wildly original at work, as the hotheaded protagonist Eric Love (Jack O’Connell) is starred up from juvie to the same higher security prison as his estranged father (Ben Mendelsohn). There, he is quick to make enemies amongst both the incarcerated and the administration, with the one exception being a puppy-eyed counselor (Rupert Friend), who claims to see something in Eric worth healing. What sets Starred Up apart are the performances (the charismatic O’Connell has received much notice, but Mendelsohn yet again proves he can do […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jul 9, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Ira Sachs’ Love Is Strange
Despite being an out gay couple, Ben and George (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina) nevertheless find themselves shouldering nasty ramifications after they decide to tie the knot in Ira Sachs’ Love Is Strange. Premiering to near universal raves at Sundance, Love Is Strange charts the fallout from this seemingly basic right, with Ben and George jobless and couchsurfing amongst a close-knit group of friends, including Marisa Tomei and Cheyenne Jackson. Sony Pictures Classics will release the film on August 22.
by Sarah Salovaara on Jun 23, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Justin Simien’s Dear White People
Dear White People was unsurprisingly divisive at Sundance, where some viewers questioned what they saw as its muddled provocations. Sight unseen, however, this just released trailer makes the film’s aims and strategies rather apparent. Directed by Justin Simien, the satire follows the experiences of four Black students at a predominately White university. With only a few shorts to his name, Simien’s brilliant concept trailer — whose opening is quoted almost verbatim in the above trailer — went viral, sparking a widespread debate and healthy Indiegogo campaign. It’s an exemplary instance of pre-production marketing, and Simien was able to follow through on its promise. Dear White People will […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jun 19, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman
Alejandro González Iñárritu last film Biutiful was so relentlessly depressing its body count nearly totalled that of an apocalyptic blockbuster, so it’s nice to see him swinging in the other direction with what looks to be a high-concept, gonzo comedy with Birdman. Starring Michael Keaton as an over-the-hill superhero actor struggling to mount a Broadway comeback, the film, which is shot by the inimitable Emmanuel Lubezki, boasts an eclectic ensemble in Naomi Watts, Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Ryan and Emma Stone. What piques my interest, however, is the fact that the Broadway play is an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jun 12, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Ari Folman’s The Congress
At turns mesmerizing and confounding, Ari Folman’s The Congress was one of the more talked about titles of any Cannes sidebar last year. Though Drafthouse Films scooped up the rights less than a month after its Director’s Fortnight premiere, it’s only just now making it’s way toward theaters, with an official release set for August 29. A loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress, Folman’s followup to the Oscar nominated Waltz with Bashir positions Robin Wright as a fictionalized version of herself, who agrees to replicate her once commodifiable actress for a movie studio’s gain. Playing on recurrent themes of aging in the film […]
by Sarah Salovaara on May 27, 2014
