Drake Doremus’ Like Crazy – a gauzily photographed love triangle drama that won Sundance – didn’t burn up the box office, but it opened up a number of doors for the third-time director and his atmospheric followup. By turns strident and sentimental, Breathe In feels like a step forward on a number of fronts. As the 30-year-old director told Filmmaker recently, the film was more or less not scripted, but it has the tension of a tightly wound product of a veteran screenwriter. Guy Pearce is Keith, a married music teacher full of longing for his zesty younger days who risks […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 27, 2014Originally 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