Muscular and involving, Christopher Smith’s medieval adventure film Black Death is a satisfying throwback of sorts — a tense, character-driven period piece that is at once an action film and an act of historical reexamination, with a dash of slow burn horror and spiritual rumination to boot. Eddie Redmayne plays Osmund, a monk in a small bubonic plague-ridden hamlet in rural England. Cloistered from the decimation somewhat, he carries on a forbidden love affair with a young woman (Kimberley Nixon) from his home town. After dispatching her back to their village in order to escape the plague, Osmund is tasked with […]

Ah, there’s nothing quite like the smell of pitches in the morning. This past Saturday, the IFP kicked off its annual Script to Screen Conference with five brave writers pitching their scripts to a panel of producers and agents.   Although all the panelists agreed that it was useful for writers to compare their projects to other films (a practice known as “using comps”) Peter Van Steemburg, the Director of Acquisitions at Magnolia Pictures, warned against using obvious ones such as “Juno or Napoleon Dynamite,” recommending that if you are pitching something that’s a lot like another movie, you should […]

It’s not too late to attend the IFP’s Script to Screen Conference, which takes place this Saturday at 92Y Tribeca in New York City. Highlights include conversations with writer-director Barry Levinson (Rain Man) and Black Swan screenwriter Mark Heyman; a Pitch Workshop in which five emerging screenwriters will pitch their screenplays to a panel of experts (including sales agents, Magnolia Pictures’ head of acquisitions, and a producer from Glass Eye Pix); a case-study with the team from Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene moderated by Ted Hope; a live reading of two IFP alumni screenplays for dialogue analysis with independent […]

Announced today, Andrew Jarecki‘s long awaited narrative All Good Things, starring Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst and Frank Langella, will be released through Magnolia Pictures in December. In the press release from Magnolia the story is described as a murder mystery set against the backdrop of a New York real estate dynasty in the 1980s. It’s inspired by true events of Robert Durst who was suspected of killing his wife who disappeared in 1982 but never tried. It’s considered the most notorious missing persons case in New York history. This will be Jarecki’s first foray into narrative features, his previous film […]