Michael Shannon
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Trailer Watch: Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special, Once Again Starring Michael Shannon
Michael Shannon has been in each Jeff Nichols feature so far, and with Midnight Special the director/star duo of Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Mud graduate to (seemingly) big-time studio money. (The actual number, per this interesting article, is a relatively modest $18 million.) It’s a sci-fi chase movie — the trailer gives off the general vibe. The film drops March 18.
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 20, 2015 -
Roofless: Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes
“America doesn’t bail out losers,” real-estate-loophole master practitioner Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) tells victim-turned-protégé Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield). “This nation is rigged for winners.” He proceeds to milk Noah’s ark for a metaphor. “I’m not going to drown.” With rapid visuals, pounding music, characters constantly in motion, montages of exploiters in action, and his usual astute observations of processes that enable the marring of innocents, Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo, Chop Shop, Man Push Cart) impeccably dramatizes the reality behind this cynical point of view. One that, as the the chasm between the 99% and the 1% widens, is especially valid […]
by Howard Feinstein on Sep 25, 2015 -
Steering Away From “Ooga-Booga” Horror Movies: John McNaughton on The Harvest
In 1985, a pair of brothers who owned a video equipment rental business in Chicago offered local filmmaker John McNaughton $100,000 in financing if he could come up with a low-budget horror movie. They probably got a little more than they bargained for when McNaughton delivered Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a chilling (though also blackly comic) character study loosely based on the experiences of real life sociopath Henry Lee Lucas. McNaughton eschewed slasher movie conventions in favor of an ultra-realistic, serious-minded film with no escape hatch for the audience; one of the greatest cinematic representations of the banality […]
by Jim Hemphill on Aug 19, 2015 -
Parting Shot
Kentucky-born Michael Shannon has been appearing regularly in television, independent film and studio pictures since the mid-’90s, but it was his Oscar-nominated turn as a bracingly honest, if perhaps mentally unstable, mathematician in Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road that made directors see him as a potential leading man. In the years since, Shannon has fulfilled that promise, most notably as another unbalanced seer in Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter. But it’s in the next 12 months that Shannon will truly explode onscreen in a succession of notable lead and supporting parts. First up is his turn in theaters as a rapacious repo […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 23, 2015 -
Five Questions for 99 Homes Writer/Director Ramin Bahrani
Based on its stellar reviews out of Venice and Telluride, Ramin Bahrani’s “eviction stunner” 99 Homes infuses the sad and infuriating tale of America’s real estate bust with visceral, gut-punching drama. Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon star as the down-and-out construction worker and shady realtor who come up with a get-rich scheme involving, of course, the exploitation of those even less fortunate. Screening Monday, September 8 at the Toronto International Film Festival, 99 Homes is already picking up Oscar buzz. Below, we ask Bahrani about researching real estate, name actors and the decline of Western civilization. Filmmaker: What attracted you […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 8, 2014 -
Short Film: James Franco’s Herbert White Starring Michael Shannon
James Franco, it seems, spent the majority of his Tisch career translating the lives and work of tormented American poets. There was C.K. Williams with the Tar omnibus, Hart Crane with The Broken Tower and Frank Bidart with the just released Herbert White. Franco and Michael Shannon played lovers in the largely misguided Broken Tower, and here, Shannon, fulfilling his menacing hulk of a persona, prefers dead girls. Franco discusses his adaptation of the Bidart poem with Matt Rager, his co-writer on As I Lay Dying and The Sound In The Fury (Faulkner, being yet another poet of sorts), over at Vice. For those who are largely uninterested in the musings […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jul 14, 2014 -
Post Mortem — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Post Mortem world premiered at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. It’s being distributed by Kino Lorber Incorporated and opens at the Film Forum in NYC on Wednesday, April 11, 2012. Visit the film’s page at the Kino Lorber website to learn more.) There is such a thing as pitch black comedy, and then there is the work of Chilean director Pablo Larraín, whose warped sense of humor deserves its own adjective. Tar black, maybe? With his latest two films, Larraín has returned to his country’s unpleasant recent past to try to make sense of what transpired. In Tony Manero, the Pinochet […]
by Michael Tully on Apr 12, 2012 -
Liza Johnson, Return
A low-key drama that articulates the ennui of a returning servicewoman after a tour in the Middle East, Liza Johnson’s Return strikes a delicate balance between familial melodrama and suffering vet pic. Light on exposition and heavy on expert thesping, it features a striking performance by Linda Cardellini, once the most sly and attractive of the awkward high schoolers on Freaks and Geeks, and now a fully mature screen actress making the most of her copious talents. We meet her character Kelly at the airport, freshly arrived in Ohio after a stint in an unnamed theater of war, and only […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 8, 2012 -
THIS IS WHAT THE (OBSCURE) MOVIES DID TO ME IN 2011
They moved me. Often deeply, in ways I failed to articulate to myself until much later. That is, of course, the whole reason I go to the movies, to have some sort of visceral, emotional (or intellectual) response, be it laughter or sadness or pain or empathy or disgust or profound understanding. Why else do it? Nothing, beside having those emotions, meets the criteria of entertainment, at least for me. See, I’m one of those lucky few that gets to travel the world just to see films. Crazy, I know, especially in this era of not so cheap oil, but it’s […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 5, 2012 -
My 10 Favorite Movie Moments of 2011
As 2011 comes to a close it’s time to look back on the year in movies. It’s always tough for me to come up with a yearly best movie list because I never feel I’ve seen everything by Jan. 1. By this time of year I’m still trying to finish watching the award contenders (still on my list: Hugo, War Horse, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, The Help). So here are 10 movie moments from 2011 (in no particular order) that have stayed with me. “I Want You To Help Me Find A Killer of Women” I know you’re probably […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Dec 31, 2011
