After a whole assortment of Barbies (and the actors who’ll play them) were announced earlier today, a full-length trailer has landed for Barbie. Directed by Greta Gerwig (her follow-up to 2019’s Little Women) and co-written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (partners and frequent collaborators, most recently on Baumbach’s White Noise), the film will hit theaters this summer. Margot Robbie stars as the titular Mattel toy icon, with Ryan Gosling embodying her long-term boyfriend, Ken. While Robbie and Gosling appear as the Barbie and Ken blueprints, an ensemble cast will portray several different iterations of Barbie—like a mermaid (Dua Lipa), Nobel […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 4, 2023Adapted by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay from The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis’s behind-the-scenes book about the 2008 housing market crash, McKay’s star-stuffed The Big Short is a brilliant demystification. Two scenes, hilarious in completely opposite ways, take place in the middle of an otherwise enervating securitization session at the American Securities Forum in Las Vegas. Hold on: hilarious and securitization jammed into the same sentence? Most people don’t even know what the latter word means. When a term completely sidesteps consciousness, it is probably unavailable to the unconscious—site of the split-second manufacture of humor. To […]
by Howard Feinstein on Dec 11, 2015Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut Lost River was torn limb from limb by critics at Cannes, followed by the news that it would be a straight to VOD release. The latter appears to have been an overreaction, as Warner Brothers quickly confirmed it’s set to receive a day and date limited spring run, but in any event, it’s a significant demotion for someone of Gosling’s pedigree at the hands of a major studio. The first trailer is now out, and I’m getting definite shades of Malick, Lynch and Tarkovsky, with Benoît Debie’s colorful lensing recalling his work on Irreversible, Enter the Void and Spring Breakers, in particular. There’s […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Feb 3, 2015Of all the transformations cinema has undergone since the rise of affordable home viewing in the 1970s, perhaps the most ephemeral, difficult to quantify is this strange result: the difficulty of falsely remembering movies. Whether it was mixing up and remembering out of order a series of shots, or conflating scenes from different movies that happened to star the same actor, or simply forgetting portions of a film, it was difficult to recall a film correctly, accurately. Which isn’t the same thing as not recalling a film truthfully. This became apparent after watching Only God Forgives recently on the big […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Aug 12, 2013Starting this week, every Thursday the Filmmaker website will be hosting exclusive videos courtesy of Craft Truck, a new website which hosts “conversations with the world’s best cinematographers, editors, technology companies and more from the world of film and television.” To kick off this series, acclaimed d.p. Andrij Parekh talks about his approach to lighting and how this impacts on the performances of actors, such as Ryan Gosling, who he shot in Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Half Nelson and Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines.
by Nick Dawson on Aug 1, 2013A superviolent and supremely strange Bangkok nocturne, Only God Forgives is Nicolas Winding Refn’s follow-up to his Cannes award-winning pop culture sensation Drive. This film, sure to be nowhere near as popular, is a distinctly less accessible affair. One senses that the filmmaker, a born contrarian, takes a certain pleasure in this. In both Thai and English, it meditates on a white man who trains child fighters and runs a family-operated drug ring with his brother. When said brother is dispatched via some brutal south Asian justice involving really sharp swords (after he is found to have rapped and killed […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 19, 2013Last week on the blog, I linked to a great piece by Nicolas Winding Refn on the obscure exploitation director Andy Milligan. Now, though, it’s the Drive helmer himself who’s in the spotlight, as he’s the subject of an hour-long portrait by French documentarian Laurent Duroche, NWR, which is available to watch on YouTube. As you’ll discover from the very first minute — when we first see and then hear Alejandro Jodorowsky talking French in his distinctive Chilean tones — this is a film without subtitles. But the good news is that Refn is fluent in English and the majority of […]
by Nick Dawson on Jun 20, 20121. A sense of outsideness. Buildings turned inside out on 9-11, and people outside in the streets of Manhattan. The mind, outside of itself with disbelief. The brutal and temporary restoration of the natural world in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities. Located a block from the World Trade Center, Zuccotti Park, terribly damaged on 9-11 and slowly restored, would become the locus of the Occupy Movement. Encampments. Tents. The incongruous sight of camping gear in urban spaces and beneath the shadows of skyscrapers, in a forest of steel and concrete and glass. It is not films […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Dec 19, 2011Note: the following piece contains spoilers. One time in my fleeting youth, I encountered George Clooney in the Warner Brothers screening room on 53rd Street after a National Board of Review screening of Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German. This is before I had, despite my ongoing poverty and lack of renown, spent ample time around movie stars and the merely sort-of famous at sundry locations, both foreign and domestic, becoming relatively at ease in their strange company. I still often felt not unlike the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, as he follows William Holden through a blustery New Orleans afternoon, sensing some […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 6, 2011“Riveting” is an adjective quite frequently used by entertainment journalists when describing crime movies, thrillers, or really anything that might simply offer its fair share of violent and shocking surprises. After seeing Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, however, one must reevaluate this clear over usage. Refn’s film, for which he took home the Cannes Best Director prize, brings fresh meaning to the term as it regards to narrative cinema. I must emphasize: this is an absolutely engrossing entertainment, surely one of the most potent and unforgettably propulsive stories you’ll encounter on a silver screen this year. A simple recap of its […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 14, 2011