Sundance Selects
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“UNA NOCHE” PICKED UP BY SUNDANCE SELECTS
Lucy Mulloy’s Una Noche, a big winner at Tribeca last month, has been acquired by Sundance Selects for distribution in North America. The film netted the young director an award for Best New Narrative Director at Tribeca Film Festival in April, as well as accolades for cinematography and acting. Mulloy wrote the screenplay, a story of three disillusioned Cuban teenagers who undertake the tense 90-mile journey from Cuba to Miami. Jonathan Sehring, president of Sundance Selects and IFC Films, issued a statement calling Mulloy’s debut feature “a remarkable first film that vividly takes us into the lives of 3 teenagers […]
by Sam Eisen on May 31, 2012 -
The Forgiveness of Blood — A Hammer to Nail Review
(The Forgiveness of Blood is being distributed by Sundance Selects and comes to theaters on February 24, 2012. It world premiered at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival. NOTE: This review was first posted at Hammer to Nail in conjunction with its screening at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.) The future of American independent filmmaking may not lie in America at all. In recent years, a number of filmmakers have turned their eyes away from the complexities of 21st century American life and toward the world beyond our national borders. The decision to engage another culture through filmmaking, to […]
by Tom Hall on Feb 23, 2012 -
“TAKE SHELTER AND WEEKEND” — A HAMMER TO NAIL REMINDER!
(Visit the official websites for Take Shelter and Weekend to find out when they will be playing on a big screen near you.) Though I often complain about how content oversaturated and short-attention-span diseased our lives have become and how these factors have directly hindered the ability for any independent film to gain even a fraction of legitimate theatrical traction anymore, the truth is that at Hammer to Nail, we share in the guilt. We post reviews on/around the day of a film’s initial theatrical release in either NY/LA and don’t continue to remind readers when these films open in […]
by Michael Tully on Oct 6, 2011 -
“WEEKEND” — A HAMMER TO NAIL PICK
(After world premiering at the 2011 South By Southwest Film Festival where it won an Audience Award, Weekend was picked up for distribution by Sundance Selects. It opens theatrically in New York City on Friday, September 23, 2011, before expanding to more cities in the coming weeks. It’s also available through cable VOD for three months beginning on September 30th. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) It is Independent Film Week in New York City. As this is the first time that I’ve personally been involved in IFP’s annual program to the extent that I have (I’m pitching […]
by Michael Tully on Sep 22, 2011 -
GREGG ARAKI, “KABOOM”
One of the key figures in the New Queer Cinema and ever youthful at 51 years of age, Gregg Araki is a director who is increasingly hard to pigeonhole. After the critical success of 2004’s Mysterious Skin, the film which confirmed that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a movie-star and that Mr. Araki could direct delicate drama as well as exploitation and cult cinema, it seemed that the director of such indie LGBT classics as The Living End (1992) and The Doom Generation (1995) was moving on to a new, more conventionally respectable, middle-aged portion of his career. Now Mr. Araki is […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 28, 2011 -
Uncle Kent Director Joe Swanberg
Since Joe Swanberg’s first feature film, Kissing on the Mouth, premiered at SXSW in 2005, he’s managed to make at least a feature a year, multiple web-series, and found regular launch-pads at SXSW and IFC Films. When Swanberg directs a film, he really functions as a craftsman of the entire work: while he eschews screenplays in favor of improvisation, he works as cinematographer, editor, and usually acts in the film. As the nexus of a low-budget film movement stressing honesty, stories chronicling the lives of people in their twenties, and improvisation (this movement begins with an “M,” ends with “core,” […]
by James Ponsoldt on Jan 23, 2011 -
PARK CITY CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK #1: WOMEN IN TROUBLE
On the night the latest edition of the Sundance Film Festival kicked off, I was approached by a man in a beat-up looking bubble coat and slacks three thousand miles away in a Crown Heights, Brooklyn laundromat. He extended his hand, in which he was holding six plastic sheets with DVDs in them, and tersely said, “Movies.” I looked down at the half-a-dozen bootleg discs in his hand, most of which were sequels to “urban” thrillers I had never heard of in the first place. “I’m good,” I brusquely whispered, causing him to saunter off into the fluorescent hum and […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 22, 2011
