Cinema Eye, which presents the Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking as part of the annual Cinema Eye Week, today announced the five nominees for its annual Heterodox Award. The Heterodox Award honors a narrative fiction film that imaginatively incorporates nonfiction strategies, content and/or modes of production. The five films nominated this year for the Cinema Eye Heterodox Award are: Arabian Nights: Volume 1 —The Restless One directed by Miguel Gomes God Bless the Child directed by Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck Tangerine directed by Sean Baker Taxi directed by Jafar Panahi The Tribe directed by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy With the announcement of […]

The word “bravura” gets thrown around all too often in the realm of ambitious filmmaking (perhaps in arts criticism in general?), but there is seemingly no other word to describe the colossal craft on display in Ukrainian helmer Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s Cannes 2014-premiering debut feature, The Tribe. The film’s narrative — which hews somewhat to the genre obligations of a Western, as Slaboshpitsky points out — concerns a young man, Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), who is a newcomer at a deaf boarding school in Ukraine. No sooner has Sergey arrived than he realizes that the school is run by its administration in […]

Hej hej JJ If doomsday scenarios compromised by persistent protagonists were the common denominator among the finest in week one of the back-loaded New Directors/New Films, the second week’s standouts hail successful rebounds. Entropy, smugness, resignation, and delusional security make way for palpable commitment, be it political, psychological, or emotional. The shared backdrop is the guarded, mine-ridden sphere of male bonding, more often than not inside restrictive institutions — a pair of bromances that take place within military bases and their outposts; a boy-gang dystopic chiller that revises the conventional sleepaway-school movie — but also within the split psyche of a […]

Cannes Film Festival 2014 by Aaron Hillis Ken Loach. Olivier Assayas. Atom Egoyan. The Dardenne Brothers. The world’s most prestigious film festival may have asked the first-ever female Palme d’Or winner (Jane Campion, for 1993’s The Piano) to head up the jury, but Cannes’ main competition was disappointingly chock-full of the usual suspects, i.e., older, white male auteurs on a return visit. At least this year’s top honor went to Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose three-hour-plus drama Winter Sleep will be released stateside in time for awards season. The characteristically Chekhovian, uncharacteristically talky epic stars Haluk Bilginer as a […]

That’s Cannes, man. The red carpet’s rolled and stashed; you don’t have to go home but you can’t afford to stay here. Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s three-hour-plus, mixed-reviewed Winter Sleep pocketed the Palme d’Or. Sorry, Naomi Kawase with your so-called “masterpiece” and Xavier Dolan, who said he “deserved” to win top honors, juries are subjective. The more burning issue is when undistributed landmarks like Adieu Au Langage and The Tribe will find their way to your eyes and ears. Until my final take on the 2014 edition of Cannes appears in the next issue of Filmmaker, here are my […]