Trailer
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Trailer Watch: Jake Mahaffy’s Free in Deed
Jake Mahaffy appeared on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2005 following his Tarkovsky-esque black-and-white (shot on a hand cranked camera, no less) tale of American collapse, War. His very different 2008 feature Wellness won the Grand Prize at SXSW and now, seven years later, Mahaffy is back with the Venice-premiering Free in Deed. Produced by Mike Ryan, it’s easily the film I’m anticipating most on the Fall festival circuit. From the film’s Facebook page: Set in the distinctive world of storefront churches and based on actual events, Free in Deed depicts one man’s attempts to perform a miracle. When […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 3, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: David Simon’s “Show Me a Hero”
The Wire creator David Simon moves up the East Coast for his latest drama, Show Me a Hero, that’s set in Yonkers in the 1960s. Based on a true story, the six-part miniseries portrays a young mayor, played by Oscar Isaac, who, amidst the civil rights movements, fights local powers to build low-income housing in his borough. The cast is impressive and includes Alfred Molina, Bob Balaban and Winona Ryder. The series debuts August 16 on HBO.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 3, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth
From the copyright notice to the ominous voiceover, the latest trailer for Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth plunges us into the world of ’60s/’70s arthouse psychological horror — mid-period Bergman, Polanski and Allen’s Interiors, for example. Here, Elizabeth Moss (Mad Men, Top of the Lake) retreats to the lakeside home of her best friend, played by Katherine Waterston (Inherent Vice), to recuperate after twin emotional jolts. There’s history, however — the lingering after effects of another weekend at this house spent one year earlier. Wrote Scott Foundas in Variety: The flashbacks in Queen of Earthh are like little Proustian […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: See You Next Tuesday
“A real treat, a genuine discovery, a whirling dervish of a movie, some kind of roiling central-Brooklyn freak show, a film so searing with rip-your-throat-out and spit-on-your-grave anger, the indignity of mental illness, the messiness of race in this fast-gentrifying strip of American near-coastal land that it seems to have a pulse all its own; it feels alive in the ways only superior works of art can.” That’s Filmmaker‘s Brandon Harris on Drew Tobia’s See You Next Tuesday, a film that has multiple fans here at the magazine. There’s me, for one — I was on the jury at Indie […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 11, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: The Fix
Fresh out of AFI Docs is Laura Naylor’s The Fix, a character-based documentary about Bronx-based IV drug users with Hepatitis C who organize to fight this epidemic. The film screens in New York September 5 at 6:00 PM at Lehman College’s Lovinger Theater in a screening organized by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and the Public Health Program at Lehman College. It is free and open to the public.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 8, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: The Theory of Everything
The life of Steven Hawking is given what looks like a gauzy, romantic approach in this trailer for The Theory of Everything, directed by Man on Wire‘s James Marsh. Eddie Redmayne stars as Hawking and Felicity Jones as his love, Jane Wilde. The film premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival and is in theaters November 7 from Focus Features.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 7, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac
The use of Rammstein in a trailer is most often a very bad sign, but somehow it works here in the first — and very NSFW — full-length trailer for Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Previously, as Sarah Salovaara noted on this site, Von Trier and co. created a new form of trailer through the staggered release of clips. Today’s release is the more traditional — and to my mind, more effective — one. Abrupt changes in music and tone, a mixture of shooting formats and fantastic moments with Charlotte Gainsbourg create a vibe that’s not unlike a punk version of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 22, 2013 -
The Intersection of Film and Live Music: Jem Cohen’s We Have an Anchor
Jem Cohen is back at BAM with the New York premiere of We Have an Anchor — a hybrid documentary that blends projections of landscapes in a variety of formats (Super 8, 16mm, HD), poetry and newspaper clippings to the sounds of a live score by an indie rock supergroup featuring members of Fugazi, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and more. A spiritual sequel to 2008’s Evening’s Civil Twilight in Empires of Tin, We Have an Anchor is an exploration of place (specifically Nova Scotia, more specifically Cape Breton) utilizing footage Cohen has shot over the last 10 years. Cohen departs […]
by Shaun Seneviratne on Aug 28, 2013 -
Lady Vengeance: Trailer Happy, Scaring the Children Edition
Trailers have the ability to psyche us up, freak us out, turn us off, and lead us very, very astray, but the heightened anticipation is part of the fun, regardless of how accurate a representation of the film that cleverly constructed little bugger ends up being in the end. Recently there’s been a spate of trailers for horror-themed animated children’s films, starting with ParaNorman (pictured above), which opened today. So which of these flicks is most likely to either give your kids nightmares, or send them down a lifelong path of genre appreciation? Let’s judge a book by its cover […]
by Farihah Zaman on Aug 17, 2012 -
TRAILER WATCH: HARMONY KORINE’S “THE FOURTH DIMENSION”
An anthology film with bizarre “rules” that was produced by Vice Films and Grolsch FilmWorks and directed a trio of international auteurs including Harmony Korine, The Fourth Dimension was always destined to be decidedly odd. But, on the evidence of this newly released trailer, it looks like it could be pretty great too. Korine’s contribution to the film features Val Kilmer as a motivational speaker (called Val Kilmer!) trying to get people to harness their “awesome secrets,” while the rest of the film is comprised of segments from Russian director Alexey Fedorchenko and Poland’s Jan Kwiecinski about a time travel-obsessed scientist […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 28, 2012
