This week on the IFC News podcast — we’re, sadly, closing up shop, at least for now and at least in this incarnation. It’s been a wonderful 215 episodes, and we’re very grateful to all of our listeners and to everyone who’s written in to agree with us, disagree with us, take us to task…
In a remote area in western Finland, a tunnel that ultimately will be three miles long and 1,600 feet deep is being drilled into the bedrock. The site is called Onkalo, “hiding place,” and when it’s completed, sometime in 2100, it will serve as a permanent resting place for the country’s radioactive waste, a tomb…
Curtis (Michael Shannon), the central figure of Jeff Nichols’ powerful, enigmatic drama “Take Shelter,” is living in the grip of overpowering dread. An Ohio man with a wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), a little girl, Hannah (Tova Stewart), who’s deaf, a construction job and a house on the edge of a field, Curtis is plagued with…
Kevin Smith’s personality now looms so large that it can seem inextricable from the films he produces, that buying into his on-screen work means also buying into Team View Askew. Smith has proven himself a mighty wielder of his own personal brand, using podcasts, his Twitter feed, his website, his speaking tours to cement a…
The cast of “My Idiot Brother” is so overstuffed with talent it almost seems unfair, like the film should be subject to some kind of comedy handicap. Emily Mortimer, Elizabeth Banks and Zooey Deschanel play a trio of sisters leading lives of various complications in New York City. Steve Coogan, Adam Scott and Rashida Jones…
Reviewed at the Sundance Film Festival 2011. Those with tweeness sensitivities should be aware that “The Future,” Miranda July’s long-awaited follow-up to “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” is sporadically and lispingly narrated by a cat, and examines about how stress over the impending arrival of said cat, a rescue animal of uncertain health…
Reviewed at the Sundance Film Festival 2011. If you need something new to be incensed about, “The Last Mountain,” a documentary directed by Bill Haney (of 2007′s “The Price of Sugar”), will do the trick nicely. Its outrage of choice is mountaintop removal (MTR) mining, the considerably controversial practice of deforesting and then dynamiting mountain…
Reviewed at the Sundance Film Festival 2011. If James Marsh’s 2008 “Man on Wire” was Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk by way of “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Project NIM” could be described as the story of Herbert S. Terrace’s chimpanzee study by way of, well, “Splice.” But maybe it’s better summed up by one of the interviewees shrugged…
He’s manufactured a plausibly ramshackle business in memory loss, introduced the world to “sweding” and has now attempted a transition into the realms of the superhero movie. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at the visually inventive output of Michel Gondry. DOWNLOAD MP3, 1:08:22 minutes, 62.6 MB SUBSCRIBE iTunes | XML This…
At the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner on Monday, this year’s chairman, Armond White, played a particularly churlish master of ceremonies, making his feelings about some of the group’s choices clear as he introduced each award, going as far as suggesting that perhaps Tony Kushner, who presented the top prize to “The Social…
Though it premiered at Sundance last year, “HappyThankYouMorePlease,” the directorial debut of “How I Met Your Mother” star Josh Radnor, is only just getting into theaters on March 4th. A romantic comedy about a group of friends in their late 20s/early 30s struggling with adulthood in New York City (sound familiar?), “HappyThankYouMorePlease” also stars Radnor…
Bill Murray presented Sofia Coppola with a “Special Filmmaking Achievement” award for “Somewhere” at the National Board of Review Awards last night. Vulture has a full transcript of his speech. A selection: I want the best for her because she’s a lady. She acts like a lady, the women in her movies are ladies, they…
Scott Beale of Laughing Squid points out that the surviving 36 minutes (the original 70 minute rough cut was damaged in a fire) of “My Best Friend’s Birthday,” Quentin Tarantino’s first film, are on YouTube, below. The black and white film was shot on 16mm over several years and finished in 1987 — Tarantino directed…
College Humor offers phonetic subtitles for Rooster Cogburn’s distinctively delivered dialogue. [H/t to Slashfilm]
With this and “Sucker Punch,” we’re just one feature short of a 2011 nubile-girls-in-scary-asylums trend. “The Ward” is the first film from John Carpenter since 2001′s “Ghosts of Mars,” and it stars “All the Boys Love Mandy Lane”‘s Amber Heard as a girl whose stay in a mental institution in the mid-’60s complicated by a…
“The Man With The Iron Fist” could be the oddest movie of 2011 — a martial arts flick that Eli Roth co-wrote with RZA, who’s also slated to direct and act in it as “a weapons-making village blacksmith in feudal China,” reportedly alongside Russell Crowe and, according to the IMDb page, Lucy Liu and martial…
The latest film from Park Chan-wook, Korea’s great chronicler of revenge and its accoutrements, is a short shot entirely on the iPhone 4. According to Mobiledia: The South Korean movie director screened his latest work, a short called “Paranmanjang,” which means “ups and downs” in Korean. The 30-minute fantasy-horror short, shot in collaboration with Park’s…
The talent getting involved — like Michel Gondry, Darren Aronofsky and others — may be better than ever, but the superhero movie and other comic book adaptations seem to be in a moment of flux, as the studio system runs out of or reboots prominent franchises and struggles with how to adapt more niche series.…
The NY Press‘ Armond White, our favorite contrarian critic, has posted his yearly list of the films he believes are not just underappreciated but better than titles that have the consensus behind them. And he uses math! Or at least a “greater than” symbol. It’s a fascinating summary of White’s frequently confounding and always confrontational…
“Yours is the most impersonated voice in the business,” muses Michael Parkinson, who interviews Michael Caine in the clip below. Which may be true — back in November, in fact, we posted this clip from the BBC series “The Trip,” in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon each demonstrate and then debate over the finer…
At The Playlist, Christopher Bell has highlights from the talk Darren Aronofsky gave last night at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the culmination of a retrospective of his pre-”Black Swan” work. Particularly of interest is the explanation of the film’s unique sound design: Many sound effects in the picture were a manipulation of a…
The 18 episodes that make up the entirety of “Freaks and Geeks” represent one of the most heartbreaking show cancellations in memory. (You can find the detailed write-ups of each episode Matt Singer and I did here.) While the creators and cast hardly dropped from the face of the earth after the show ended, it’s…
I don’t know that the video below needs further introduction, other than that it’s the creation of aspiring comedienne Gloria Shuri Nava and is a frighteningly funny satirical take on both Darren Aronofsky’s film, the abundance of amateur makeup tutorials on YouTube and a particular type of fandom.
Moving Image Source has made an annual tradition of gathering from their contributors, but also artists, writers and others, their pick for the “moving image moment or event” of the year. What makes this list so interesting is that it ranges far past just the movies, to include videos on the web, TV shows, news…
