Red on white on white, Tomas Alfredson’s “Let the Right One In” is a moody, surprising Nordic pre-teen love story about a bullied boy, Oskar, and the girl who moves in next door, Eli — a vampire. And it’s not the perky goth fable it sounds like it could be — Oskar’s a monochromatic, friendless…
“Blindness,” the new film from “City of God”‘s Fernando Meirelles, was one of the major omissions the industry was buzzing about when the Cannes line-up was announced last week. Now it looks like the film will be opening the festival — from the Toronto Star: The Cannes Film Festival has selected Blindness, produced by Toronto’s…
The IFC News podcast is taking this week off — catch us in video form instead in our coverage of the Tribeca Film Festival right here. Want to download these video dispatches? Here‘s the link to the feed. + IFC News Festival Video Podcasts (XML)
35-year-old director Shane Meadows seems unruffled by the burdens of being the current great hope of British cinema. “Somers Town,” his sixth film and best yet, is all the finer for its modesty — shot in black and white and coming in at a neat 75 minutes, the tale of the friendship between two teens…
For his tenth feature, “Jogo de Cena” (Playing), documentarian Eduardo Coutinho placed an ad in the paper calling for Rio de Janeiro women over the age of 18 with stories to tell to come to an audition. Naturally, everyone has a some kind of story to tell, but the subjects he selected were all particularly…
Salman Rushdie turns up in a somewhat jarring cameo as an obstetrician in Helen Hunt’s directorial debut “Then She Found Me” — he’s not bad, but his presence does throw you, as would, I suppose, Tom Stoppard playing a firefighter, or Joan Didion delivering a few lines of advice as a sage aunt. New York…
Having taken advantage of none of the past weeks’ advance screenings, I’m going to be heading into many a Tribeca film come tomorrow, and possibly turning around and heading right back out of a few, given my luck in the past with parsing the festival’s daunting line-up. All of IFC.com’s Tribeca coverage, including interviews and…
Another tour around the interview circuit: “It’s been axiomatic that documentaries are incapable of presenting the entire truth since the Lumière brothers first pointed a camera at workers leaving a factory, then got them to leave all over again for a second take.” —Guy Maddin on the blurry line between doc and narrative at the…
James Caan has left David O. Russell’s political comedy “Nailed.” From the Hollywood Reporter: The trouble started Wednesday on the first of Caan’s two days of shooting the role of a U.S. speaker of the house who chokes to death on a cookie. Russell asked him to cough as he choked, but Caan argued that…
Here’s the official announcement from the festival. (See this previous post for the competition line-up.) Another addition to the big out-of-competition premieres: Korean director Kim Ji-woon’s western “The Good, the Bad, and the Weird” — “The Host”‘s Song Kang-ho is “the Weird.” You can find the full line-ups for Un Certain Regard and the midnight…
It seems Roger Ebert won’t be making it to the 10th anniversary of the Illinois film festival he established after all. He writes: After consulting with my doctors, I have decided it may not prudent to try to make the journey today with a fractured hip. Sigh. I was really happy with this one. The…
At long last! Premiering out of competition will be, as expected, “Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull,” as well as Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and everyone’s favorite “Kung Fu Panda.” The closing night film may still be the already announced “What Just Happened?” from Barry Levinson — or maybe not —…
Baz Luhrmann is vodcasting about the making of “Australia,” that Oz fuck explosion starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, thousands of cattle and World War II, as part of Apple’s “Set to Screen” series on iTunes. The film, Luhrmann’s first to follow the Red Curtain Trilogy, is in post-production now, and is due in theaters in…
One more NY Comic Con tidbit: Russian-Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov made his name with “Night Watch,” that epilepsy-inducingly excessive fantasy blockbuster about good and evil battling it out in the streets of modern Moscow that beat out “The Lord of the Rings” at the Russian box office. “Day Watch,” the film’s somewhat less fun and…
The Walt Disney Company has established a new production banner, Disneynature, through which it hopes to put two new nature docs a year to theaters starting in 2009 with “Earth,” then on to “Oceans” and “Chimpanzee.” Despite the apparently enviro-angle, Brook Barnes at the New York Times points out this move is mainly just business-savvy:…
The spring issue of The Threepenny Review has a symposium on the various forms of editing, with contributors ranging from Walter Murch to literary critic Christopher Ricks. Most aren’t online — fortunately, one of the few that is is from documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. He gives a nicely grounded explanation of how he shapes a…
Andrew Jarecki’s anguished “Capturing the Friedmans” started as a doc about birthday clowns — its central figure, David Friedman, first caught Jarecki’s eye as Silly Billy, a successful New York magician, clown, balloon twister and children’s entertainer with what turned out to be one hell of a personal history. Friedman’s day job was eventually explored…
Two rumors from the past weekend’s New York Comic Con that caught my eye: JoBlo.com reports that Guillermo del Toro, at the convention to push “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” announced that he’s working on a project called “Saturn and the End of Days”: What he calls his final movie about “childhood and horror”, it…
“The Oxford Murders” seemed an uncharacteristically buttoned-down choice of project for fearless Spanish cult film director Ãlex de la Iglesia, he of the lurid and hilarious “The Day of the Beast” and the dedicatedly nasty “Ferpect Crime.” Shot in English in the U.K., the new film features Elijah Wood and John Hurt as a grad…
A tour round the interview circuit: “I am a ham. It makes people laugh when I play the male. So I played the male, when I am not playing a hermaphrodite.” —Isabella Rossellini on depicting insect mating habits in “Green Porno,” at the New York Times Magazine [Rossellini also discusses the “gigantic genitals” of insects…
Did all the controversy-courting work for Ben Stein’s critically unloved anti-Darwinist documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”? The film, which opened last weekend against Morgan Spurlock’s equally pop if not so rampantly right-wing “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?”, racked up over $3 million at the box office.Two reads, the first from Nikki Finke…
The weather’s warming, the days are longer and “Iron Man” ads are getting inescapable — clear signs that summer’s on the way. This week on the IFC News podcast, we present ten indie alternatives to the season’s blockbusters that we haven’t seen and are really looking forward to. Download: MP3, 28:41 minutes, 26.2 MB Subscribe…
Today also marks the release of “Zombie Strippers,” whose title was probably also its pitch and its own self-contained marketing plan. The film, which stars former porn actress Jenna Jameson and Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund, has to earn bonus points for purportedly being based on Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros.” Jameson, who made her non-porn acting debut…
On to another doc in Morgan Spurlock style, this one actually made by Morgan Spurlock. “Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?” attracted a lot of attention when the Weinstein Company picked it up on the basis of just 15 minutes of footage shown to buyers at Berlin last year, and later because of…
