A rich and unsparing look at the indomitable survival instincts of a teenage girl in one of America’s most blighted regions, “Winter’s Bone” stunned audiences during its Sundance debut, taking home the Grand Jury Prize for drama. Part cultural study and part clannish thriller, it focuses on the week in which 17-year-old Ree (Jennifer Lawrence)…
If time is an avenger, then the Naughts have had it both ways with Nicole Kidman. In the span of a decade, Kidman was transformed from arm candy into an artist — the rare movie star who made genuinely interesting choices — eclipsing her ex-husband, Tom Cruise, who filed for divorce in 2000, with an…
Juliette Binoche doesn’t have a lot of time. This is impressed on me over successive days leading up to an interview scheduled with much difficulty. Were there an American equivalent to Ms. Binoche, who turned 45 this summer, I’d imagine her with hours and perhaps even months to spare, as she waits out the Hollywood…
On the screen, Julian Sands is known for a wide spectrum of roles that make the most of his seemingly contradictory mixture of glowering, antihero intensity and ethereal leading man looks. On the telephone, he presents an equally formidable hybrid: Sands has got delightfully prickly down to an art. The British-born actor, who began his…
Although the recent Bollywood strike had an almost immediate impact on distribution and exhibition of Bollywood films around the world, specialized theaters, such as the Eagle Theater in Jackson Heights, Queens, never lost hope. The Eagle, located in the heart of New York City’s Little India, was forced to close in May, as the stream…
Inspired by writers like Woody Allen and Donald Barthelme, Larry Doyle began his writing career with humor pieces for the New Yorker and then moved into television, where he wrote for “Beavis and Butthead” and “The Simpsons.” He also started scripting film, among them “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” and “Duplex.” Doyle estimates that for…
Watch the world premiere of the latest Bob Dylan music video, “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” exclusively at IFC.com. As if capturing a momentous period in Bob Dylan’s career and crafting one of the best and earliest examples of a major cinematic movement — cinema vérité — with “Dont Look Back” weren’t monumental achievements enough, D.A.…
[This article is part of our Radiohead Fanatic Fortnight -- check out our box set giveaway here.] As this week’s earlier list illustrates, Radiohead’s music has inspired a number of videos shot with the artistry of a short film. Something about the band’s dramatic, intensely emotional sound calls out to the screen, and a number…
As anyone who sat through this year’s Oscars knows, according to Hugh Jackman, Beyoncé, and, well, that chick from “Mamma Mia!”, musicals are back. It’s a somewhat desperate refrain we’ve been hearing for almost a decade now, one that began with the success of “Moulin Rouge” in 2000. Since then, we’ve had “Chicago,” “Dancer in…
A poignant charting of one man’s course through the art world of the 1990s and early 2000s, “Guest of Cindy Sherman” is also a meditation on the relationship its subject and director Paul H-O began with that world’s queen, the artist referred to in the title. The psychic kin of personal documentaries like Ross McElwee’s…
Rock stars want to be movie stars and movie stars want to be rock stars; models want to be designers and designers want to tooth-tug Keira Knightley’s ear on the cover of Vanity Fair. These are known facts, demonstrable often to a shudder-inducing degree. What to make, though, of the latent career ambitions suggested by…
By Michelle Orange A right-minded woman from England once said, “I write about love and money. What else is there?” And if Jane Austen were alive and running a movie studio today, she’d find her two-pronged sensibility more sensible than ever — particularly that second bit. Long a plot lynchpin for any number of genres…
I can count on one hand the number of times the sight of a woman has completely taken my breath away: my aunt, drinking coffee in our home when I was a child; a teenage friend laughing in a parking lot, at night; a tired-looking French woman buying cotton balls in a Paris department store;…
Samuel Johnson said it was the last refuge of scoundrels, and if that’s true, then I predict a nation-wide crime wave and a week-long run on golden toothpicks and hairless cats, because at this time of year patriotism will not be denied. Refuse to partake of — or at least acknowledge — it at your…
By Michelle Orange Four years after the release of “Incident at Loch Ness,” a wily mockumentary with a big, German question mark at its center, writer-director Zak Penn returns with “The Grand,” his friend Werner Herzog once again in tow, this time as a participant in a high stakes poker tournament. More forthright than “Loch…
Julian Schnabel casts from the gut, and his third film, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” was no exception. The artist/director refused to let his comme ci comme ça French inhibit him from selecting an all-Francophone cast and shooting the film in the native language of its subject, 43-year-old Jean-Dominique (“Jean-Do”) Bauby. To play Bauby,…
As the adage goes, “dying is hard, comedy is harder.” So why is it that so many comic actors are eager to cast aside the funny for the oh-so-serious? Sure, you’re much more likely to bag an Oscar nomination for a role that calls for droopy-eyed soulfulness than for one that involves carrying out a…
By Michelle Orange IFC News [Photo: Shareeka Epps and Ryan Gosling in "Half Nelson," ThinkFilm, 2006] When “Half Nelson” opened last summer, it quickly brought Brooklyn directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to the forefront of the independent film scene. They were rewarded with three Gotham Awards in November, including Best Feature — the first…
By Michelle Orange IFC News [Photo: "The Lives of Others," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007] When “The Lives of Others,” the spectacularly named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s directorial debut, was nominated recently for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it was just another notch in the belt for a film that’s been racking up…
By Michelle Orange IFC News [Photo: "Volver," Sony Pictures Classics] 1. Volver 2. Shortbus 3. Fateless 4. Notes on a Scandal 5. Deliver Us From Evil 6. The Departed 7. Half Nelson 8. The Science of Sleep 9. The Queen 10. The Painted Veil I don’t have any themes to point out or grand sweeping…
By Michelle Orange IFC News [Photo: "Turistas," Fox Atomic, 2006] In a recent piece about the “torture porn” trend in horror films, New York magazine critic David Edelstein had a great line about the ever-escalating attempts to shock an audience, writing that “in the quest to have a visceral impact, actual viscera are the final…
John Cameron Mitchell, whose second feature, “Shortbus,” opens this week, has justified his use of graphic, unsimulated sex throughout the film by saying it was done as “an act of resistance” against the Bush regime. Other directors usually come up with something about “normalizing sexuality” or “cinematic honesty” in their attempt to work actual sex…
By Michelle Orange IFC News At last, Mike Judge and Justin Timberlake will have something to talk about over gluey hors d’oeuvres at the MTV Christmas party. Last month, Sony Pictures sent Timberlake’s first film “Edison Force” straight to DVD, and Judge’s second live-action feature, “Idiocracy,” looked like it was going to face a similar…
