Originally reviewed at Fantastic Fest 2010. A hallmark of Spanish horror in recent years has been the long take, something that’s been perfected by the disciples of Guillermo del Toro like “The Orphanage”‘s Juan Antonio Bayona and “Julia’s Eyes”‘s Guillem Morales and the filmmakers behind shockers like “[REC].” Of course, slow burns have always been…
In the two weeks since I conducted this interview, The New York Times‘ executive editor Bill Keller announced that he would be stepping down from his position to become a full-time writer once more, paving the way for managing editor Jill Abramson to make history as the first woman to lead the venerable news organization…
It was only last fall when I wrote about “the wonderful afterlife” of Edgar Wright‘s “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World,” which wasted no time in mobilizing its rabid fan base after a disappointing theatrical release with a series of midnight screenings featuring special guests to quickly cement its legacy not as a box office misfire,…
Despite the fact that Helena Bonham Carter is currently in England filming Tim Burton’s reimagining of the ’60s TV series “Dark Shadows,” she’s sending her best to America. And she isn’t alone. As the digital distributor Emerging Pictures did last fall for a selection of Australian hits that wouldn’t have made it to U.S. theaters…
When John Schultz was in elementary school, his favorite classroom activity was when the teacher would hand out a vocabulary list of 20 words and he would have to write a story that employed all of them. “I loved that challenge of here’s what you have to work with. Make it work,” Schultz said. It…
There’s something charmingly old fashioned about the way Tom DeLonge calls his first venture into the film world “a motion picture,” which may be a more accurate description of “Love” than he may know. A film that’s so beautifully captured in every individual frame that it easily lends itself to adjectives such as striking and…
In order to understand what Brian Cox went through on “Ironclad,” one must spoil a climactic plot point in the film, so if you’d prefer to remain unsullied, please dive right into the Q & A. But if not, you should place yourself in Wales in November, where as director Jonathan English recalls, “It was…
When the budding gangster Riva first lays eyes on the flame-haired Nora, the arm candy of an abusive thug she’s itching to distance herself from, she’s crouched behind the club relieving herself in the most unladylike of ways. It’s not the meet cute that you’d expect to spark a life-changing love affair, but then again…
Steven Spielberg has been out of the public eye for the last few years, but that’s all about to change this week. 2011 will actually be one of the most prolific years for the famed director ever, with his long-gestating motion-capture project “Adventures of Tintin” and the drama “War Horse” being released within a week…
In a summer of superheroes and silly bachelors and bachelorettes, it’s about time things got a little medieval. Which they most definitely do in “Ironclad,” an epic action flick set in the time of the Knights Templars starring Paul Giamatti as the tempestuous King John, who reneges on his signing of the Magna Carta promising…
In the state where it takes place, “The Last Mountain” occupies the loneliest corner, the “last “referring to the Coal River Mountain, the only peak that hasn’t been reduced to rubble for the sake of coal production in West Virginia. And the film itself, the latest from “The Price of Sugar” director Bill Haney, is…
“Beautiful Boy” is tough in every sense of the term. A film that deals with the aftermath of a school shooting from the perspective of the parents who raised the assailant, it’s the type of subject matter that would rather be left unexplored by most and doesn’t go out of its way to suggest you…
One of the very few disappointments of meeting Jeff Dowd, the inspiration for the Coen Brothers’ creation of The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” is that he’s hardly the lethargic, carefree type that Jeff Bridges went on to turn into one of the most famous characters in recent memory, though of course his Dude would…
Toni Collette is returning to Australia to work with director PJ Hogan for the first time since the two collaborated on their breakthrough film “Muriel’s Wedding” 17 years ago on a comedy called “Mental,” in which Collette is expected to star as a caretaker for a politician’s family of seven that has recently seen their…
This interview was originally published during the 2010 Toronto Film Festival. “I have a very sarcastic sounding, insincere voice,” joked Richard Ayoade during his introduction to “Submarine,” an adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s coming-of-age novel about Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), a 15-year-old consumed with looking up words like “atavistic” in the dictionary, saving his parents (Sally…
A mystery that might be best left for Lisbeth Salander to solve, a red-band trailer for David Fincher’s eagerly anticipated adaptation of Steig Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” popped up on YouTube over the weekend. Set to a Karen O-Trent Reznor cover of the Led Zeppelin classic “Immigrant Song,” it is a stunner…
Although it won’t be coming out until September, the first trailer for the Joseph Gordon-Levitt-Seth Rogen drama “50/50″ hit the Internet today and what makes the debut so unusual is that on many film sites, it’s accompanied by a quasi-review since the film’s distributor Summit has already started to build word-of-mouth. The film, based on…
Words like “punishing” and “challenging” have been following around Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Black Venus” ever since it premiered at the Venice and New York Film Festivals last year, adjectives that could be considered misleading when the film’s greatest flaw is it’s too simple. The true story of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, an African woman exploited for her…
Not to paint the good people of Norway with the same brush, but if the country’s recent films are any indication, the problem of sexual dissatisfaction amongst women is making it frostier for some in the country than the usual climate in winter. Only weeks ago at the Tribeca Film Fest, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s “Turn…
“Maybe we could make a drinking game out of this,” Matt Walsh told the crowd at the Seattle Film Festival. “Every time you see a comedian onscreen you like, drink a beer.” No one could legally take the Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder and Todd Phillips regular up on his offer, as the Neptune Theater doesn’t…
The media is a double-edged sword in “The First Grader,” a feel-good film that’s surprisingly self-reflexive if one strays to think beyond the narrative director Justin Chadwick and writer Ann Peacock unfurl. Based on a true story, the film’s main character Maruge (Oliver Musila Litondo) simply wants an education after spending many of his 84…
It would be easy to call the Seattle Film Festival a “best of fest,” a collection of the world’s most impressive films culled from nearly every festival that happened since the 36th edition of the festival ended last June. In purely relative terms, Seattle doesn’t boast a ton of world premieres amongst the 441 films…
While heading up the Northwest for the Seattle Film Festival, it was hard to miss the attention-grabbing headline of this week’s Portland Mercury, “Celluloid Cemetery,” noteworthy to cinephiles not only because of its subject matter, but because Portland is a place where passion for film is strong enough to land the wonky technological transformation of…
Up until the advent of DVD, alternate endings could only exist in the audience’s imagination or as the product of movie industry lore. Few were ever seen beyond the studio’s gates, the general public never knowing that Deckard was outed as a replicant in the final minutes of the original cut of “Blade Runner” or…
