“The Dark Knight Rises” debuts more new character posters
Has the Sacha Baron Cohen shtick jumped the shark?
Tim Grierson on Will Smith, the Last Movie Star
Exclusive download: Corporal, featuring Michael Shannon, presents “Glory”
By Matt Singer [For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.] Four Spanish mathematicians convene for an evening of puzzle-solving at the house of a man named Fermat. But almost as soon as they arrive, their mysterious host is called away to attend to his ailing daughter. A PDA…
By Stephen Saito [For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.] Last year, when New York magazine celebrated Richard Avedon’s portrait of a pensive Marilyn Monroe by publishing reinterpretations of the famous photograph, they probably didn’t think to ask Billy Pappas for a contribution. A waiter and busboy from…
By Matt Singer [For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.] As a boy, Philippe Petit enjoyed climbing things. Many boys do. But Petit never grew out of it, the way many boys do, and when he learned about wire walking, he found his calling in life. When he…
As film festivals proliferate like strip malls in nearly every city on the globe, say sayonara to the seminal anti-fest fest, the New York Underground Film Festival, giving up the ghost and closing shop after 15 years of courageously struggling to commercially showcase the inherently uncommercial. Over the years the fest has been the nation’s…
It was an oddly complementary pairing at SXSW when there was a mid-festival premiere of “Lou Reed’s Berlin” followed by “The King of Texas,” a documentary about indie film pioneer Eagle Pennell. Like Reed, whose sole album fronting The Velvet Underground inspired a host of imitators, Pennell is cited as an influence for not only…
By Stephen Saito “My gold standard for the length of the movie was 85 minutes, which, by the way, is the length of ‘March of the Penguins’…and I missed it by two,” muses Phil Donahue, a day before his first film, “Body of War” starts its national theatrical run. “But we have longer credits, I…
By Stephen Saito Dennis Lambert may be the most successful singer/songwriter you’ve never heard of — unless you live in the Philippines. Although best known as the songwriter and producer behind everything from The Four Tops’ “Ain’t No Woman Like The One I’ve Got,” Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” and, more infamously, Starship’s “We Built This…
By Stephen Saito Kofi Annan once told Alexander Payne that “Election” was the most purely political film he’d ever seen, which makes one wonder where the former U.N. Secretary-General would place the nonfiction “Frontrunners,” Caroline Suh’s study about the real life political process at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School. As the film immediately lets…
By Stephen Saito I’ll start with a spoiler: You won’t see Bigfoot in Jay Delaney’s documentary, “Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie.” (Actually, that’s a matter of opinion, since there’s photographic evidence presented throughout the film that may or may not be Sasquatch.) But there is something much more elusive that Delaney captures as he tracks…
By Stephen Saito When Richard Berkowitz’s mother is asked why she thought her son’s book wasn’t successful, she replies, “sex sells” and frankly, his book wasn’t very sexy — even though it was titled “Stayin’ Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex.” Berkowitz had heard that before, even if his past as a gay hustler in…
Screenings for the 2008 SXSW Film Festival (as well as our coverage here at IFC.com) will carry on as the music contingent rolls into Austin, but last night, the winners of the jury and audience awards were announced. Daniel Junge’s “They Killed Sister Dorothy,” about the murder of activist Dorothy Mae Stang, received both the…
There’s film! There’s music! There’s barbecue! There’s… interactive! This week on the IFC News podcast, we check in from SXSW 2008 to talk about what we’ve been up to, what we’ve seen, and why we like this damn festival so much. Download: MP3, 32:51 minutes, 30.1 MB Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]
By Stephen Saito There’s an everyman quality to Richard Jenkins, but not every man (or actor) has had the chops that have led Jenkins to become one of cinema’s great scene-stealers. Though his career has spanned over 30 years, Jenkins first broke through with a turn as a gay FBI agent on acid in David…
By Stephen Saito With 4/20 only a little more than a month away, SXSW kicked off an all-encompassing celebration of marijuana on Friday with the regional premiere of the Doug Benson doc “Super High Me” at the Paramount Theatre, shortly before other comedies about the herb made their premieres (officially: “Humboldt County”; unofficially: Jonathan Levine’s…
By Alison Willmore If you know short films — and, given how hard it can be to see them, you’d be in a select crowd — then boy, do you know the Zellner brothers. David and Nathan Zellner are an Austin-based filmmaking team whose distinctively deadpan, frequently funny and unfailingly if oddly affecting shorts have…
By Alison Willmore José Padilha’s “Tropa de Elite” (“Elite Squad”) was awarded the Golden Bear, the top prize of the Berlin Film Festival, this past Saturday. The film, which looks at how the BOPE special police unit in Rio de Janeiro uses exceptionally violent tactics to subdue crime in the favelas, was a controversial pick.…
By R. Emmet Sweeney The 37th edition of the Rotterdam Film Festival is kaput after a low-key closing ceremony this past Friday night. The big prize was for the VPRO Tiger awards, which hands three first or second time filmmakers $15,000 towards future projects. The jury, headed by ace Iranian director Jafar Panahi (“Offside”), handed…
By R. Emmet Sweeney IFC News [Photo: "The Sky, The Earth, and The Rain," Jirafa Films/Charivari/Peter Rommel Productions, 2008] It’s a week into the Rotterdam Film Festival, and the one title that keeps popping out of the mouths of inebriated critics is “The Sky, The Earth, and The Rain,” a world premiere Chilean film directed…
By Matt Singer IFC News [Photo: Josh Hartnett in "August," 57th & Irving Prod., Periscope Entertainment, 2008] “August” Directed by Austin Chick We never learn how Land Shark, the dot-com at the heart of “August,” is supposed to make money. Characters tell us that the brand “speaks for itself. Nobody does what [they] do,” but…
By R. Emmet Sweeney IFC News [Photo: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Ploy," Fortissimo Films/Five Star Entertainment, 2007] As I sit in the crowded hall of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s main building, I’m drowning in an atmosphere of harried conviviality. At the table next to me, three ladies promoting “Lucky 7,” an omnibus Thai film, are exchanging…
Over the six years that the New York Asian Film Festival has been bringing Japanese horror, extreme Korean cinema, Malaysian action flicks, Chinese epics and more to appreciative fans, the face of Asian cinema has changed significantly. I caught up with one of the festival directors, Grady Hendrix, to find out his thoughts on what’s…
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore IFC News [Photo: Park Chan-wook's "I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay," Moho Films, 2006] Roaring into town to punish evil-doers and please all lovers of the esoteric, the weird and the wonderful, the New York Asian Film Festival returns with a line-up of films from Korea, Japan, China, Pakistan,…
By R. Emmet Sweeney IFC News [Photo: Left, Miroslaw Dembinski's "A Lesson of Belarusian"; below, Shimon Dotan's "Hot House"] Conspicuously absent at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the subject of the Iraq War has slowly receded as the flashpoint topic of political filmmaking. Whether a matter of over-saturation or simply fatigue at the implacable pace…
By Dennis Lim Not surprising given his own directorial sensibility, the defining characteristic of Stephen Frears’ jury turned out to be eclecticism. Whatever your predilections, there was probably not a lot to complain about, given how this year’s awards wealth was distributed between arty young auteurs (Carlos Reygadas, Naomi Kawase) and likely crowd pleasers (“Persepolis,”…
Even a place as exciting and glamorous as the Cannes Film Festival can feel pretty lonely. You’re 4,000 miles from home, you don’t speak the language, and there’s nothing to eat but dried sausage and gherkins. Which makes it the perfect place to see movies like Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park” and Harmony Korine’s “Mister…
