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By Jordan Hoffman There are two things that always bring a smile to my eyes: murderous space aliens and drunken Irishmen. “Grabbers,” a delightful little romp playing at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is surely the first movie ever to have both. A streak of light shoots through the night sky which spells mysterious doom…
By Jordan Hoffman There are some characters you love to hate. Like, you know, Severus Snape or Bill O’Reilly. But what about characters that you loathe – how can you spend an entire movie with them? That’s the question behind “The Comedy”, the new experiment in darkness starring Tim Heidecker that debuted at the Sundance…
By Jordan Hoffman What’s scarier: ethereal creatures lurking in your bedroom at night or the thought of sitting through another “found footage” horror film? The cabal of independent filmmakers behind “V/H/S,” which tore the roof off of Sundance’s Library theater at its midnight debut, might have trouble answering that one. And like all good artists,…
For a film that’s already making waves at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, little is known about “Filly Brown.” That’s sure to change, but for now we’ve got an early peek at this music-flavored indie. The film follows a young woman named Maria Jose ‘Majo’ Tonorio (played by Gina Rodriguez), a hard-charging Mexican-American street poet…
By Jordan Hoffman There’s a moment early in “Celeste and Jesse Forever” when the very talented Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg are being sickeningly cute. We cut to their friends Ari Graynor and Eric Christian Olsen looking grossed out by their silly, “Hans and Franz read the dinner menu” shtick and the gag is “man,…
By Jordan Hoffman Not since John Waters’ “Desperate Living” has a feature film ever been more dedicated to stream-of-consciousness shock humor as Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s “Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie.” It will simultaneously blow your mind and test your patience, offering bathtubs full of gross-outs, character oddities, baffling post-production tweaks, and, on…
It’s one thing to break out at Sundance as the star of two premieres (“Another Earth” and “Sound of Your Voice”). It’s quite another order of magnitude to also function as co-writer of those films. Meet double-threat Brit Marling, brainy beauty and new “It Girl” of the Amerindie scene. An economics major at Georgetown University,…
On the eve of the premiere for Michael Rapaport’s documentary, “Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest,” tensions still seem thick between the group and the first time feature director. The ongoing public airing of disagreements began with a comment made by Q-Tip via twitter after an unofficial trailer leaked out…
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)…
This may be a little inside baseball, but in updating our Sundance Cheat Sheet, it’s been an interesting thing to watch how different outlets are handling link etiquette, particularly in regard to Variety, which recently put a paywall on their Web site to limit readership to their subscribers. This has led Filmmaker‘s Scott Macaulay and…
When I was a child I believed that mosquitoes were the blood sucking, winged minions of Satan, loosed upon the world to torment us. I can’t even imagine living somewhere where they can actually kill you. But millions of people do, without so much as a mosquito net to protect them. Did you know it’s…
Steven Soderbergh had a remarkable 12 films in theaters between 2000 and 2009. That includes two shiny Oscar winners, “Erin Brockovich” (which nabbed Julia Roberts a statuette) and “Traffic,” and a potential third, “The Informant!”; all three installments of the blockbuster “Ocean’s” franchise; three fast-and-loose video experiments (“Full Frontal,” “Bubble” and “The Girlfriend Experience”); an…
So Sundance woke up all sweaty and hungover a few days ago and apparently decided it was time to change its ways. The quirky Fox Searchlight acquisitions, the earnest Amerindie movies like “Sin Nombre” going nowhere slowly but self-righteously…something didn’t feel right. Was this the same festival that gave us Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino?…
Ted Hope, the major indie producer behind “Happiness,” “American Splendor,” “Adventureland” and many others, is a worrier — he wants new distribution models and new ideas for independent film, and he wants them now. This week he’s got a provocative guest post on his blog from Caitlin McCarthy, a screenwriter and inner-city public high school…
Los Angeles-born comedienne Charlyne Yi seemed so adorably unassuming as one of Seth Rogen’s stoner buds in “Knocked Up,” in which she memorably comments to the pregnant Katherine Heigl: “You must be angry at the baby whenever it steals your food, huh?” But the 23-year-old funny girl couldn’t spend her life as a couch potato…
The Sundance Institute has just put five short films from six established(ish) filmmakers up on the web for your free viewing pleasure here. The catch? They were commissioned as part of Sundance’s Global Short Film Project to be designed specifically for mobile phones and, therefore, tiny screens, and, therefore seem to have been created with…
