tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55768533107555821822010-03-16T13:10:49.544-04:00Webmasterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03643468321632241172noreply@blogger.comBlogger154125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-88248948988069026012010-02-24T08:03:00.003-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.691-05:00

As a theme in Western art, sibling rivalry is as ancient as the Hebrew Bible or the internecine blood feud that shapes the destinies of two sisters in Sophocles’ Antigone. In her utterly absorbing family portrait Prodigal Sons, which won the FIPRESCI prize at the 2009 Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, Kimberly Reed (“25 New Faces of Independent Film,” Summer 2007) revisits this archetype

Damon Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12246161548342687015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-48014278960467880002010-02-22T11:24:00.000-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.691-05:00

A often stunning and certainly never less than riveting meditation on the coming of age of an Arab/Corsican criminal in the unforgiving French penal system, Jacques Audiard's A Prophet is that rare bird that feels utterly at home as an art house blockbuster (its pedigree includes the Grand Prix in Cannes, multiple European Film Awards and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film) and

Brandon Harrisnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-81750813559912694682010-02-10T07:44:00.004-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.692-05:00

Television has been blamed for the dumbing down of the American public since the ascendance of the boob tube in the 1950s. But in Italy, where scandal-plagued prime minister Silvio Berlusconi controls the flow of information through his monopolistic holdings in that nation’s biggest media conglomerates, there is a more insidious aspect to the chronic press muzzling at RAI and trashy tits-and-ass

Damon Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12246161548342687015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-56173830175141446692010-02-03T13:30:00.002-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.692-05:00

Ernst Aebi, the subject of Martina Egi's keenly observed new documentary Barefoot to Timbuktu, is something of a renaissance man. Artist, SoHo real estate pioneer and social activist, he is full of paradoxes: easy going yet driven, humble yet self-assured, a man of much wealth who nonetheless spends his leisure time among the dispossessed. Egi profiles Ernst with affection, but she doesn't shy

Brandon Harrisnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-60552813432328914692010-01-27T08:21:00.007-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.692-05:00

As a history lesson, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s enthralling new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, is as solid as a textbook, stitching together old broadcast footage, first-person testimony, tart excerpts from the Nixon White House tapes, and noirish recreations into riveting, revelatory political drama. The name “Daniel Ellsberg”

Damon Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12246161548342687015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-70062758674452673312010-01-20T10:15:00.008-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.692-05:00

The first non-Canadian film to open the Toronto film festival in quite some time, Jon Amiel's Creation seems to both embrace and shun the duties and limitations of the historical biopic. Paul Bettany stars as middle age naturalist Charles Darwin, well past his explorations on the HMS Beagle, who having settled into English country life with his children and wife Emma (Bettany's real life spouse

Brandon Harrisnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-65141204706837491512010-01-13T00:26:00.010-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.693-05:00

Long before she became an Oscar-winning filmmaker, Dartford native Andrea Arnold settled on a path that was anything but conventional. After moving to London in the late ’70s, she worked as a dancer on Top of the Pops, and later became a TV presenter in Britain for Saturday-morning kids’ programs like No. 73, Motormouth, and the enviro-awareness series A Beetle Called Derek. Never entirely

Damon Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12246161548342687015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-27978712752656358362010-01-06T14:12:00.011-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.693-05:00

An observational documentary that utterly transports you to a forgotten corner of the American West, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash's Sweetgrass is billed as a glimpse at the final sheep drive the state of Montana ever hosted. Shot in muddy, early aughts DV, this often funny, occasionally terrifying and almost always beautifully composed film follows a pair of modern shepherds who

Brandon Harrisnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-28157948863660780722009-12-29T18:30:00.004-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.693-05:00

Topping the Korean box office is no small feat for a first-time filmmaker, given the perennial offerings of sassy romantic comedies and vivid, attention-grabbing genre flicks from this nation’s impressive stable of film artists. It’s even more improbable when you’ve made a no-frills documentary (not so popular in South Korea) for less than $150,000 about the relationship between an elderly farmer

Damon Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12246161548342687015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-11229830275924980642009-12-23T12:35:00.002-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.694-05:00

Cornelieu Porumboiu’s absurd anti-policier Police, Adjective, a hit at last fall's New York Film Festival, has pushed the Romanian director into the forefront of a young group of Romanian filmmakers who have in the past four years taken the world of International Art Cinema by storm. Along with Cristian Mungiu (2008 Palme D'Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days), Cristian Nemescu (California

Brandon Harrisnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-80511710712772097802009-12-16T00:00:00.010-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.694-05:00

Absurdists at heart, Belgian animators Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar have spent two decades perfecting their hilariously antic brand of fantastic, faux-naïve humor. After graduating from La Cambre, the School of Visual Arts in Brussels, the duo created a popular hand-animated series entitled Pic Pic Andre Shoow, about the adventures of a magic pig and an evil, beer-swilling horse, which first

Damon Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12246161548342687015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-73139539922462668622009-12-09T13:05:00.005-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.694-05:00

Opening with a blistering, misogynistic monologue by Caleb (a terrific Adam Scott), a newly unemployed construction worker who's recent breakup has left him with an unquenchable hate for all things feminine, The Vicious Kind seems to announce its intentions very quickly: dramatizing the bitterness of a young, damaged man and the toll his misanthropy exacts on his small, middle class New England

Brandon Harrisnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-90974968574663736722009-11-30T00:36:00.005-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.694-05:00

Interview by Alicia Van CouveringFilmmaker selected John Maringouin as one of our "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in 2006 after seeing Running Stumbled, the filmmaker's hilarious and disturbing film documenting his own reconciliation with his estranged father. This year he brought his remarkable film Big River Man to Sundance, a film several years in the making that documents the Amazon River

Scott Macaulayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04728573558664904533noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-24426791146040496682009-11-24T23:59:00.010-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.695-05:00

In life and art, John Hillcoat takes the road less traveled. Born in Queensland, Australia and raised in the United States, Hillcoat got a crash course in mid-sixties American music and culture from his parents, who took him to folk festivals where Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and old-time blues musicians left a distinct impression. “As a young kid, I was thrown into the sixties in

Damon Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12246161548342687015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-51125683109868363342009-11-18T09:52:00.001-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.695-05:00

Forty-plus years into a still-vital, ever-proliferating filmmaking career, Werner Herzog has aged gracefully into the role of the sage adventurer, still fearlessly exploring the terrain between documentary and fiction as well as the vanishing point between charismatic eccentricity and full-blown psychosis. Born in Munich, raised in the Bavarian Alps, and lumped early on with other avatars of the

Damon Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12246161548342687015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-45870399822612776832009-11-11T12:01:00.008-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.695-05:00

If one had only a single adjective with which to describe the body of work that directing team David Siegel and Scott McGehee have crafted over the past decade and a half, cerebral immediately jumps to mind. Since their debut film Suture (1993), an austere, black and white thriller starring Dennis Haysbert that took Toronto and Sundance by storm, they have often found it difficult to get their

Brandon Harrisnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-87073636505645708412009-11-04T12:14:00.003-05:002010-02-25T15:32:16.695-05:00

Ex-LAPD Detective, investigative journalist, 9/11 truther, foreteller of the coming apocalypse --- these are just some of the roles Michael C. Ruppert has inhabited in his fascinating life, one that versatile filmmaker Chris Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) has chosen to examine in his newest film Collapse. It is a return to documentary films for Smith, who has oscillated between disparate

Brandon Harrisnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-61880891465589918552009-10-30T12:16:00.000-04:002010-02-25T15:32:16.696-05:00

As a genre that's all about keeping the audience on its toes, the horror movie naturally needs a regular injection of fresh talent, and writer-director Ti West is the latest to give it a shot in the arm. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1980, West spent his adolescence watching as many movies as he could catch on TV or rent from his local video store. Though he made stop motion movies with his

Nick Dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12860797195563953766noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-29892384400992329922009-10-21T12:12:00.000-04:002010-02-25T15:32:16.696-05:00

It is not uncommon to describe filmmakers as “true artists,” however in the case of Peter Greenaway it is literally the case that he brings an artist's sensibility to work on the big screen. Born in Newport, Wales, in 1942, Greenaway grew up in London and studied to be a painter at the city's Walthamstow College of Art. In the late 60s, Greenaway began to explore his fascination with cinema,

Nick Dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12860797195563953766noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-61285147051283829272009-10-16T12:37:00.001-04:002010-02-25T15:32:16.696-05:00

CATALINA SAAVEDRA IN DIRECTOR SEBASTIAN SILVA'S THE MAID. COURTESY ELEPHANT EYE FILMS.Sebastián Silva could seemingly make a career out of a variety of creative pursuits, however at the moment it is on filmmaking that he is focusing all his attention. Silva was born in Santiago, the capital of Chile, in 1979, and grew up attending a Catholic school in the city. Though from a young age it was

Nick Dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12860797195563953766noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-63859432640223926372009-10-09T18:32:00.001-04:002010-02-25T15:32:16.696-05:00

TOM HARDY AS THE EPONYMOUS LEAD IN WRITER_DIRECTOR NICOLAS WINDING REFN'S BRONSON. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.At a time when Danish cinema boasts a large number of first rate directors, Nicolas Winding Refn stands out among his peers for his raw talent and ambition. The son of filmmaker Anders Refn, Refn was born in Copenhagen in 1970 but spent much of his teenage years living in New York, which

Nick Dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12860797195563953766noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-59101737734882726932009-10-02T22:16:00.001-04:002010-02-25T15:32:16.697-05:00

EZRA MILLER IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ANTONIO CAMPOS' AFTERSCHOOL. COURTESY IFC FILMS.To call Antonio Campos a precocious talent would be to understate his abilities. Amazingly, the 26-year-old writer director, a native of New York City, has already spent half of his young life making films. Campos directed his debut short, Puberty (1997), at the age of 13 as part of a New York Film Academy program, and

Nick Dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12860797195563953766noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-34983791163966198162009-09-24T08:01:00.003-04:002010-02-25T15:32:16.697-05:00

A STILL FROM DIRECTOR MICHAEL ALMEREYDA'S PARADISE. COURTESY POST FACTORY FILMS.As he himself puts it, writer-director Michael Almereyda loves to make movies like a fighter likes to brawl, and over the course of his directorial career he has sought out an intriguing variety of creative challenges. Born in 1959 in Overland Park, Kansas, Almereyda spent his formative years in the Los Angeles area,

Nick Dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12860797195563953766noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-48833410705472220942009-09-18T17:05:00.001-04:002010-02-25T15:32:16.697-05:00

JUSTIN RICE IN WRITER-DIRECTOR BOB BYINGTON'S HARMONY AND ME. COURTESY HARMONY AND ME, LLC.From Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez to Bryan Poyser and the Zellner brothers, Austin is a hotbed of gifted directors, and Bob Byington now emerges from there as another talent to be reckoned with. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Byington studied at UC-Santa Cruz before going to graduate school at the

Nick Dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12860797195563953766noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5576853310755582182.post-55495588145775096992009-09-09T17:18:00.002-04:002010-02-25T15:32:16.697-05:00

A STILL FROM DIRECTOR JOE BERLINGER'S CRUDE. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.Joe Berlinger is a filmmaker who makes documentaries that tell important stories with integrity, while still always entertaining his audiences. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1961, Berlinger studied English and German at Colgate University, and got his first taste of the movie business while working on TV commercials at

Nick Dawsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12860797195563953766noreply@blogger.com0