In Contention

Tag: festivals

  • The five Venice titles I’m most curious to see

    Jared Leto in Mr. NobodyAt the crack of dawn, I board a flight to Italy — so this time tomorrow, if all goes well, I’ll be writing to you from the water-riven city of Venice after having attended a festival screening of John Hillcoat’s “The Road.” It’s both my first visit to the city and my first taste of one of the major film festivals, so it should be an exciting few days all round.

    Venice may lag slightly behind Cannes in terms of glamor and auteur attractions, but it’s arguably the European festival that feeds most into the awards season to come: as recent Cannes winners have remained largely arthouse-bound, Venice has birthed several crossover successes that went on to factor to varying degrees in the race: in recent years, “Brokeback Mountain,” “The Queen,” “Atonement” and “The Wrestler,” among others, saw their buzz begin on the Lido.

    (more…)

  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 1 — Best in show so far, campaign strategies, festival preview and “the 10”

    Oscar TalkWelcome to the first installment of Oscar Talk, a (hopefully) weekly podcast between myself and Anne Thompson, newly of indieWIRE.  We spend some time getting our feet wet in this introductory kudocast, but among the topics on the rundown:

    • Films screened thus far with the best Oscar profile heading into the awards season, including “The Hurt Locker,” “Up” and even some discussion on “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”

    • Meryl Streep’s performance in “Julie & Julia,” what Anne calls “the story of the summer,” and how Streep succeeds into her 60s where her contemporary actresses have not.

    • Oscar’s controversial move to 10 and what how we think it will affect the awards landscape.

    • The rise of indie studios such as Overture Films, Summit Entertainment and Apparition.

    • Shifting philosophies of Oscar campaign strategies

    • Paramount bumping “Shutter Island” to 2010.

    • All things “Avatar”: the new trailer, “Avatar” Day, etc.

    • A festival preview as Anne runs down her list of anticipations at Toronto.

    And then we ran out of steam.  For now.  I runs close to 40 minutes, but we had plenty to discuss in this first edition. We’ll whittle it down by half that in future installments, I’m sure.

    Have a listen below.  (Audio?  How novel!)  We’ll try to do another one from Telluride but the more consistent stuff will probably pick up in a month or so.

    [display_podcast]

  • Seeking refuge in festival season

    The Golden Lion at the Venice Film FestivalThere’s been much prophesying of doom among film journalists lately, with everyone from Roger Ebert to Jeff Wells harping on about an imminent cinematic dark age, brought on by mainstream audiences who prefer “G.I. Joe” to “The Hurt Locker.”

    If I don’t quite share their alarm, it’s because it’s a cry that is repeated at least every other year, as we near the end of another summer stuffed with celluloid shit — that this year’s better blockbusters didn’t quite catch on to the degree of a “Dark Knight,” or (in pop-culture impact, at least) a “WALL-E,” to me suggests a return to the status quo rather than a significant dip.

    Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE shares in the general dissatisfaction with this summer’s crop — bemoaning in particular the dearth of originally-scripted hits — but hits a more upbeat note than his colleagues by painting the upcoming fall festival season as a kind of beacon of hope for serious film lovers.

    (more…)

  • ‘The Road’ and others set for TIFF

    (from left) Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in The RoadRight now, all is right with the world.

    The Toronto International Film Festival has confirmed that John Hillcoat’s “The Road,” the film I am looking forward to most this year, is going to be here in the Special Presentation Program.

    Yes!! I have been waiting for this film since reading that amazing book in three days a year ago.

    Along with the Viggo Mortenson, Charlize Theron and Robert Duvall starrer will be new films featuring Natalie Portman, George Clooney, Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, Demi Moore, David Duchovny, Colin Firth, Omar Sharif, Jeff Bridges and countless others, making for another star-studded Toronto line-up.

    Among the films announced today in addition to The Road are, “Mother and Child” from director Rodrigo Garcia, a study of three women and the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters. Annette Bening, Naomi Watts and Kerry Washington star in the film.

    (more…)

  • Resnais and Almodóvar bookend world-flavored NYFF lineup

    Penelope Cruz in Broken EmbracesindieWIRE has the full lineup for this year’s New York Film Festival, which runs from 25 September to 11 October, and at a glance, it looks remarkably like a greatest-hits lineup from May’s Cannes festival.

    This year, both the NYFF’s opening and closing films have been plucked from the Croisette. Alain Resnais’s “Wild Grass,” for which the 87 year-old New Wave master received a special career-achievement award at Cannes, will kick off proceedings, marking the second year in a row that a French title has taken this high-profile slot.

    Palme d’Or winner “The Class” opened NYFF last year en route to an Oscar nod. Whether a similar path awaits Resnais’s film, a high-flown romantic melodrama which was very warmly reviewed in Cannes, of course depends on what the French choose as their entry from a bumper crop of possibilities.

    (more…)

  • ‘Bright Star,’ ‘Precious,’ ‘Informant’ and 19 more to play TIFF

    Matt Damon in The Informant!The Co-Directors of the Toronto International Film Festival took to the stage this morning at the first of three summer press conferences to begin announcing the slate of films that will comprise this, the 34th annual Toronto International Film Festival.

    This morning’s announcement of 22 titles brought some pleasant surprises, as well as some expected announcements.

    The Opening Night Gala will be Jon Amiel’s “Creation” featuring Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin and Jennifer Connelly as his wife.

    There were several Gala Presentations announced, among them “Get Low,” a film featuring the great Robert Duvall as Felix Breazeale, a backwoods eccentric who exiles himself from society for more than 40 years. Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek co-star with Oscar winner Duvall.

    As expected, Lee Daniels’s festival circuit hit “Precious” will land in Toronto, already an Oscar contender, as well as “The Invention of Lying,” directed by Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson.

    (more…)

  • ‘Moon’ takes top prize at Edinburgh

    Sam Rockwell in MoonThe Edinburgh International Film Festival closed today with an awards ceremony that culminated in Duncan Jones’s sci-fi debut feature “Moon” landing the fest’s most coveted prize, the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature. The jury, headed by Joe Wright and including Oscar-nominee Frank Langella, said of the film:

    We award “Moon” for its singular vision and remarkably assured direction as well as for the inspired manner in which it transcends genre. The central performance by Sam Rockwell embodies the film’s emotional complexity and compelling philosophical perspective.

    The award is an aupicious one; recent winners that have gone on to considerable international success include “My Summer of Love,” “Control” and Oscar-winner “Tsotsi” (yes, it’s British). I suspect Jones might land a few more citations, particularly of the Best First Film variety, before the year is out.

    (More details, and a full list of awards, after the cut.)

    (more…)

  • Miyazaki’s ‘Ponyo’ closes LAFF

    Hayao MiyazakiI’ve come to the awkward, “I’m the only one” conclusion that, despite my best efforts, the cinema of Hayao Miyazaki just doesn’t paddle my boat.

    Looking back over the animator’s past works again throughout the week in preparation for this write-up, and having taken in his latest, “Ponyo,” just a few weeks back, I still find myself struggling to maintain an interest in these films.  “Ponyo” is probably more in line with “My Neighbor Totoro” or “Kiki’s Delivery Service” than the director’s more ambitious fare, but it nevertheless represents an imagination that, despite my aversion to the work, is a welcome dose of creativity in a business sorely lacking it year after year.

    “Ponyo” is a loose adaptation of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” though Ariel’s mermaid has been swapped for Ponyo’s gold fish and there isn’t a villain within earshot.  But a narrative lacking an antagonist is par for the course for Miyazaki, perhaps one of the reasons I never warmed to his work but still a brazen way to go about visual storytelling business.

    (more…)

  • EDINBURGH: ‘Humpday,’ ‘Adam’

    HumpdayMy last full day at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (which wraps up on Sunday) served up a pair of comparatively conspicuous U.S. titles. Both are comic ventures of a sort that made a splash (one via widespread critical and audience enthusiasm, the other via a high-profile pickup by Fox Searchlight) at the Sundance Film Festival, but otherwise represent opposite tonal ends of the spectrum of American independent comedy.

    Before I get into those, however, a quick shout-out for another marvelous French title, Sylvie Verheyde’s “Stella,” which merits further discussion down the line. A loose-limbed, autobiographical picaresque of sorts following the misadventures of a neglected working-class 11 year-old girl in a posh Parisian school, the film transcends standard coming-of-age territory via the protagonist’s mordant wit and an astonishingly assured lead turn from young Leora Barbara. This one’s also playing at the L.A. fest — catch it if you can.

    HUMPDAY (***)

    Since its attention-grabbing debut at Sundance in January, “Humpday” has become one of those odd items whose premise far precedes it: even those with only a scant working knowledge of American independent cinema can tell you that it’s a comedy about two straight dudes who get it into their heads to make a gay porno, even if they couldn’t supply a single other detail about the film.

    (more…)

  • SHORT TAKE: “Bronson” (****)

    BronsonLos Angeles Film Festival

    It took me a few minutes to really grasp that watching Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Bronson” was likely the most rewarding cinematic experience of the year to date, but when it clicked, it became obvious I was in the hands of an unrelenting artist.  Refn’s canvas is bone-crushingly overt.  The telling of the story is at once abstract and refined, quite expressionistic and an oddly refreshing assault on senses.

    The film concerns itself with the bizarrely true tale of Britain’s “most violent prisoner,” Michael Peterson, who after being taken into custody for attempted armed robbery at 19-years-old managed to turn a 7-year sentence into 34, 30 of them spent in solitary confinement.  The madness making itself at home, Peterson developed a superstar alter ego, “Charles Bronson,” proceeding, throughout his decorated tenure of incarceration, to maim, batter, bruise, take hostages and pretty much guarantee an inevitable discretionary life sentence for the crimes he’s committed behind bars.

    For all of this seemingly aimless madness, Refn is unexpectedly reserved when it comes to building a traditional motive into his vision of Bronson, still alive and surely raising hell to this day across the pond.  Beyond an intriguing theatrical structure motif, which stages actor Tom Hardy in spotlight as a one-man show (revealing Bronson, perhaps, as something of an exhibitionist), there is no pat reasoning for the criminal.  The film is a tapestry of implication, not indication.  And it is a fierce staple of the year’s festival circuit so far.

    (more…)

  • Aronofsky at Edinburgh

    Darren AronofskyAs someone who prefers watching movies to listening to others talk about them, I probably haven’t attended as many of the In Person Q&A sessions at this year’s Edinburgh festival as I should have. Sam Mendes lost out in my priority scale to “The Red Shoes,” while the likes of Bill Forsyth and Brenda Blethyn (whose award-caliber work in “London River” I discussed yesterday) passed me by.

    I did, however, catch Darren Aronofsky’s career discussion earlier this week, and a most entertaining couple of hours it was. It wasn’t quite clear why Aronofsky was at the festival, given that he had nothing new to present – perhaps he also simply fancied a chance to kick back and watch a few movies in a picturesque town. (Earlier in the day, I had found myself seated behind him at the “Antichrist” screening – he didn’t look quite as impressed as I was.)

    As with the last time I saw Aronofsky speak, when presenting “The Wrestler” in London, the filmmaker’s interview style is largely too chatty and anecdotal to relate in writing – for the most part, I simply dropped my notepad and enjoyed the patter. The interviewer (whose name, I’m embarrassed to admit, escapes me at this moment, though I can confirm she was both gracious and very well-versed) reasoned that “The Wrestler” was still fairly fresh in the audience’s mind, so the conversation mainly flowed around Aronofsky’s first three features.

    (more…)

  • EDINBURGH: “35 Shots of Rum,” “Séraphine,” “The Maid”

    35 Shots of RumTuesday was a day of mellower pleasures at the Edinburgh Film Festival, from an idle sun-soaked writing break in the park, to a chance conversation with Paddy Considine and Shane Meadows (both as smart and affably bloke-ish as you’d expect) outside the theater, to, most importantly, a trio of quietly impressive, character-oriented foreign-language titles.

    Two of them — France’s “Séraphine” and Chile’s “The Maid” — were decorated earlier this year with glittering prizes from the Césars and Sundance, respectively. Typically, the strongest of the three (and one of the best of the festival, not to mention the year) comes with no such accolades, having played inexplicably out of competition at Venice last year.

    35 SHOTS OF RUM (***1/2)

    Call it coincidence, but the finest films of this year’s festival have all come from the hands of female filmmakers. However, if Andrea Arnold’s and Kathryn Bigelow’s new efforts found them substantially broadening their canvases to knockout effect, “35 Shots of Rum” (which also played last night at the LA Film Fest across the pond) is an immaculate miniature from a master filmmaker; wispy at first glance, the film deftly accumulates tiny environmental and character details to create a richly satisfying tableau of restless lives.

    (more…)

  • Toronto announces 26 titles for this year’s fest

    TorontoToronto International Film Festival programmers announced today that they are bringing home the circuit with a group of titles scheduled for the fest that have played previously at other festivals, including Cannes, Berlin and beyond. They will all be North American premieres, spread across several of the festival’s programs.

    In the Masters Program we will have “The Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl” from director Manoel de Oliveira, celebrating his 101st birthday this year, and still at work. From Alain Resnais we have “Les Herbes Folles,” a romantic adventure built around the loss of a wallet, and Hirokazu Kore-eda brings us his Japanese film, “Air Doll,” in which a blow-up comes to life and tries to find her way in the real world, leaving behind her role as a sex toy.

    The Discovery Program will give us “Gigante,” a love story from director Adrian Biniez, “The Happiest Girl in the World,” a comedy from Radu Jude, and the love story, “Kelin” from Kazakhstan. Australian director Warwick Thomas gives us “Samson and Delilah,” the tale of a young couple treated as outsiders as they live in an aboriginal community.

    (more…)

  • EDINBURGH: ‘London River,’ ‘Spread’

    London RiverThe past day has presented me with two films that made their first appearances at high-profile festivals early in the year: Scottish auteur David Mackenzie’s first U.S. effort “Spread” — a “look ma, I can act” venture of sorts for Ashton Kutcher — played at Sundance in January, while Rachid Bouchareb’s “London River” was a favorite (and an award-winner) at February’s Berlinale. Suffice to say that winter festival bows are all these titles have in common.

    LONDON RIVER (***)

    American filmmakers have been combing the ashes of 9/11 for inspiration for some years now, but the British have been far more reticent in taking the London bombings of July 2005. Indeed, it has fallen to Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb (a recent Oscar nominee for his excellent WWII drama “Days of Glory”) to make the first major fictional exploration of this territory, and happily he doesn’t fumble the catch by presuming importance.

    The story of two culturally opposed parents (an impoverished Francophone Muslim and a middle-class British widow) who travel to the eponymous city after the attacks, in search of their missing children, “London River” infuses a standard-issue story of parental grief with social and racial tensions that mine the Western suspicion of Islam that has become commonplace in the wake of 9/11. (“The place is crawling with Muslims!” Brenda Blethyn’s culturally sheltered rural character exclaims about London, in one of the film’s few stabs at humor.)

    (more…)

  • REVIEW: “Antichrist” (***1/2)

    AntichristEdinburgh International Film Festival

    “I am the greatest director in the world,” Lars von Trier declared in an already notorious Cannes press conference following the unveiling of “Antichrist” in May.  Unable to resist such shameless baiting, most critics either responded with affectionate exasperation (“Oh, Lars!”) or, as one suspects von Trier preferred, tomato-faced indignation.

    What few did, however, was entertain the possibility that he might be telling the truth. It’s a conclusion that, even on the imperfect evidence of “Antichrist,” this viewer is willing to consider.

    Few contemporary filmmakers are as adept at arousing feeling as Lars von Trier – by which I refer not merely to the ingenious media-provocateur act he performs to market his work, but the actual excesses and polarities of emotion he mines within his own cinema.

    Von Trier’s best films arouse equal measures of devotion and resentment because they engage human empathy with no concessions whatsoever to conventional artistic standards of restraint or good taste; like their psychologically frail heroines – Bess in “Breaking the Waves,” Selma in “Dancer in the Dark,” Grace in “Dogville” – they teeter on the brink of self-destruction simply because they feel too much.

    I must slightly temper that argument upfront by admitting that “Antichrist,” as mercurial and bruising as it so often is, is not one of von Trier’s very best. Though it by and large meets the criteria described above – and its unnamed anti-heroine is a fascinating, near-parodic amalgamation of physical traits and psychological symptoms from all the director’s women – it lacks the emotional breadth of “Breaking the Waves,” or the formal and ideological conviction of “Dogville.” Unusually for von Trier, for all the film’s sledgehammer brutality in its concluding chapters, it’s rather coy about what it actually wants to say.

    (more…)

  • EDINBURGH: “Modern Love is Automatic,” “Jerichow,” “White Lightnin’”

    Modern Love is AutomaticWith over 100 new feature films appearing at the Edinburgh this week, and a chaotically overlapping schedule of press screenings to work with, the choice of what to see can be a bewildering one.

    With previous festival cred behind them, the likes of “The Hurt Locker” or “Fish Tank” hardly have to fight for your attention, but the programme is packed with underexposed, unbuzzed titles that have to rely on word of mouth, or just gut instinct, to get seen.

    It’s this lucky-dip process that makes festivals fun, whether you’re rewarded with the smug satisfaction of happening upon a hidden gems – or simply the knowledge of why no one is talking about a certain title. What follows are three under-the-radar titles that typify the mixed fortunes of the festival experience.

    “MODERN LOVE IS AUTOMATIC” (***)

    I probably wouldn’t have unearthed Zach Clark’s delicious, unapologetically avant-garde sophomore were it not for a tip-off from our own Chad Hartigan, which would have been my own significant loss. A study of sexual politics in the postern age of disassociation and consumerism, with precisely none of the dry academic heft of that pitch, “Modern Love” more resembles the kind of candy-colored, off-the-cuff riff that might have emerged if Andy Warhol had ever tried his hand at “Sex and the City.”

    (more…)

  • REVIEW: “Fish Tank” (***1/2)

    Katie Jarvis in Fish TankEdinburgh International Film Festival

    There’s a slightly condescending tendency among many critics to brand almost any British film set on a working-class council estate as “miserablist” simply by virtue of the aesthetics of its setting, despite the fact that many thousands of people live functional, three-dimensional lives in precisely such conditions.

    Of course, it’s a bias that filmmakers feed too: since Ken Loach essentially patented this sub-genre with “Cathy Come Home” in 1966, the landscape of Britfilm has been clogged with imitators piling on the grimness to perverse effect.

    Occasionally, however, the trend gives rise to a creative voice of genuine compassion and ingenuity. Recently, Lynne Ramsay and Shane Meadows have located poetry and humor in the crevices of blue-collar Britain.

    Now Oscar-winning short filmmaker Andrea Arnold joins their rank with “Fish Tank,” a deserving Jury Prize winner at Cannes that represents a quantum leap on Arnold’s already impressive feature debut, “Red Road.”

    I’d be lying if I said “Fish Tank” isn’t an often unhappy, and occasionally very angry, film. But in its detailed, immersive study of the life of an emotionally tormented, 15 year-old Essex girl (the term applied geographically rather than pejoratively, though protagonist Mia certainly has many of the vulgar physical and behavioral traits beloved of British satirists like Catherine Tate), the film seeks out moments of everyday contentment, and even cathartic bliss, that keep the proceedings in balance. (It’ll be interesting view the film in relation to its similarly-themed U.S. counterpart, “Precious.”)

    (more…)

  • Festival frenzy

    You know you’re properly in the swing of a film festival when you have neither the time nor the clarity to actually write about the day’s events. And so it is today: after four back-to-back screenings, one panel discussion and a whole lot of trekking back and forth between the festival’s rather widely dispersed theaters, I haven’t really the presence of mind for anything other than a stiff drink and an early night. And with the festival’s official press party due to kick off in under an hour, it looks like I’ll only be getting the first half of that prescription.

    Of course, there is much that I want to share with you from today’s proceedings, including one superb film that I’m deliberating over giving another four-star review to. (I don’t usually dish those out often.) Meanwhile, this afternoon offered up another film lover’s Sophie’s Choice: attend the in-depth Sam Mendes Q&A, or the festival’s only screening of the exquisitely restored “The Red Shoes?” Actually, my heart had no trouble deciding on the latter, and it proved every bit as nourishing as you’d expect, but I’d have liked to have made both.

    All to be discussed in good time. Stay tuned.