In Contention

Tag: Gareth Edwards

  • ‘Monsters’ poster and trailer

    A smart little horror-romance-road movie hybrid, and an eye-catching debut for British writer-director-DP-production-designer-FX-creator Gareth Edwards, “Monsters” was one of my top finds of June’s Edinburgh Film Festival, where it deservedly won the New Directors Award. Judging from this new poster and UK trailer, the film’s marketers are obviously feeding off the comparisons that have already been made to “District 9” — and though Edwards’s film is very much its own beast, it’s easy to see why they sense similar indie-genre-crossover potential. Keep an eye on this one. Poster (via IMDb) and trailer after the jump; read my review of the film here.

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  • ‘Get Low,’ ‘Monsters,’ ‘Skeletons’ among Edinburgh winners

    I have an irritating habit of missing key prizewinners at film festivals, so it was with some astonishment that I perused the list of films honored at the close of the Edinburgh Film Festival — only to find that I’d seen most of them. Considering the brevity of my visit, and my mostly random selection procedure, I can only conclude that the less I prepare for a fest, the better I do.

    Clearly, it’s not because I have a natural nose for a winner — I’d never have guessed that Aaron Schneider’s sluggish, self-regarding folk tale “Get Low” was a likely winner of the festival’s Audience Award, yet the public evidently responded to it more than I did. No accounting for tastes, I suppose.

    This particular award has proven something of a good luck charm in recent years, with winners like “Tsotsi,” “Man on Wire” and “The Secret of Kells” all going on to bigger things — perhaps last year’s Toronto buzz for the Robert Duvall vehicle wasn’t a false alarm after all.

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