One film with reported Oscar potential that was left without a buyer at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival was Larysa Kondracki’s “The Whistleblower.” Rachel Weisz has a lot to work with and, by most accounts, gives a stellar performance in the film. Samuel Goldwyn Films eventually picked it up and it’s set for an August 5 release date. The trailer has popped up via Apple. Check it out by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump.
Last week we got a look at the new trailer for Alexander Payne’s first film in seven years, “The Descendants.” Today, the poster comes our way. Take a look at the full image after the jump.
UPDATE (5/31): Sony has pulled the trailer offline, just in time for the official green band version to drop (which it did, in what looks like a legit leak, but we’ll wait for Apple or whatever to deliver before passing it along).
I was going to refrain from posting the recently “leaked” trailer for David Fincher’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” but there is some talk out there that it might have been a controlled leak, a bit of a marketing stunt. (And after all, no moves have been made to take it down.) If so, I TOTALLY dig it. The material itself already seems to indicate Fincher is back to his grungy days, and maybe having more fun than ever. A little shaky in-theater recording of what will be cleaned up a bit for Thursday’s official green band trailer launch adds to the flavor. So, check out it out via YouTube by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump (and delight in the best piece of marketing since the Coens’ “A Serious Man”).
One film that could slip up on the awards season with an endearing, personal journey is “50/50,” from an original screenplay by Will Reiser (it’s fully his story) and directed by “The Wackness” helmer Jonathan Levine. I’m sure Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be someone to watch, but I’ve heard Anjelica Huston steals the show. The trailer has hit via Apple, so check it out by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump.
Also opening in wide release this weekend is DreamWorks Animation’s “Kung Fu Panda 2,” which I’m hearing is pretty good. In a year that is likely to have Pixar bow out of its dominance in the Best Animated Feature Film category, it could be a rat-race for the finish (and potentially a five-horse race at that). If you get around to this sequel this weekend or whenever, let us know what you thought.
[Apologies for leaving my Cannes coverage in limbo as I unwound in Paris before returning to London housekeeping. A handful of films from my festival viewing roster are still owed some discussion in grouped capsule form, and I’ll get to those this weekend — hey, the films aren’t going anywhere, so why stick to the parameters of the festival diary? I’ll begin, however, with the last of my individual reviews from this year’s Cannes, and the last of my three four-star finds of the fest.]
Elizabeth Olsen’s face is an ellipsis, a perturbingly lovely marker of concerns unspoken and unresolved, in writer-director Sean Durkin’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” a sharp blackberry winter of a debut feature that perhaps invites a re-evaluation of how we define the modern horror film. Little happens in the course of Durkin’s curtly time-shifting narrative that is definably horrific, yet the constricting rhythms of the editing combine with the between-the-lines anxiousness of Olsen’s performance to instil a kind of objectless dread in the audience, playing their preconceptions of the film’s sensationalistic subject matter against its own craftier revelations. Watching it, in short, feels like being slowly strangled from behind.
If you’ve been fortunate enough to catch Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” in its limited release already, don’t forget to tell us your thoughts in the reactions thread.
I’ve written about the film at length once (during a lunch break at jury duty downtown after sleeping on it). Guy reviewed it in full out of Cannes, where the film walked away with the Palme d’Or, and we dedicated an edition of The Lists to Malick’s work earlier this week. But I wanted to include a separate space for spoiler discussion, as I’ve had a chance to re-visit the film and taken some time to mull over its particulars more over the last week. I guess I just really wanted to write about it again.
So, if you want to stay pure, I suggest staying out of this thread. I’ll be digging into specifics of narrative and theme that you’d probably rather avoid. Or maybe you’d like to digest every morsel you can in preparation. Fully up to you, but the warning is there. SPOILERS follow…
Also opening this weekend are two films with wider releases than the Malick, so I figured I’d offer a space for those, too. We’ll start with “The Hanogver: Part II,” which I haven’t seen (and have heard is little more than a rehash, natch). I’ll be taking a look this weekend. Todd Phillips is getting a kick out of insulting journalists. Hopefully audiences are getting a kick out of his cash grab. If you get around to it this weekend, tell us your thoughts.
Today, Terrence Malick’s latest opus “The Tree of Life” opens on four screens, two in Los Angeles, two in New York. So while it’s a small slice, the US public now has its chance to see the film, so it’s time to gauge reactions. Guy reviewed it out of Cannes, I followed up with my take (to be accompanied by another extended piece later today) and we’ve used the occasion to look back on performances in Malick’s filmography. But I’ll be very interested to hear what you all think of the film, so whenever you get around it (or whenever it gets around to you), please let us know.
As soon as the wheels started turning on 2011 Oscar season considerations, I was thinking Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants” could be a big player. Fox Searchlight could have another healthy slate this year and the studio has clearly caught and maintained its prestige stride. The trailer for the film dropped recently via Apple. Check it out by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump (and maybe clear off a spot for George Clooney in your Best Actor predictions).
If you can believe it, it’s been since Halloween that we kicked the dust off this feature at In Contention. We made it all the way through the Oscar season without feeling compelled to go there. Odd. So, with Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” opening in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, before expanding to other cities throughout June, it seemed a good time to dig back in and cook up a collective that might drive a little more interest in the discussion.
The easiest thing I could think of was a list of the best performances from Malick films, and as I sat down to revisit all five of the director’s works last week, it became clear it was as good a choice as any. There is, after all, plenty to choose from.
Malick films contain a wide-ranging array of performances, all of them proving to be singular feathers in the caps of many actors. Indeed, when an actor stars in a Malick film, he or she is met with direction unique to any other experience, and it can yield great, unexpected work. Naturalism and a sense of authenticity are hallmarks of these portrayals, as Malick likes to scrape away the dishonesty of “performance” and get to something truer, with all the imperfection that comes with it.
For my money, the following 10 represent the best of the lot. Let’s dive in…
Lynne Ramsay’s Cannes hit “We Need to Talk About Kevin” has found a home, and an awards trajectory is in place. The press release, in part:
May 23, 2011 Oscilloscope Laboratories announced today the company has acquired from Luc Roeg’s Independent Film Company North American distribution rights of the critically acclaimed and much talked about 2011 Cannes Film Festival competition entry WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, the highly-anticipated third feature from director Lynne Ramsay (RATCATCHER and MORVERN CALLAR). Oscilloscope will release WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN theatrically this Winter, accompanied by an awards campaign.
A suspenseful and psychologically gripping exploration into a parent dealing with her child doing the unthinkable, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN is told from the perspective of Eva, played by Tilda Swinton in a tour-de-force performance.
Adam Yauch, head of Oscilloscope Laboratories said: “We are honored to be working with Lynne, Tilda, John, and Ezra to release this masterpiece– the most intense thriller I’ve seen since Polanski’s ROSEMARY¹S BABY. I was on the edge of my seat throughout and it was clear I was in the capable hands of a master filmmaker, who I’m now proud to see join all our other great filmmakers as a member of the O-Scope family.”
[Photo: Oscilloscope Laboratories]
Yesterday’s thoughts on Academy Award potential for “The Tree of Life” will serve as my post-Cannes Oscar column. Thanks to Guy for doing such a bang-up job covering the festival. For now, I’ve run a comb through the Contenders section and tiered things up a bit. No ranking and no predictions yet. Just defining the field a bit more. I won’t get into serious consideration until the year’s mid-way point, I expect.
Check back tomorrow for a Malick-themed installment of The Lists.
Cannes Film Festival
It’s not often that opening credits as hideous as the ones in “Drive” — hot-pink cursive squiggles of the kind favored these days only by nail bars in suburban strip malls — are a reassuring omen for the film to come. But Nicolas Winding Refn’s beautiful, bolt-from-the-blue genre trip is a kind of snazzily dressed, testosterone-enhanced bag lady of a movie, one that gathers all manner of tossed-out debris from the Hollywood scrapyard to demonstrate its continued usefulness.
Accompanied by the irregular heartbeat of Cliff Martinez’s throbbing synth score, those lurid credits are the first clue that we’re in contemporary period piece territory: “Drive” may be set in modern-day Los Angeles, and its measured but grotesque bursts of violence may make use of our Tarantino-elasticated cinematic sensibilities, but in all other respects Winding Refn is partying like it’s 1985.
Based on American pulp merchant James Sallis’ short, sharp 2005 novel of the same title, the laconic tone and clean structure of “Drive” nonetheless feel adapted more from cinema itself, and not merely from films that share its 80s-pop mood board. The Michael Mann of “Thief” and the William Friedkin of “To Live and Die in LA” may be obvious touchstones here, but so are 70s-era Walter Hall (most obviously the similarly titled and plotted “The Driver”) and even the hard 1960s strut of John Boorman’s “Point Blank.”
With “The Tree of Life” winning the Palme d’Or in Cannes today, Oscar talk has already swelled on Twitter (after whispered considerations in the wake of the premiere last week). I’ll be writing about the film again next weekend, when some of you will be able to take a look, but for now, I thought I’d speak on this.
As we mentioned in the podcast Friday, I think Searchlight picking this demanding film up was an admirable move. It’s relationship-building with an important filmmaker (who has another film on the way, mind you). And its best chance at bringing in money was a counter-programming maneuver in the summer.
But I don’t think this was ever considered a major awards threat, to be honest. I can’t imagine anyone watching it and expecting Academy types to embrace it. And I don’t think today’s unexpected award (Guy was hearing the only major fan of the film on the jury was Olivier Assayas) changes things.
And so it came to pass that the pre-festival bookies’ odds were on the money. The most talked-about film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” was handed the Palme d’Or by Robert De Niro’s jury — a major vindication for a film that has been labelled both a masterpiece and a failure by duelling factions of critics on the Croisette.
Malick, to the surprise of precisely nobody, did not pitch up to the ceremony, though I imagine he’s feeling somewhat relieved. However it performs outside the insular festival environment, his film’s cultural landmark status has been sealed: armed with this prestigious bit of hardware, Fox Searchlight can set about readying the film for the US awards season, though approval from more mainstream bodies could yet be an uphill battle.
“The Tree of Life” isn’t the film I would have picked for the Palme by a long shot — as I wrote in my review, I think it’s an intermittently stunning work that ultimately overreaches, never marrying its three disparate sections — but it’s not an unintelligent pick: De Niro and his fellow jurors have opted for the title that looks likely to have the longest shelf-life in popular culture. In that respect, it’s a preferable choice to the film widely viewed as the favorite going into the awards tonight, Aki Kaurismäki’s charming but wafer-thin comedy “Le Havre” — which, in the evening’s most surprising turn, won not a single prize.
It’s a funny thing. For 10 days at Cannes, the Croisette hums with stimulating discussion and debate about movies; for the final two, all that chatter dissolves into a single blunt question: “What will win the Palme d’Or?” It’s a little like the Oscars, except without the initial stage of stimulating discussion and debate about movies. Let’s do it.
On the one hand, I kind of want the beautiful, punishing 160-minute anti-procedural epic of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” to win, since there’s £140 waiting for me in London if it does. (Gamble responsibly, kids.) On the other, I can make more convincing cases for a number of titles. Unlike last year, when it was easy to single out “Uncle Boonmee” and “Of Gods and Men” for the top two spots, this year’s lineup has been higher in terms of median quality, as well as more contentious — which allows for a wider range of hypothetical jury-room arguments.