One of my favorite movies of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival was Zal Batmanglij‘s Sound of My Voice, a microbudget dramatic thriller which is about a couple who infiltrate a cult in the San Fernando Valley. But the story has a tiny bit of a science fiction as well — the leader of the group is a woman named Maggie (Brit Marling) who claims to be a time traveler from the year 2054. The couple sneak cameras into the cult hoping to expose her scam. You can read my lengthy review here (I’ve tried my hardest to keep it spoiler free). Fox Searchlight acquired the film sometime after last year’s festival, and has been figuring exactly how to market and release such a unique movie.
As the April 27th 2012 release date approaches, Searchlight is beginning their marketing push. Today they have released the first two-minutes of the film as a clip on Apple.com — you can watch it after the jump. Tomorrow we will be exclusively be posting the entire first 12 minutes of the film (the entire first chapter of the story) before it is released on the official website later this week. So please, watch out for that.
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As I’ve started to read about the Sundance film Beasts of the Southern Wild (check our review here), what keeps coming to mind is something like the early films of David Gordon Green filtered through the sensibility of author China Mieville. The film shows us the world through the eyes of a six-year old girl, but that world isn’t quite ‘real.’ It is the creation of director Benh Zeitlin. His landscape is based in part on a post-Katrina Louisiana landscape, but it also has many other elements, some realistic and some fantastic, woven into its fabric.
But rather than looking to some esoteric and possibly way off-base comparison to get an idea of what Beasts of the Southern Wild might be like, let’s look back to the 2008 short film from the same director. Glory at Sea is also by Zeitlin, and like his new feature the short is also set in a landscape that is at least influenced by the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina. But this is no When the Levees Broke; rather it is a film that uses images that suggest a devastated Louisiana as part of a story about following faith and vision even in the aftermath of apocalypse.
Zeitlin breaks many rules of shooting low-budget indie films: he shoots with kids, and on the water, and with a couple of wild, homemade sets. Well, ‘sets’ is a loosely applicable term, but you’ll see what I mean. Glory at Sea is a pretty fantastic 25-minute short, and I highly recommend giving it a look. Read More »
When the film world converged on Park City, Utah for the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, several movies were highly anticipated. Beasts of the Southern Wild was not one of them. But in the truest and most exciting tradition of this legendary film festival, word of mouth after the first screening spread like wildfire and Benh Zeitlin‘s directorial debut became the talk of the town. Fox Searchlight purchased the film for distribution and screenings later in the week all sold out.
So does Beasts of the Southern Wild live up to those wild expectations? Absolutely. It creates an entire new world where a six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) lives in squalor with her father Wink (Dwight Henry). When Wink gets sick, Hushpuppy’s world is almost literally turned upside down and she must come to grips with her inner strength, her mortality, and a whole lot more.
After the jump, read more about this fantastic film or – if you aren’t in a reading mood – watch a video blog featuring Peter and myself. Read More »
Fox Searchlight has become a big buyer at Sundance in the past couple years, and this year has already picked up two of the most acclaimed films playing the fest. Last night the company grabbed the rights to the John Hawkes/Helen Hunt film The Surrogate, which is already generating Oscar talk for next year thanks to the strength of Hawkes’ performance.
And now Fox Searchlight has finalized a deal to distribute the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Neither Pete nor Germain has seen the film yet, so we haven’t covered it up until this point, but the movie quickly became one of the Sundance films I’m most interested in seeing, as early reviews have used language like “remarkable, beautiful, moving and astonishing” to describe the story that gets inside the head of a young girl worried about the end of her universe. Read More »
Shame, the new collaboration between Hunger director Steve McQueen and star Michael Fassbender, is about to open in limited release this weekend after months of built-up interest following the film’s festival debut. The picture quickly earned a certain notoriety for explicit sexual content, with an NC-17 rating handed down from the MPAA.But Fox Searchlight didn’t run from the rating. Instead, the studio embraced the tag and is using Shame as sort of a small rallying cry for the acceptance of truly mature entertainment.
Now, just before the public at large gets a chance to see the movie, Fox Searchlight has released a red-band trailer for Shame. You might expect something wildly explicit given the film’s rating and reputation. But this is actually quite a well-done trailer that suggests a lot more than it shows. (There is some sex and nudity, yes.)
Hit the break for a sexually-charged train ride that is like the bastard son of ideas from Alfred Hitchcock and Darren Aronofsky. Read More »
Posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2011 by Angie Han
Steve McQueen‘s sex addiction drama Shame may be getting tons of attention for its too-hot-for-the-MPAA explicitness, but having just seen the film I can attest that in truth, it’s less sexy than it is emotionally devastating. And it’s that pain that comes across most in this brand-new U.S. trailer for the film, which sees Carey Mulligan singing what may just be the loneliest version of “New York, New York” ever recorded as Michael Fassbender has lots of sad, soulless sex. Watch the trailer after the jump.
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Here’s the US trailer for Steve McQueen‘s film Shame, in which Michael Fassbender stars as a man who can’t control his sex drive and Carey Mulligan appears as his sister.The film was a big hit at festivals throughout 2011, and has drawn attention for its raw and explicit depiction of sex and sex addiction.
This is essentially the same thing as the UK trailer we saw not long ago, but for the sake of enthusiasm we’ll push this US version on you, too. Strangely, there is no big notice of the fact that the film earned an NC-17 rating, which is a tag that distributor Fox Searchlight reportedly plans to embrace rather than avoid. Read More »
Jeffrey Blitz, who made his debut with the award-winning 2002 spelling bee documentary Spellbound, and his dramatic feature debut in ’07 with Rocket Science, is lining up a new movie. Table 19 is a script by Jay and Mark Duplass, who were once going to direct the film. But they’ve moved on to other things and now Blitz is in talks to make the movie, which Shawn Levy will produce. Read More »
