Posted on Monday, April 16th, 2012 by Angie Han
As usual, this summer season looks to be stuffed with massively hyped, massively budgeted blockbusters, from May’s The Avengers to August’s The Expendables 2. Whenever you tire of glossy, expensive explosions in IMAX 3D, however — and at some point you will — there are plenty of other smaller movies on the calendar that could be worth a look.
After the jump, we have trailers for Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy‘s Victorian-era sex comedy (yes, really) Hysteria, Noel Clarke’s sci-fi thriller Storage 24, and the latest installment of Fox’s kid-friendly Diary of a Wimpy Kid franchise, Dog Days. Watch after the jump.
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Odds are, if the insanely excellent action film The Raid: Redemption isn’t yet playing in a theater near you, that’ll change on Friday. Sony Pictures Classics is opening the film in almost 700 theaters this week enabling fans from all over to see a film that reminds us what action films can be.
Directed by Gareth Evans, The Raid: Redemption is a non-stop roller coaster of chaos following an elite squad of police who enter a drug dealer’s sky rise strong hold. Adding to the visceral feel of the movie are the live-action stunts performed on set and, in this /Film exclusive featurette, Evans and his co-composers Mike Shinoda discuss one of the most memorable. Check it out after the jump. Read More »
2011 saw one of the greatest successes of Woody Allen‘s career, as his film Midnight in Paris did great business on the US arthouse circuit and worldwide, eventually raking in nearly $150m globally. There was also that little matter of winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Now Allen returns with To Rome With Love, a vignette-based romantic comedy with most of the action falling into a very familiar Allen mode. (It’s a welcome returns, with lines like “the kid’s a communist, the father’s a mortician… does the mother run a leper colony?”)
The cast features Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, Ellen Page, Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, Roberto Benigni (of whom we haven’t seen much in some time), Judy Davis and Woody Allen himself, who hasn’t been in front of the camera since the 2006 release Scoop. The action places that cast in various minor romantic and comic entanglements that all look a bit fluffy, and very entertaining.
Check out the trailer below. Read More »
Following up his most financially successful film to date, recent Oscar-winner Woody Allen has his next film all but ready to go. It was going to be called Nero Fiddled but distributor Sony Pictures Classics announced the title has changed to To Rome With Love and it’ll be released June 22. Read much more after the jump. Read More »
Enthusiasm for Gareth Evans‘ film The Raid, about a police assault on a tenement building held and fortified by a drug/crime lord, shows no sign of abating. The film has been earning fans in droves since premiering at TIFF last year. It just played SXSW where it converted more fans.
The Raid opens in the US as The Raid: Redemption, on March 23. (Some markets will have to wait a week or two; Atlanta, for example, gets it on April 6.) But we’ve known that Evans has at least one sequel in mind, and at SXSW he talked a bit about his plans, expanding what we already knew. Read More »
Three festival favorites have just gotten U.S. distribution. The most exciting piece is confirmation that Sony Pictures Classics has, indeed, picked up James Ponsoldt‘s Sundance hit Smashed starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul. Also, IFC Midnight acquired the Sundance horror comedy Grabbers (above) and Cinema Guild will release Rotterdam Film Festival winner Neighboring Sounds, by Mendonça Filho. Read more about all films, two of which I’ve seen, after the jump. Read More »
If you still feel a little confused when you hear the phrase “West Memphis Three,” never fear. The documentary West of Memphis is almost here. Oscar-winner Peter Jackson produced director Amy Berg‘s Sundance darling, which concludes a controversial and epic saga that began in 1994 when three boys from West Memphis (hence “West Memphis Three”) were tried and conviced of murder.
In 1996, a film called Paradise Lost shed new light on the case, painting the boys as innocent, and sparked an overwhelming ground swell of support from all walks of life, eventually leading to their release. Along the way, the directors of Paradise Lost – Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky – released two more films, the last of which was just nominated for an Academy Award. West of Memphis is sort of the authoritative amalgamation of those three films with a strong and much more specific focus on the end of the saga.
The film had its world premiere at Sundance in January and picked up mostly rave reviews. (Here’s mine). Now, Sony Pictures Classics has finally acquired the film for domestic distribution. Read More »
For action film fans, there’s a healthy amount of excitement for Gareth Evans‘ movie The Raid: Redemption (or simply The Raid in many territories), which will be released on March 23 in the US. Last week we saw the first domestic trailer for the film, and got word of that title change, as well as confirmation that the film’s new US title is meant to lay the ground for a small series of movies.
Now we’ve got a 13-minute behind the scenes featurette which goes into detail about the training that went into making the film, and the general approach to creating the action scenes that power the movie. Watch that, and read comments from the director about the US title change, after the break. Read More »
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