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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Maybe you’ve noticed over the past few years, but we here at /Film are fans of limited edition, pop culture art. This is evidenced by the copious amounts of posts we write on the subject, be it Mondo, Gallery 1988, Spoke Art or just some talented artist who does work portraying TV, movies or comics. And maybe you remember last year when we exclusively revealed that an in-production documentary on that subject was titled Just Like Being There. We even revealed some early, early footage.
That film, directed by Scout Shannon, has finally been completed and was accepted into South by Southwest 2012. However, as tends to be the case with any documentary, in the several months since we first wrote about it, the film’s focus has shifted a little. The music gig poster, while still a major part of it, also led the filmmakers to explore the current movie poster craze driven by the work by the aforementioned galleries and companies. So the crew ended up at several Mondo Mystery Movies, Gallery 1988 openings and even a certain /Film writer’s apartment to see his disgusting collection.
To that aim, they’ve cut a brand new trailer for the film and you can check it out after the jump. Read More »
One of the films announced today as part of the SXSW 2012 Midnight lineup is The Aggression Scale, from director/editor Steven C. Miller (Automaton Transfusion) and writer Ben Powell. The film is called “an 80′s influenced thriller with teenagers as the heroes,” and comes from Snowfort Pictures and producer Travis Stevens, who is behind A Horrible Way to Die and Jodorowsky’s Dune.
The film stars a great lineup of new and veteran genre and not-quite-mainstream actors: Fabianne Therese (John Dies at the End), Ryan Hartwig (The Thompsons), Dana Ashbrook (Twin Peaks), Derek Mears (Friday the 13th), Jacob Reynolds (Gummo), Joseph McKelheer (The Hamiltons) and Ray Wise (Twin Peaks).
We’ve got the exclusive poster premiere below, as well as some stills and the first trailer, all of which were released today. Read More »
Be it Sundance, Toronto or South by Southwest, some of the most exciting films to play in any film festival these days are part of the midnight line up. That’s where festivals feel comfortable playing the over the top genre stuff and, last year, SXSW’s midnight schedule included films like Attack the Block, Insidious and Kill List. Now the 2012 schedule has been announced.
The main schedule is already cool enough, featuring the world premieres of fantastic films like The Cabin in the Woods and 21 Jump Street, but at midnight, they’re adding to that with the world premieres of [REC] 3: Genesis, Girls Against Boys and The Tall Man with Jessica Biel. They’ll also screen the awesome anthology V/H/S, John Dies at the End and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s Intruders with Clive Owen, just to name a few.
Read the full list after the jump. Read More »
Attendees of South by Southwest 2012 are in for a treat. 130 feature films will screen at the Austin, Texas festival taking place March 9-17. Among them are 65 World Premieres, 17 North American Premieres and 10 U.S. Premieres. The organization already announced Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods would open the festival (the movie is phenomenal) and today the majority of the remaining line up has been revealed. One of the highlights is the unbelievably smart and hilarious 21 Jump Street, directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller. Both of those are World Premieres.
Other highlights include The Hunter, Killer Joe, The Babymakers, frankie goes boom, God Bless America, The Imposter, The Raid, Bernie and Casa de mi Padre just to name a few.
After the jump, read descriptions of all the films that have been announced so far. Read More »
For ten days each January, in the snowy town of Park City, Utah, the year in independent cinema is set. The 2012 Sundance Film Festival was true to that promise and provided attendees with a slew of films that are sure to be not only among the year’s best, but in the hunt for awards come Oscar time next year.
Along with Peter Sciretta, I was once again deep in the trenches of Park City – battling bus schedules, lack of sleep, snow, slush and more – to see as many movies as possible to try and get an idea of what the rest of 2012 holds. And it’s looking good.
We all know that the next few months hold an unprecedented offering of big budget blockbusters but companies like Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, IFC, Magnolia and more all bolstered their upcoming release schedules by purchasing some of the best films of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The official awards have been handed out, but what were our favorites?
After the jump read about the best films of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Read More »
The Lord of the Rings saved the West Memphis Three. It sounds like a crazy statement but one of the many things a viewer takes from Amy Berg‘s breathtakingly detailed and effective documentary West of Memphis is that co-producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh spent a lot of time, and even more money, to assist in the legal defense, new investigations and expert testimony which eventually lead to the 2011 release of the West Memphis Three, three men accused of murdering three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. Jackson and Walsh got a lot of their money from The Lord of the Rings so, put two and two together, and the statement seems less crazy.
Jumping off where Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky took off with their Paradise Lost documentary trilogy, Berg’s film makes Purgatory, the latest of Berlinger and Sinofsky’s movies, feel elementary. It expands greatly on all of the revelations on that film, and provides new ones of its own that were filmed as recently as January 12, 2012. Whereas the first Paradise Lost was the definitive documentary on the beginning of this massive, controversial case, West of Memphis is the definitive documentary on its conclusion. Read More »
One Oscar winner, an Oscar nominee and the actor who made the EGOT famous simultaneously elevate the quirky family drama Predisposed. Melissa Leo plays a drug addicted mother whose son, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is forced on a madcap adventure on the most important day of his life. On his way to drop mom off at rehab, he’s taken hostage by a a crazy drug dealer (Tracy Morgan), takes oxycontin, is forced to parent his little sister and even takes part in a Revolutionary War reenactment.
Co-directed by first time feature director Phil Dorling and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Ron Nyswaner from their short of the same name, Predisposed is extremely ambitious and, at times, succeeds in fulfilling those promises thanks in large part to fantastic performances by the three leads. Read More »
