Yesterday the Sundance Film Festival announced the core lineup of films that will be spotlit in the Competition slates at the 2012 festival. Now we’ve got a lineup of films that will play out of competition in the Spotlight, Park City at Midnight, NEXT <=> and New Frontier schedules. There are a few films in here with which you might be nominally familiar, like The Raid, Grabbers and Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, not to mention Andrea Arnold‘s new version of Wuthering Heights. But many are new announcements.
While the competition lineups are always a good place to look for some of the films that will be the most talked-about in the year following each Sundance fest, these schedules are where some of the more unique and provocative films live. There are still some big premieres to be announced next week, but if I was making a big Sundance wishlist, these 30 movies would be among the ones I’d consider most highly. Read More »
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Snow is falling, the temperature is dropping, movies are getting better. Some might say it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas but I say it’s beginning to look a lot like Sundance. The 2012 Sundance Film Festival announced its first batch of films Wednesday, all of which are in competition. Meaning these are the films eligible for awards. It also means that, as of right now, these are the films you probably haven’t heard of. But, at this time last year, the competition films included a ton that you’ve surely now heard of such as Another Earth, Circumstance, Like Crazy, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Pariah, The Guard, Tyrannosaur and Take Shelter. Those were just the narratives. In last year’s documentary competition, films like Beats, Rhymes and Life, Being Elmo, How to Die in Oregon, Page One, Knuckle, Project Nim and Senna all played.
Basically, while you probably haven’t heard of these movies yet, you will soon hear a lot about them. Read the full list after the jump. Read More »
Honesty isn’t always fun, but in environments where it is a rare commodity honesty can provide entertainment like nothing else. Ronald Meyer is the head of Universal Studios. He’s a US Marine who co-founded the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in 1975 and became president of Universal in 1995. He has held that post ever since, through six regime changes. He’s doing something right, even when he does things wrong.
The question is, which of these things was wrong: making Land of the Lost, The Wolfman and Cowboys & Aliens, or publicly admitting that the movies were mistakes? While appearing at the Savannah Film Festival, Meyer talked with surprising candor about Universal’s recent fortunes and the state of the studio’s business today. The quotes in the headline are just the beginning. Read More »
No one grows up with hopes and dreams to be a short filmmaker. People who want to make films aspire to make features and it takes time to realize the short subject is one of the best steps to achieving that goal. However, in the case of director Kristoffer Aaron Morgan, writer Eric Vespe and their short film No Way Out, they did things backwards.
Before No Way Out was even conceived, Vespe, best known as Quint from Ain’t It Cool News, and Morgan had already sold Dimension the rights to The Home, their feature length, haunted nursing home movie. But when pre-production on that film was put on hiatus, the pair decided a short might be a good way to practice their craft and simultaneously hang with some of their Austin, Texas film friends.
Two thousand dollars later, they have No Way Out, a 10-minute short starring A.J. Bowen (The Signal, The House of the Devil, You’re Next) as a lost and frightened man stuck in a basement with something unnatural. It played Fantastic Fest in Austin last month and /Film spoke to the writer, director and star of the short about how it came about, the art of the short subject and a collective love of film in general. Read More »
NOTE: This review was originally published on September 29th 2011 from a secret screening that took place at Fantastic Fest, and is being republished for the wide release.
The second half of Paranormal Activity 3 is the most consistently intense and frightening segment so far in the popular found footage series. Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (the guys behind Catfish) take their sweet time getting to it but once the scares begin, they don’t let up. That’s the good news. The bad news is for a third film in a series, it adds almost nothing to the overall Paranormal Activity mythology. (Not to mention well over half the footage in the new trailer is NOT in the movie.) Fans might also be disappointed that Katie Featherstone, the star of the first two films, only makes a brief cameo to give a bit of context to the rest of the film which is primarily about her character and her sister as little girls. And they did not have a pleasant childhood.
The world premiere of Paranormal Activity 3 was the second Secret Screening at Fantastic Fest 2011 and you can read more about it after the jump. Read More »
Another Fantastic Fest is in the books and the festival once again lived up to its name. For eight straight days I slept little, met friends, ate, drank and watched an inhuman amount of crazy genre movies. Now that it’s over, it’s time to not only rank the best films I saw at the festival, but point out a few trends that defined Fantastic Fest 2011. Read More »
Certain movies undeniably pop off the screen. Movies such as Amelie, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Waking Life and What Dreams May Come each have a visual style that is colorful, stylized and a treat for your senses. Milocrorze: A Love Story, winner of Best Fantastic Feature at Fantastic Fest 2011, is one of those movies. It’s a three-part Japanese anthology film directed by Yoshimasa Ishibashi and starring Takayuki Yamada (13 Assassins) in each part. There are very minor through lines between the segments, but the major connective idea is that each shows a different viewpoint on love. All three are visual and emotional delights. Read More »
Bullhead and Two Eyes Staring have nothing in common except their country of origin. They’re both from Belgium, two of the three films from that country playing Fantastic Fest this year, in fact. Two Eyes Staring was optioned by Charlize Theron last year for an American remake and is about a woman who inherits her childhood house after her estranged mother passes away. There, her young daughter begins to have visions that illuminate mommy’s seedy past. That’s a very female-centric film and Bullhead is the opposite. Winner of Best Picture in the AMD & Dell Next Wave Spotlight Competition and the Belgian contender for the 2012 Academy Awards, Bullhead is about a muscle-bound, hormone-peddling gangster who himself has a huge childhood secret that has affected everything he’s done since.
One is realistic and the other ethereal; one has compelling points but both have major flaws. Read More »
