Movie Making

Debuting today is the first trailer for David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which premiered at Sundance, is currently in Cannes, and will be out through IFC on August 16. Though I’ve already seen the film twice, this trailer beautifully captures the gorgeous lyricism of Lowery’s 1970s-set tale of outlaw lovers and makes me right away want to revisit it once more.

As Cannes is coming to a close, the accolades are being handed out. We still have to wait for the Competition award ceremony,which will be on Sunday, but the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics Week have already both bestowed honors on their films. Though Directors’ Fortnight does technically have a competition, nevertheless prizes are handed out, with this year Guillaume Gallienne’s flamboyant comedy Les Garçons Et Guillaume, A Table! (an autobiographical piece about his difficult relationship with his mother) taking two prizes, and The Selfish Giant – Clio Barnard’s follow-up to The Arbor, a Cannes favorite in 2010 — also winning an award. …

Cinematographer David Kruta spent a week in Indonesia this February shooting footage for the SurfAid charity to use in their promotional and educational campaigns. He took with him a RED EPIC, and says that the goal was to “bring a cinematic approach” to something that would be more often shot in a documentary style. Filmmaker: How did the project come about? Kruta: The director, Michael Lawrence, is a good friend of mine and I’ve done five or six projects with him. He said he had a shoot in Indonesia, and that he was going there to revisit the places he photographed after …

For the final installment of Filmmaker and the MIT Open Documentary Lab’s interview project with the foremost thinkers on transmedia, IDFA DocLab’s Caspar Sonnen answers our questions. Sonnen is the new media coordinator for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and curator of the festival’s IDFA DocLab, a competition program for new forms of documentary and interactive storytelling. In 2008, Sonnen founded IDFA DocLab to create a platform for interactive and multimedia documentary storytelling that expands the genre beyond traditional cinema. Besides his work at IDFA, he is co-founder and programmer of the Open Air Film Festival Amsterdam. For an …

James Gray’s The Immigrant is Classic Hollywood melodrama, done incredibly well, a film that powerfully portrays the emotional journey of a Polish immigrant, Ewa (Marion Cotillard), and her pimp, Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix). It offers a powerful historical account of the connections between the mass immigration to the United States and the often desperate desire to achieve the American Dream, while also serving as a brutal reminder of the ways in which that dream was exploited by people who were willing to take advantage of new arrivals, many of whom were overwhelmed by their new home. Gray’s film borrows from classical …

Sequels are the curse of modern-day moviegoing. Occasionally you find a good one, but more often the second or third installment dissipates all the fun and sense of discovery that made the original a hit in the first place. The Hangover is one of the funniest movies in recent memory. I tried to remind myself of that as I watched The Hangover Part III, a pointless and mostly unfunny film that can only be seen in a positive light because it’s infinitesimally better than The Hangover Part II. I won’t waste much time describing the storyline. Suffice it to say that Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms get in trouble again because of their dimwitted friend Zach Galifianakis, whom they try to... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

If you’ve followed the saga of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, from their initial flirtation in Before Sunrise (1995) to their Paris reunion in Before Sunset (2004) you’ll definitely want to see Before Midnight, even if you don’t find the results as fully satisfying as the previous installments in this trilogy. I liked the first film fairly well, but I loved the second, because I was drawn to the idea of two people getting a chance to rethink a missed opportunity. Many viewers will find it just as easy to relate to the older, more settled couple depicted in Before Midnight. Now in their early 40s, they’re raising twin daughters and winding up an idyllic summer in Greece, where... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Apparently I’ve been misreading the success of this series. I thought it was all about street racing, muscle cars, and eye-popping stunts. But, as I learned from the latest installment, it’s really about “family.” I know this because the characters told me so, over and over again. They also say, on far too many occasions, “It’s what we do.” What they do is street race, drive muscle cars, and perform eye-popping stunts, but that’s beside the point. There is comfort in familiarity, which is why having original cast members Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Paul Walker, and Jordana Brewster back together from the first movie, made in 2001, is a definite asset, along with other colorful... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

There are few more unlikely and inspiring filmmaking success stories than that of Rama Burshtein. The 46-year-old New York City-born, Israel-based writer/director of Fill the Void had previously made handful of films specifically aimed at Jewish Orthodox audiences, but had defined herself primarily as a mother and a wife. Now she has become the first Israeli Orthodox woman to direct a film intended for those outside the Orthodox community. After going through the Sundance Screenwriting Labs, Burshtein’s debut feature had a remarkable festival run last year, world premiering without much fanfare at the Jerusalem Film Festival but then going on to play at Venice (where …

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is an impressive achievement, a fresh and innovative take on that most familiar of genres, the road movie, one that takes conventions about the American heartland and turns them on their head. It’s also a story about a father and son learning to see and understand each other for the first time. The film opens with a shot of Woody Grant (Bruce Dern in what should be a performance that collects numerous awards) shuffling purposefully down a Billings, Montana, highway, his scraggly beard, limping gait and weathered face suggesting a man who has struggled for the little …