Movie Making

Negotiating Cannes is a unique challenge, especially for someone attending the festival for the first time. Although the festival is commonly associated with red carpets and other assorted glamour, my clearest memories of the festival entail trekking from a borrowed condo in Antibes early in the morning — thanks to the monumental patience of my wife who drove me in — to queue up with other journalists for an 8:30 press screening (finding those lines the first couple of days is an entirely different matter). Rainy weather early in the festival also seemed to undermine Cannes’ reputation for sun and …

This year’s 66th Cannes Film Festival opened with a venerable love fest at the Jury Press Conference on Wednesday. Led by Steven Spielberg, this year’s panel drew an incredible mix of cinema talent Ang Lee, Nicole Kidman and Christoph Waltz, as well as Romanian director Cristian Mungiu and Scotland’s Lynne Ramsay. Spielberg and Lee admitted to the assembled press that they absolutely worshipped each other, despite being pitted up against each other at the Oscars this year. Although Spielberg said he was ready to judge, he claimed, “I look at this as two weeks of celebrating film, not two weeks …

Noah Baumbach, who made an impressive directorial debut with The Squid and the Whale, continues to blaze his own trail with an effervescent little film called Frances Ha, which he wrote with its star, Greta Gerwig. A tribute to the spirit of French New Wave cinema, it’s shot in black & white and scored by the music of Georges Delerue, a lovely homage in itself—but Baumbach never positions form over content, and there isn’t an ounce of pretension here. Indie darling Gerwig has a great deal to do with the picture’s success: she’s disarmingly likable, even though her character isn’t terribly bright or focused. Frances is a young woman trying to get along in New York City,... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Since IFP and Filmmaker began programming the reRun Theater in Brooklyn, we’ve been trying to bring audiences great films, but also do it in an interesting and different way whenever possible. One of the ideas that we came up with to bring a little variety to proceedings was our Secret Film Club, which kicks off tonight. In the next week, we’ll be playing 11 films over five different nights. The screenings will all be free. But we won’t be telling anyone what the films are. Cryptic clues will be distributed to give you something to go on, however, the first …

Director David Lassiter, whose short film The Opportunist is playing in the Critics’ Fortnight, is blogging about his Cannes experiences. You can read his first dispatch here. Day one at Cannes and we’re already off to the races! After almost a full day of travel (L.A. -> Toronto -> Zurich -> Nice -> Cannes) we checked into an Airbnb apartment owned by a charming Frenchman named Olivier, dropped off our bags, and hit the Croisette. Our first stop was the Palais de Festival, where we were warmly greeted by Julie Marnay and her lovely team at Semaine de la Critique. …

Made quickly and on the cheap, prolific South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, Pieta, is an often disturbing revenge tale, moody and morally challenging, where redemption for one of recent cinema’s most dark-hearted anti-heroes seems just out of grasp. Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a pitiless and anger-fueled debt collector for a equally brutal moneylender who specializes in forcing his often destitute debtors to commit insurance fraud in order to pay back what they owe him. Living a comfortless and filthy existence in the same slum as many of his victim, Kang-do has not a friend or a care in the …

When discussing Julianne Moore, there are so many avenues to take. One might focus on her remarkable consistency, and how, on the big screen, she’s remained a stellar presence for more than two decades. Then there’s her transformative capabilities, which have helped her morph into everything from a troubled hypochondriac (Safe) and a maternal porn star (Boogie Nights) to a 1950s housewife (Far From Heaven) and one half of a loving lesbian couple (The Kids Are All Right). There’s also, of course, her singular and nature-defying beauty, which is still landing her fashion cover shoots at the age of 52. …

Another day, another bunch of clips from U.S. indies playing at Cannes. Above there is a quick snippet, featuring Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Renner, from James Gray’s period drama The Immigrant (previously called Lowlife). The Weinstein Company will be putting out the film (also starring Gray regular Joaquin Phoenix) later this year and, barring terrible reviews from Cannes critics, it should be a 2013 awards contender. Below are a teaser trailer and a clip from Jeremy Saulnier’s second feature, Blue Ruin, which looks incredibly compelling and has the potential to establish the director (who mostly plies his trade as a …

I sadly missed Calvin Reeder’s The Rambler when it played at Sundance this January, but the film is having a theatrical release starting June 7 (at the reRun Theater!) so I will be checking it out very soon. This first trailer for the film certainly has whetted my appetite even more, and confirms just how crazy and out there Reeder’s movie really is.

Over the past few months it’s been hard to miss the green icons showing up on Twitter and other social media in support of the FX Protest, an event that happened at this year’s Oscar ceremony to protest ongoing problems in the VFX industry. While movies continue to make great use of visual effects, the companies that create these effects are being financially stressed and are going out of business. To find out more about what’s been going on in the VFX industry, we spoke to Michael Scott, a VFX compositor who has been working in the industry for the …