Zoe Kazan won the best actress award at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival for her performance in Bradley Rust Grey’s melancholy film The Exploding Girl. Almost a year after its debut, the film is opening in limited release in New York this Friday.
To appreciate this slow and gentle film, you’re going to have to love looking at rising star Zoe Kazan. You have to let yourself get swept away by repeated quiet moments, extreme close ups of Zoe riding the subway, or sitting on a bed staring into space, lying in the bath, or cradling a new born baby.
Read Marcy’s review.
Review: The Exploding Girl originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 11:43:44.
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Jacques Audiard’s film A Prophet took nine awards at the 35th annual Cesar Awards in Paris, including Best Film, Actor, and Director. The film had already won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Cannes Festival, Best Foreign Language Film at the BAFTA awards, and is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards.
A Prophet is currently playing in theaters. Jurgen reviews the tough prison drama.
Review: A Prophet originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 10:16:31.
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The 60th International Berlin Film Festival came to a close on Sunday. The Jury, led by Werner Herzog, awarded the top prize, the Golden Bear, to Bal (Honey), the third part of Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu’s trilogy.
Roman Polanski received the Silver Bear for Best Director for The Ghost Writer (currently playing in theaters). Due to his legal troubles, Polanski was not able to receive the award in person. At the Auteurs Notebook, David Hudson has a complete round up of the winners.
The Golden Bear Goes To Honey originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 17:59:51.
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A year after going out of business, New Yorker Films is returning. indieWIRE reports that the company will be headed by former VP Jose Lopez and founder Dan Talbot. Known for its acclaimed catalog of 400 film films and the countless classic foreign films the distributor brought to the US, the new New Yorker will release six to eight films theatrically each year.
New Yorker Films Returns originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 13:41:16.
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We’re thrilled about the way the web is opening up new avenues of distribution for movies that aren’t getting much love at multiplexes across the country — but thanks to services like Netflix Watch Instantly, you can now stream these underappreciated films straight to your TV. We’ll occasionally point you to overlooked gems you may have missed and which are now, thanks to the wonders of the web, only a click away. Hooray for living in the future.
The Orphanage
This sophisticated and supremely creepy ghost story was Spain’s entry for the 2007 Academy Awards. The debut by Juan Antonio Bayona also stars the beautiful Belén Rueda and Geraldine Chaplin. Read Jürgen’s review and watch The Orphanage in HD on Netflix.
Troubled Water
We rooted for Eric Poppe’s riveting drama at the 2008 Hamptons Film Festival — where it promptly won the Golden Starfish and the Audience award, only to disappear. If you blinked, you might have missed the one-time screening at the Scandinavian House. Luckily, this tale of crime and redemption, starring the wonderful Trine Dyrholm, is now available online. Read Marcy’s review and watch Troubled Water on Netflix.
Priceless
If creepy and gripping don’t do it for you, maybe you’re in the mood for a glimmering French trifle. Priceless, starring Amelie’s Audrey Tautou, is a forgettable but enjoyable romance about lovers and gigolos set in the glitzy hotels of the Cote d’Azur. If you’re snowed in like us, this might be just the way to spend the day. Read Jürgen’s review of Priceless and watch it on Netflix.
More: Online Movies
Stream This! New on Netflix Watch Instantly: The Orphanage, Troubled Water, Priceless originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 12:38:23.
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Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, a tale about an impoverished teen (Jennifer Lawrence) searching for her meth-cooking father in the Ozarks, won both the grand jury prize for best drama film and the Waldo Salt screenwriting award at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival .
Based on the Daniel Woodrell’s novel, Winter’s Bone was Granik’s second film at Sundance. In 2005, she received a director’s award for Down to the Bone, the gritty drama about a drug addicted single mother that helped launched the career of Vera Farmiga.
Restrepo took the prize for best documentary. The film, directed by Sebastian Junger (author of The Perfect Storm) and Tim Hetherington, tells of a year in the life of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
In the audience awards, first-time director and actor Josh Radnor’s happythankyoumoreplease won the award for best drama. The film tells of six young New Yorkers dealing with life, love and friendship. Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), received the audience award for best documentary for this critical look at the crumbling U.S. educational system, Waiting for Superman.
This year’s jury included Morgan Spurlock, Ondi Timoner, Russell Banks, Jason Kliot, Karyn Kusama, Parker Posey, and Robert Yeoman.
The complete list of Sundance Winners.
Winter’s Bone Wins Top Prizes at Sundance originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 11:14:48.
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Acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog has been selected to head the jury for the 60th anniversary Berlinale. He’ll be joined by Oscar-winning actress Renee Zellweger, Italian director Francesca Comencini, and Chinese screen star Yu Nan. The Berlinale runs from February 11 through 21.
If you require an immediate fix of Werner, we recommend this dramatic reading of Curious George (no, it’s not really him.) His most recent film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans was one of our favorites of 2009.
In near simultaneous announcement, Tim Burton has been selected as jury president at the illustrious Cannes Film Festival. His much anticipated adaptation of Alice in Wonderland starring wife Helena Bonham Carter, Johnny Depp, and newcomer Mia Wasikowska, will be released March 5, 2010.
Big Jury News: Werner to head Berlin, Burton does Cannes originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 11:24:04.
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The Sundance Film Festival is currently underway. Chances are — like us — you’re not in Park City, Utah. The good news is that the festival is showcasing more and more films by both video on demand and streaming online.
As part of the “Direct from the Sundance Film Festival” initiative, three films that being are being screened at the fest are simultaneously available nationwide through Sundance Selects. The films are:
- Michael Winterbottom’s Shock Doctrine, based on the book by Naomi Klein, a documentary that seeks to explain the rise of “disaster capitalism.”
- Josh and Benny Safdie’s Daddy Long Legs, an autobiographical fairy tale and bittersweet comedy about the responsibilities of parenthood.
- Daniel Grou’s 7 Days, a dark and gritty thriller that centers on a successful surgeon whose world is torn apart by the murder of his eight-year-old daughter.
Online, YouTube is making a selection of this year’s fest available for download. Films such as Tze Chun’s Children of Invention and Linas Phillips Bass Ackwards can be rented for $3.99.
Check out IFC’s awesome cheat sheet for highlights of this year’s festival.
Experience Sundance From Home originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 14:08:12.
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The Academy has announced the nine films that comprise the foreign film short list 82nd Academy Awards. The list is led by Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, which received the Palme d’Or, a Golden Globe, Best Foreign Film by the New York Film Critics Online, and topped Jürgen’s list of Best Films of 2009.
Also in the running is Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, from France.
The Complete Short List:
Argentina: El Secreto de Sus Ojos
Australia: Samson & Delilah
Bulgaria: The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner
France: Un Prophete
Germany: The White Ribbon
Israel: Ajami
Kazakhstan: Kelin
The Netherlands: Winter in Wartime
Peru: The Milk of Sorrow
More: A list of past Academy Award winners in the Best Foreign Film category.
The Oscar Short List: Foreign Films originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 12:13:08.
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Steven Soderbergh’s obsessively detailed two-part biopic about the Argentine revolutionary is boldly ambitious, with a bravura performance by Benicio del Toro at its center. By focusing on two specific periods of Guevara’s life, Soderbergh Che manages to avoid all of the biopic’s cliched pitfalls and instead offers an epic combat adventure that is also a deconstruction of genre expectations, a study of guerrilla warfare, and a vivid portrait of a larger-than-life personality.
Supervised and approved by director Steven Soderbergh, the Criterion Collection release of the film — available in DVD and Blu-Ray — offers a bevy of special features, including the documentary Making “Che”, interviews with participants in and historians of the Cuban Revolution and Che’s Bolivian campaign, deleted scenes and more.
DVD Pick of the Week: Che originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 11:14:29.
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