One can’t ignore the seriousness of Australia’s elegantly shot, brutal dramas. Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown Murders is based on the horrifying crimes discovered in Snowtown, Australia in 1999, where police found dismembered bodies rotting in barrels. “One hell of a movie,” writes critic Jordan Hoffman, “particularly since the director and all the key leads are first timers.”
Part of IFC Films Midnight Series, Snowtown Murders opens in theaters today. Read Jordan’s review.
Revew: Snowtown Murders originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Friday, March 2nd, 2012 at 08:23:03.
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The highest grossing film ever to come out of New Zealand, actor/writer/director Taika Waititi’s (Eagle vs Shark) largely autobiographical Boy is by turns charming, painful, whimsical, and laugh-out-loud funny. Filmed in the house where Waititi was raised on the east coast of New Zealand, Boy is a coming of age portrait set in the haunted paradise that is childhood, within the lush (also haunted) paradise of coastal New Zealand.
Boy opens in limited release today. Jessica West reviews.
Review: Boy originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Friday, March 2nd, 2012 at 08:14:18.
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Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation won the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film at last night’s 84th Academy Awards. The Iranian drama beat out films from Belgium, Canada, Poland, and Israel, including In Darkness and Bullhead, which we also reviewed.
And in case you hadn’t heart, The Artist won five major awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Jean Dujardin. The Daily Mubi has the complete list of winners.
Read Jordan Hoffman’s review of A Separation, which he called “juicy, with plenty of high drama mixed in with the philosophical waxing on the lucidity of truth.”
Iranian A Separation Wins Foreign Film Oscar originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Monday, February 27th, 2012 at 05:51:21.
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Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World) is conducting seances at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in an attempt to raise the spirits of lost silent films — and streaming the results on the web.
“Over eighty percent of silent films are lost. I’ve always considered a lost film as a narrative with no known final resting place — doomed to wander the landscape of film history, sad, miserable, and unable to project itself to the people who might love it…. This absence haunts me. I need to see these films. It’s eventually occurred to me that the best way to see them would to make contact with their miserable spirits and invite them to possess me. And with actors quite willing to participate in some para-normal cinematic experiments.”
And indeed, Maddin has found a terrific range collaborators for the project, called Spiritismes: Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, Géraldine Chaplin, and Jeanne de France are among the actors who will try to breathe new life in to films by Jean Vigo, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, and Ed Wood. Says Maddin:
“Every day my actors will plunge themselves deep into a trance, and open themselves up to possession by the unhappy spirit of a lost film. And every day my actors will act out the long forgotten choreographies that once lived so luminously on the big screen for thousands, maybe millions of viewers.”
Best of all: Spiritismes is streaming live on the Internet. More from Kim Morgan.
Guy Maddin Is Conjuring the Spirits of Lost Movies in Paris originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Friday, February 24th, 2012 at 05:36:57.
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Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Academy Awards, the Israeli film Footnote tell the story of of a rivalry between a father and son, Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik, eccentric professors, who have dedicated their lives to their work in Talmudic Studies.
Writes Jordan Hoffman: “Footnote is a refreshing film if for no other reason than it ought to remind people that there are Israeli stereotypes to snicker at that have nothing to do with oppressing Palestinians.”
Footnote opens in theaters March 9, 2010. Read our review.
Review: Footnote originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012 at 09:25:01.
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Tom Tykwer’s 1998 Run Lola Run will be turned into an opera, The Local reports. A stage version of the breathless metaphysical puzzler, a classic of world cinema starring Franka Potente and Moritz Bleibtreu, will premiere at the Regensburg Theater next year. Ludger Vollmer, who has already adapted Fatih Akin’s Head-On as opera, will write the music. No word on whether the original’s throbbing techno score will make it into any of the arias.
Run Lola Run: The Opera originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Saturday, February 18th, 2012 at 07:15:25.
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I am absolutely of the belief that there are a dearth of quality roles for women actors and that an embarrassingly low percentage of films are produced with female characters as anything other than girlfriends, damsels or whores. This does not mean, however, that there are not opportunities to tell complex stories about that other confusing topic: masculinity. Bullhead, Oscar-nominated Belgian film written and directed by Michaël R. Roskam, does all it can to hit manhood directly where it lives.
Read Jordan’s review of Bullhead.
Review: Bullhead originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Saturday, February 18th, 2012 at 07:21:14.
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Flavorwire rounds up the best tumblr blogs dedicated to the movies, including some of our favorites: the Criterion Collection, Awesome People Hanging Out Together, the mesmerizing If We Don’t, Remember Me, and the must-follow Old Hollywood.
We’d add Silent Films, the Clara Bow archive, and Jürgen’s own Tulpendiebe to that list, three blogs dedicated to, you’ve guessed it, the stars and films of silent cinema.
Let us know about your favorite movie tumblrs in the comments!
The Best Movie Tumblrs originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Monday, February 13th, 2012 at 05:00:55.
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Nominated for Best Foreign Film, Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness tells the story of a group of Jews who survived the Holocaust by spending 14 months living in sewers beneath the city of Lvov.
In his less than laudatory review, Jordan Hoffman writes: “Only hardest of hearts could ever watch a movie like In Darkness and not be moved.” He vastly prefers the Academy Award nominated film The Separation out of Iran.
In Darkness opened in theaters this week. Read Jordan’s review.
Review: In Darkness originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Saturday, February 11th, 2012 at 10:19:45.
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David McKenzie’s dystopian love story Perfect Sense demands a lot from its audience. Accept the film’s premise and suspend your disbelief: the world is coming to an end and humans will lose their senses, one sense at time. In the midst of this crisis, a pair of tormented pair of lovers find each other and experience true love for the first time.
This would almost be preposterous except for the lovers, played with smoldering intensity by Eva Green and Ewan McGregor. Perfect Sense is currently playing in both theaters and on VOD. Read Marcy’s review.
Review: Perfect Sense originally appeared on About.com World / Independent Film on Thursday, February 9th, 2012 at 06:24:12.
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