Oscars 2016: Spotlight Surprises With Best Picture Win
A genuinely surprising Oscars wrapped with Tom McCarthy's Spotlight winning Best Picture over equally likely contenders The Revenant and The Big Short. Mad Max: Fury Road cleaned up the technical awards, which wasn't surprising, but Mark Rylance beating out Sylvester Stallone for Best Supporting Actor sure was. Despite five nominations, Star Wars: The Force Awakens didn't pick up a single award (but droids C-3PO,
Chatting With Day out of Days Writer/Director Zoe Cassavetes
In Day Out Of Days, starring Alexia Landeau and Melanie Griffith, writer/director Zoe Cassavetes follows the struggles of a forty-year-old actress trying to stay relevant in Hollywood. We talk to Cassavetes about making her second feature film, crowd-funding and what she learned from her trailblazer parents, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.
I was reading that you chose to go down the crowd-funding route to finance the film so you could cast your friend and co-writer,
Know Your Oscar Nominees: Live Action, Animated & Documentary Short Films
We've covered a slew of the either often overlooked or misunderstood nominated categories for this year's Oscars. Earlier today we published our technical guide to visual effects, and in the past week or so we've looked at editing, costume design, and sound mixing and editing. Now we're going to shift our focus a bit and look at the short film category; live action, animated and documentary.
Berlinale 2016: A Recap
With Meryl Streep presiding over the festival’s international jury, the 66th Berlinale handed out awards yesterday and drew to a close. The Golden Bear went to Fuocoammare, or Fire at Sea, a tragic and topical Italian-French co-production from the director Gianfranco Rosi. Taking place on the Sicilian island Lampedusa, the documentary thoughtfully and powerfully examines the ongoing refugee crisis, through the lens of a 12-year-old Italian boy,
Judd Apatow Brings the Love to Netflix
The warts and all view of relationships we know and love from Judd Apatow’s comedies is set to become bingeable with today’s premiere of his Netflix series Love. Love follows dorky nice guy Gus (Paul Rust) and freewheeling tough girl Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) as they embark on a relationship. The half hour comedy series was created, written and executive produced by Apatow, Rust and Lesley Arfin. It was originally conceived as a film by husband and wife team Rust and Arfin (who was a writer on the Apatow-produced Girls) and Apatow helped them develop it into a TV rom-com about a slow-burning romance.
The Wild Hail, Caesar! Press Conference at the 66th Berlinale Film Festival
An unwitting, kidnapped communist. A gay (or so implied) tap dancing undercover agent. Very angry rival twin gossip columnists. These are George Clooney, Channing Tatum, and Tilda Swinton in Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest, Hail Caesar!, which doesn’t have quite the gravitas of, say, No Country For Old Men, or even A Serious Man, but more than makes up for that in chuckles,
New Teaser Hints at Opening Shot of Star Wars: Episode VIII
Principal photography officially began on Star Wars: Episode VIII at Pinewood Studios in London on February 15, 2016. The teaser announcing this news had one very interesting reveal—either this could be one of the opening shots of Episode VIII, or, writer/director Rian Johnson was on set for the very final shot of The Force Awakens. Considering The Force Awakens was very much J.J.
Talking to Writer-Director Tobias Lindholm About his Oscar-Nominated A War
The third big-screen collaboration between Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm and actor Pilou Asbaek, A War follows a company commander through the horrors of Afghanistan and back to Denmark, where he's put on trial for alleged war crimes. The movie, an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, has a semi-improvisational style and features mostly nonprofessional performers. Lindholm's two previous movies, R and A Hijacking,
Warner Bros. Names Ryan Coogler First Creative Talent Ambassador
Ryan Coogler's young career continues to move in interesting directions. The writer-director burst onto the scene in 2013 with Fruitvale Station, a Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award winner at Sundance. This past year, he co-wrote and directed Creed, again teaming up with Fruitvale star Michael B. Jordan as the titular son of Apollo Creed, who goes on to become a protegé of Rocky Balboa.
How Deadpool’s Tight Budget Helped Create a New Kind of Marvel Film
To understand how we ended up with the wisecracking, dirty-talking, unapologetically murderous Deadpool we already know and love- thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign- we have to go back to the origin story of this origin story.
The project had been kicking around at Fox for more than a decade when in July, 2014, two minutes of test footage was leaked on the web, portraying a very different kind of superhero.
Boba Fett! Code Names! The Rogue One Rumor Mill is Alive & Well
What you already know about Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the next addition in Disney's Star Wars canon, is probably pretty limited. You know it's the first film in Disney's upcoming release schedule that's not a part of the Skywalker saga trilogy, to which The Force Awakens was the first, and you know it's about the band of rebels who stole the plans for the Death Star, which were eventually uploaded to R2D2 and set the events of the very first
Watch the new Batman v Superman International Trailer
With the premiere date drawing ever closer (March 25, folks), Warner Bros. Pictures has been releasing a slew of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice trailers and TV spots. The latest is a new international trailer, which keeps the dialogue to a minimum and the mayhem at full throttle.
By now you know that the premise of Batman v Superman is right there in the title; Gotham City's winged vigilante (Ben Affleck) takes on Metropolis's alien savior (Henry Cavill) in a battle for the ages.
Watch This Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Featurette
"The job we have to do is to make it seem natural and kind have to ignore your own sense of wonder watching it," says actress Katherine Waterston about her work in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The highly secretive and hugely exciting project is the first screenplay penned by J.K. Rowling herself, and will transport Harry Potter fans back into the wizarding world, only one that takes place an ocean away from Hogwart's,
Sundance 2016: Review Roundup, Part IV
Welcome back. You’ve already read parts I, II and III of our Sundance film review roundup.
Let's begin with Whit Stillman's Jane Austen adaptation, Love & Friendship. While you might be thinking, another Austen adaptation, keep in mind Stillman is the man who brought you Metropolitan and Last Days of Disco, and is uniquely suited to bring out Austen's biting humor,
Watch The Birth of a Nation‘s Nate Parker’s Potent Short Film
This is the power of the Sundance Film Festival, it can turn a talented artist like Nate Parker into a sensation over night. As the undisputed King of Sundance this year with The Birth of a Nation, a film Parker wrote, directed, and starred in—after nurturing the project for 7 years and using $100,000 of his own money to find financing—the man has earned this moment. And as it happens when a filmmaker suddenly becomes an object of fascination,
Sundance 2016: Nate Parker’s Huge Night & More
We wrote yesterday about the rapturous response to Nate Parker’s Sundance-shaking Nat Turner biopic, The Birth of a Nation. Today, reports are flooding in that the whopping, festival record-setting $17.5 million offer the film got from Fox Searchlight was actually less than what Netflix was willing to part with.
THR reports that writer, director and star Parker, who had put $100,000 of his own money into the film to fly around the country in an attempt to find financiers (he eventually had a dozen investor groups,
Sundance 2016: A Roundup of Reviews, Part II
Let’s take a look at what the critics are saying about some of the films that have premiered at Sundance.
Nate Parker and Tony Espinosa in 'The Birth of a Nation.' Photo by Elliot Davis. Courtesy Sundance Film Festival.
Earlier today, we took a look at Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation,
Sundance 2016: Fox Searchlight Nabs Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation
Nate Parker, writer, director, and star of The Birth of a Nation's seven year commitment to his labor of love has paid off in a distribution deal with Fox Searchlight Pictures, The Wrap reports. Parker's epic is currently the talk of Sundance. The Hollywood Reporter Rebecca Ford writes that Parker’s film earned a rapturous standing ovation at its' premiere in Eccles theater in Park City,
Sundance 2016: A Film Review Roundup
Earlier we looked at some of the films that have premiered at Sundance that have found homes in a variety of studios, from IFC to Amazon. Now let's take a look at some of the films reviews coming out of the festival this year, perhaps gleaning what will be next on the bidding block.
Vulture's Bilge Ebiri has written that Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea,
Sundance 2016: Complete Unknown, Morris From America & More are Sold
As the first major film festival of the year, and arguably one of the most important on the ever expanding festival circuit, the Sundance Film Festival is something of a taste maker. Studios small and large vie for the distribution rights of a number of films, while unknown talents can, in a single Park City night, become hot commodities. Here's a look at the news coming out of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
Before we get into what films have sold thus far,
