In the first scene of Good Time, the latest from directors Josh and Benny Safdie, Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson) barges into an office where a social worker is interviewing his brother Nick (Benny Safdie), who has a mental disability and impaired hearing. From there, the two brothers are off to the races, as Benjamin Mercer writes at Reverse Shot:Almost immediately after, Connie is hauling Nick along with him on an ill-conceived robbery of a bank branch in Flushing, Queens. “Do you think I could have done that without you standing next to me, being strong?” Connie reassures Nick right after the job—and just before a paint bomb goes off in their bag of stolen cash, filling the cab they’re in with red vapor and sending it off the road. The accident, an eye-poppingly entropic moment staged by the Safdies and captured as if on the fly by cinematographer Sean Price Williams,...
- 8/24/2017
- MUBI
Hollywood has been attempting to make sense of computers and their effect on the world for decades. Most of the time, these films entail cartoonish portrayals of tech nerds, making them all out to be skateboard-riding, trenchcoat-wearing hackers who stare into the abyss of their laptop screens (aka "cyberspace") as they look to fight the powers that be. Also, there's usually techno music involved.
But, even in 2013, with our feet now firmly planted in the era of Web 2.0, Hollywood still hasn't learned its lesson. Take, for example, "The Fifth Estate," which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. The film tells the true story of Wikileaks -- an organization that publishes classified material from anonymous sources -- and its founder, Julian Assange.
The movie earnestly attempts to tackle the current state of journalism. Is it a watered-down tool used to spout opinion rather than fact? Is it an...
But, even in 2013, with our feet now firmly planted in the era of Web 2.0, Hollywood still hasn't learned its lesson. Take, for example, "The Fifth Estate," which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. The film tells the true story of Wikileaks -- an organization that publishes classified material from anonymous sources -- and its founder, Julian Assange.
The movie earnestly attempts to tackle the current state of journalism. Is it a watered-down tool used to spout opinion rather than fact? Is it an...
- 9/7/2013
- by Alex Suskind
- Moviefone
One of your Once Upon a Time favorites has a very different part coming to a popular NBC series. The ABC fantasy drama’s August/ Pinocchio has signed on for a guest spot on Law & Order: Svu. This means congratulations are in order for the actor, Mr. Eion Bailey.
Frank Patterson is the name of Bailey’s Svu character, reported a THR exclusive. Patterson is an Iraq war vet, unfortunately suffering from Ptsd. When a sexual assault occurs at a night club, he becomes the key witness. Bailey’s episode is number 21 for the series and is scheduled to air this April.
The water cooler buzz has been heavy about Bailey’s Once Upon a Time character, given that he became Pinocchio for the first time just recently. What did you think about that little happenstance?
Of course Once does a solid job of mixing things up and changing your favorite child hood tales.
Frank Patterson is the name of Bailey’s Svu character, reported a THR exclusive. Patterson is an Iraq war vet, unfortunately suffering from Ptsd. When a sexual assault occurs at a night club, he becomes the key witness. Bailey’s episode is number 21 for the series and is scheduled to air this April.
The water cooler buzz has been heavy about Bailey’s Once Upon a Time character, given that he became Pinocchio for the first time just recently. What did you think about that little happenstance?
Of course Once does a solid job of mixing things up and changing your favorite child hood tales.
- 3/30/2013
- by Sasha Nova
- Boomtron
The journey of Annie Walker (Piper Perabo) has always been a love story. From the very beginning, we knew that Annie was a girl who followed her heart to the ends of the earth and wherever it led, she would follow. It began when Annie joined the CIA, in search of a man she fell in love with on holiday — a man who disappeared so easily that she figured out that he had to be a spy. Yet Annie’s search for the elusive love of her life, Ben Mercer (Eoin Bailey), was just the beginning. Slipping in and out of her life like a ghost, Ben was the man who gave Annie a taste for adventure and opened the door to international espionage; he introduced her to a world that she had always craved and gave her the courage to embrace it.
Then just as soon as she stepped...
Then just as soon as she stepped...
- 10/30/2012
- by Tiffany Vogt
- The TV Addict
From TorontoFilm.Net, comes a new poster supporting the next season of USA Network's Toronto-lensed spy-action TV series "Covert Affairs", from the producers of "The Bourne" feature film trilogy.
"...CIA trainee, 'Annie Walker' (Piper Perabo), is mysteriously sent out into the field, to capture her ex-boyfriend, with 'Auggie Anderson' (Gorham), a blind officer, acting as the new guide in her new life..."
Other cast characters include 'Conrad Sheehan III' (Eric Lively), a senior CIA officer and 'womanizer' who enjoys a spicy rapport with Annie, 'Jai Wilcox' (Sendhil Ramamurthy), a CIA officer, 'Danielle' (Anne Dudek), Annie's older sister, unaware of Annie's real career, 'Ben Mercer' (Eion Bailey), Annie's ex-boyfriend, targeted by the CIA and 'Arthur Campbell' (Peter Gallagher), the CIA director of 'Clandestine Services'.
Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "Covert Affairs"...
"...CIA trainee, 'Annie Walker' (Piper Perabo), is mysteriously sent out into the field, to capture her ex-boyfriend, with 'Auggie Anderson' (Gorham), a blind officer, acting as the new guide in her new life..."
Other cast characters include 'Conrad Sheehan III' (Eric Lively), a senior CIA officer and 'womanizer' who enjoys a spicy rapport with Annie, 'Jai Wilcox' (Sendhil Ramamurthy), a CIA officer, 'Danielle' (Anne Dudek), Annie's older sister, unaware of Annie's real career, 'Ben Mercer' (Eion Bailey), Annie's ex-boyfriend, targeted by the CIA and 'Arthur Campbell' (Peter Gallagher), the CIA director of 'Clandestine Services'.
Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "Covert Affairs"...
- 6/2/2012
- by Michael Stevens
- SneakPeek
Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, slated to open in mid-December, will be the first major feature to be screened at 48 frames per second. Both Mike Bracken (Movies.com) and Carolyn Giardina (Hollywood Reporter) wonder just how many theaters will be able to handle the High Frame Rate Jackson and James Cameron have been promoting.
In other news. Senses of Cinema is back online with a new look.
Books. Ada Calhoun finds that Frank Langella's new memoir, Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women as I Knew Them, "paints Hollywood and Broadway as teeming with vulgar, neurotic and irresistible company, and Langella as relentlessly affable in the face of nonstop groping by famous people in far-flung locations. He ambles into history and falls into notable beds like some kind of sexy Forrest Gump or beefcake Zelig."
Reviewing Claude Lanzmann's memoir The Patagonian Hare for the New Republic,...
In other news. Senses of Cinema is back online with a new look.
Books. Ada Calhoun finds that Frank Langella's new memoir, Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women as I Knew Them, "paints Hollywood and Broadway as teeming with vulgar, neurotic and irresistible company, and Langella as relentlessly affable in the face of nonstop groping by famous people in far-flung locations. He ambles into history and falls into notable beds like some kind of sexy Forrest Gump or beefcake Zelig."
Reviewing Claude Lanzmann's memoir The Patagonian Hare for the New Republic,...
- 4/24/2012
- MUBI
"In 1962 Pier Paolo Pasolini received a suspended sentence for his allegedly blasphemous contribution to the portmanteau film Rogopag, a brilliant sketch satirizing biblical movies," writes Philip French in his brief review of the new Masters of Cinema release of The Gospel According to St Matthew in today's Observer. "Two years later the gay, Marxist atheist showed the world how a life of Christ should be made, and it is a magnificent achievement, far superior to Scorsese's or Gibson's films."
David Jenkins in Little White Lies: "Essentially a 'straight' retelling of the life of Christ (who is played with fervent intensity by Enrique Irazoqui), which, on its surface, seldom editorializes or strays towards controversy, the film was fully embraced by the religious community to the extent that a colorized version was made to capitalize on the Bible belt buck. General familiarity of with the text makes this one of Pasolini's most easily approachable films,...
David Jenkins in Little White Lies: "Essentially a 'straight' retelling of the life of Christ (who is played with fervent intensity by Enrique Irazoqui), which, on its surface, seldom editorializes or strays towards controversy, the film was fully embraced by the religious community to the extent that a colorized version was made to capitalize on the Bible belt buck. General familiarity of with the text makes this one of Pasolini's most easily approachable films,...
- 4/8/2012
- MUBI
There'll be a party following the single screening of Bad Fever this evening at the Downtown Independent Theater in Los Angeles. Nick Schager, originally for the Voice, now in the La Weekly: "Writer-director Dustin Guy Defa's stark indie trains its character-study gaze on Eddie (Kentucker Audley), a socially dysfunctional 20-something who — while living at home with his dour mom (Annette Wright), hanging out in empty diners and entertaining stand-up comedy dreams by recording anecdotes on cassette — strikes up a random romance with Irene (Eleonore Hendricks), who lives in an abandoned school and has a fondness for kinky videotaping. Eddie and Irene are kindred misfits in search of some direction and contentment, and if Defa's aesthetics are mundane, his leads' performances are not, especially in the case of Audley, whose darting eyes and hushed, stuttering speech express confused longing with transfixing, train-wreck magnetism."
The New Yorker's Richard Brody: "Defa exerts...
The New Yorker's Richard Brody: "Defa exerts...
- 4/2/2012
- MUBI
Two controversies greet a documentary's opening this weekend. Salon is best on the one you've probably heard about; Slate uncovers another you likely haven't. Let's start with Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "With its unerring instinct for being on the wrong side of every major social and aesthetic issue, the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board has refused to budge off its R rating for Bully, an earnest and moving documentary made for and about tormented preteens and teenagers." And "what's really perverse, of course — not to mention cruel and repellent — is a ratings decision that ensures that the kids who most need the succor that Bully has to offer are now the least likely to see it." Further in:
Without doubt, the MPAA has handed Bully director Lee Hirsch and Harvey Weinstein, whose company is releasing the film, a formidable marketing weapon and a tremendous amount of free publicity…. Mind you,...
Without doubt, the MPAA has handed Bully director Lee Hirsch and Harvey Weinstein, whose company is releasing the film, a formidable marketing weapon and a tremendous amount of free publicity…. Mind you,...
- 3/30/2012
- MUBI
You Are Not I
"Showcasing a free-form approach to narrative that you'll wish wasn't all but extinct in American independent cinema," writes Benjamin Mercer in the L, "Sara Driver's long-unavailable (and too small) body of work constitutes a minor revelation. In her 1981 debut, You Are Not I — recently rediscovered and refurbished, providing the impetus for Anthology's retrospective — Driver laid the groundwork for her eerily dissonant overlay of enchantment, terror, and tedium: Adapting a Paul Bowles story with longtime collaborator (and partner) Jim Jarmusch, who also shot the film on black-and-white 16mm, You Are Not I is an outer-boundary study in the mind's capacity to project its disturbance." Suzanne Fletcher plays Ethel, "who has somehow escaped from a nearby mental hospital in the flaming aftermath of a several-car pileup. She travels through a derelict zone to her sister's house, where the 'inconvenient' Ethel winds up in an unnervingly clenched domestic showdown.
"Showcasing a free-form approach to narrative that you'll wish wasn't all but extinct in American independent cinema," writes Benjamin Mercer in the L, "Sara Driver's long-unavailable (and too small) body of work constitutes a minor revelation. In her 1981 debut, You Are Not I — recently rediscovered and refurbished, providing the impetus for Anthology's retrospective — Driver laid the groundwork for her eerily dissonant overlay of enchantment, terror, and tedium: Adapting a Paul Bowles story with longtime collaborator (and partner) Jim Jarmusch, who also shot the film on black-and-white 16mm, You Are Not I is an outer-boundary study in the mind's capacity to project its disturbance." Suzanne Fletcher plays Ethel, "who has somehow escaped from a nearby mental hospital in the flaming aftermath of a several-car pileup. She travels through a derelict zone to her sister's house, where the 'inconvenient' Ethel winds up in an unnervingly clenched domestic showdown.
- 3/24/2012
- MUBI
Konstantin Nikolaevič Leont'ev
"Radical Emma Goldman famously demanded 'fun' as a precondition of revolution (the nerve!), and Bl associate editor Andrew Grossman agrees," writes editor Gary Morris, introducing the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal. "Leading off the Articles section, he collates the 'polka tremblante' (aka Bohemian polka) with strolls through Byzantine ascetic philosopher Leontev, Nosferatu, and Carl Sandburg in a magical riff. Equally dazzling is Dave Saunders's paean to the Connectitrons via Hugo, The Big Clock, and Jeanne La Pucelle (Parts 1 and 2)."
Also in Issue 75: "Every trip must end, and our 'empty guest room' is unusually full this time. Jack Stevenson, who knows all things underground, offers thoughtful tributes to two talents associated with, among other things, the Kuchars: Marion Eaton, star of Thundercrack!, and Bob Cowan, who appeared in various Kuchar efforts. These are the kinds of rare histories that would not be written but for Jack,...
"Radical Emma Goldman famously demanded 'fun' as a precondition of revolution (the nerve!), and Bl associate editor Andrew Grossman agrees," writes editor Gary Morris, introducing the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal. "Leading off the Articles section, he collates the 'polka tremblante' (aka Bohemian polka) with strolls through Byzantine ascetic philosopher Leontev, Nosferatu, and Carl Sandburg in a magical riff. Equally dazzling is Dave Saunders's paean to the Connectitrons via Hugo, The Big Clock, and Jeanne La Pucelle (Parts 1 and 2)."
Also in Issue 75: "Every trip must end, and our 'empty guest room' is unusually full this time. Jack Stevenson, who knows all things underground, offers thoughtful tributes to two talents associated with, among other things, the Kuchars: Marion Eaton, star of Thundercrack!, and Bob Cowan, who appeared in various Kuchar efforts. These are the kinds of rare histories that would not be written but for Jack,...
- 2/15/2012
- MUBI
If the Costa Concordia, which ran aground off the west coast of Italy last night, looks familiar to you, it's likely that it's because it's the cruise ship that's the setting for the first movement of Jean-Luc Godard's Film socialisme ("It's less a tourist cruise than an international summit of bastards," wrote David Phelps in June). The accident, which cost the lives of three people and injured many more (and around 40 of the 4000 passengers are still missing), occurred on the same evening that a rogue vigilante group going by the name of Standard and Poor's downgraded the credit ratings of nine eurozone countries.
Which brings us to our first set of DVDs. A Forum topic on Artificial Eye's release of its Theo Angelopoulos Collection has been rumbling along for half a year now and, with the third volume coming out next month, David Jenkins has a good long...
Which brings us to our first set of DVDs. A Forum topic on Artificial Eye's release of its Theo Angelopoulos Collection has been rumbling along for half a year now and, with the third volume coming out next month, David Jenkins has a good long...
- 1/14/2012
- MUBI
"Steven Spielberg's War Horse, a deliberate throwback to a long-dormant style of unabashedly sentimental Hollywood filmmaking, is so completely what you would expect it to be that it comes back around and transcends its own clichés," suggests Slate's Dana Stevens. "In this 146-minute Wwi epic, there are plucky tenant farmers and sneering, oppressive landlords. There are idealistic youths whose character is tested by the crucible of war. There is, my right hand to God, a comic-relief goose. Above all, there are horses, those animals whose kinetic grace seems intimately bound up with the history of cinema, from Eadweard Muybridge's racehorse photographs to John Ford's equine-crisscrossed landscapes. If you don't thrill to the site of a horse galloping across a green meadow with a beautiful young rider on its back — if you believe (wrongly) that National Velvet is just a sappy kids' movie — then you may not be susceptible...
- 12/23/2011
- MUBI
Bulle Ogier and Jacques Rivette on the set of L'Amour fou
Photo by Pierre Zucca
In the last issue of Senses of Cinema, Daniel Fairfax reviewed Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith's Jacques Rivette, and now, for Issue 61, Mary Wiles has allowed the editors to choose a chapter from her forthcoming Jacques Rivette. Rolando Caputo's decided to go with the one on L'amour fou (1969) for a number of reasons, but primarily because "the film seems the point of historical conjunction between the end of one wave and the coming of a second wave of filmmakers that washed up in its undertow. At a stretch, one can see the shadow of this film on the cinema of Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat, Philippe Garrel and others. L'amour fou is a great and wondrous film." And he's running Rivette's 1950 essay "We Are Not Innocent Anymore" as well.
Also in this issue: Marko Bauer,...
Photo by Pierre Zucca
In the last issue of Senses of Cinema, Daniel Fairfax reviewed Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith's Jacques Rivette, and now, for Issue 61, Mary Wiles has allowed the editors to choose a chapter from her forthcoming Jacques Rivette. Rolando Caputo's decided to go with the one on L'amour fou (1969) for a number of reasons, but primarily because "the film seems the point of historical conjunction between the end of one wave and the coming of a second wave of filmmakers that washed up in its undertow. At a stretch, one can see the shadow of this film on the cinema of Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat, Philippe Garrel and others. L'amour fou is a great and wondrous film." And he's running Rivette's 1950 essay "We Are Not Innocent Anymore" as well.
Also in this issue: Marko Bauer,...
- 12/21/2011
- MUBI
"The German documentary Under Control depicts a world where every precaution requires a set of additional precautions," writes Benjamin Mercer in the L. "In detailing the impossibly elaborate (but still not infallible) safety measures put in place in the shadow of Germany and Austria's atomic cooling towers — and in its slow pans of the plants' mechanical daily operations — Volker Sattel's superlative film highlights the permanent lockdown at several nuclear colonies."
"There's something truly terrifying about elaborate systems of precaution," writes Eric Hynes in Time Out New York. "Danger lurks in the shadows of safety…. In lieu of a traditional narrative arc and talking-head explication — there are, in fact, few words spoken throughout the film — Sattel constructs a tone poem via impeccably composed pictures that toe the line between beauty and banality, revelation and tedium."
Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant: "The film's mechanical dreaminess recalls the work of unsubtle, sci-fi...
"There's something truly terrifying about elaborate systems of precaution," writes Eric Hynes in Time Out New York. "Danger lurks in the shadows of safety…. In lieu of a traditional narrative arc and talking-head explication — there are, in fact, few words spoken throughout the film — Sattel constructs a tone poem via impeccably composed pictures that toe the line between beauty and banality, revelation and tedium."
Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant: "The film's mechanical dreaminess recalls the work of unsubtle, sci-fi...
- 12/3/2011
- MUBI
"Roland Emmerich's Anonymous is a well-polished cowpat that will confuse and bore those who know nothing about Shakespeare and incense those who know almost anything," declares David Edelstein in New York. The film begins with Derek Jacobi announcing on a contemporary Broadway stage that the plays we attribute to Shakespeare are, in fact, the work of "Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who could not, by virtue of his rank, have anything to do with the theater and so handed over his masterworks — many of which were not performed until well after his death — to a boobish actor named Will Shakespeare, who incidentally was the one who stabbed Christopher Marlowe in the eye. Less improbably, De Vere screwed Queen Elizabeth, as well as (accidentally) his own mum…. Apart from its ineptitude, Anonymous is peculiarly beside the point. Shakespeare's succession of masterpieces, near masterpieces, and thrilling misses is a...
- 10/27/2011
- MUBI
"The Skin I Live In is Almodóvar's most formally complex, bravura film since All About My Mother (1999)," argues Amy Taubin in Artforum. "It effortlessly synthesizes the mad-scientist horror flick; a contemporary resetting of a nineteenth-century grand opera narrative (motored by the desire for revenge and filled with dark family secrets); and the most perverse strain of the Hollywood 'Woman's Picture,' where the heroines are wrongly imprisoned in insane asylums or hospitals and treated as sadistically as lab rats. That it is a disturbing film goes without saying, but its affect is strikingly narcotic throughout, its moments of anguish tempered by the Carnivalesque…. The Skin I Live In is an exhilarating treatise on identity in which the self transcends the fragile, sullied flesh, and, as always in Almodóvar, the law of desire trumps sexual difference."
Karina Longworth in the Voice: "A postmodern homage to Hitchcock that raises the Master of...
Karina Longworth in the Voice: "A postmodern homage to Hitchcock that raises the Master of...
- 10/15/2011
- MUBI
At the top of its roundup of all things Farocki, Alt Screen notes that MoMA will be hosting An Evening with Harun Farocki tonight in conjunction with the exhibition Harun Farocki: Images of War (at a Distance), on view through January 2. Farocki will then be at Anthology Film Archives tomorrow night for the launch of their retrospective, running through October 10.
Ben Rivers will be at the Harvard Film Archive this evening for a double bill: Slow Action (2010) and Sack Barrow (2011). His latest, Two Years at Sea, premiered in Venice, and Neil Young wrote: "This Is My Land (2006) was an intimate portrait of Jake Williams and his hermit-like existence in the middle of Aberdeenshire's forests, and Two Years at Sea, Rivers's first feature-length work, is a 90-minute variation on similar themes, with only one line of audible dialogue ('chesty cough,' mumbles Jake, examining a bottle of expectorant.) A hoarder of old photographs,...
Ben Rivers will be at the Harvard Film Archive this evening for a double bill: Slow Action (2010) and Sack Barrow (2011). His latest, Two Years at Sea, premiered in Venice, and Neil Young wrote: "This Is My Land (2006) was an intimate portrait of Jake Williams and his hermit-like existence in the middle of Aberdeenshire's forests, and Two Years at Sea, Rivers's first feature-length work, is a 90-minute variation on similar themes, with only one line of audible dialogue ('chesty cough,' mumbles Jake, examining a bottle of expectorant.) A hoarder of old photographs,...
- 10/3/2011
- MUBI
"Standing outside his small-town Ohio home, his wife and child busy preparing breakfast inside, Curtis Laforche (Michael Shannon) looks up at the ominous slate-gray sky in the first scene of Take Shelter," begins Melissa Anderson in the Voice. "The clouds open, raining down oily piss-colored droplets. It's end-of-days weather, a phenomenon that only Curtis seems to witness, and the first of many private, impressively CGI'd apocalyptic visions to come. Like Carol White, the central, unglued character of Todd Haynes's Safe (1995) who is 'allergic to the 20th century,' blue-collar worker Curtis is haunted by one of the looming terrors of the 21st: financial ruin. This unarticulated fear triggers Curtis's mental illness, and despite a few missteps, Take Shelter powerfully lays bare our national anxiety disorder — a pervasive dread that Curtis can define only as 'something that's not right.'"
"Convinced the end is coming," writes James Rocchi at the Playlist,...
"Convinced the end is coming," writes James Rocchi at the Playlist,...
- 9/30/2011
- MUBI
Michael Atkinson in the Voice on My Joy: "Imagine the early, hellaciously bleak work of Cormac McCarthy transposed to the corrupt outlands of modern Russia and/or Ukraine and composed with a steely psychopath's disregard for cohesion, and you have something like Sergei Loznitsa's debut feature, a two-hour-plus decathlon of evil cross-purposes and runaway iniquity. A documentarian by trade, Loznitsa trusts his camera and distrusts dialogue, just as does his dire landscape's assortment of feral mercenaries, whores, scroungers, and cutthroats."
"After eluding the authorities, à la Stalker, young truck driver Viktor Nemets chooses to head down a forbidden road and embarks on an episodic journey that creeps to the edge of the surreal and supernatural without going over the line." Scott Tobias at the Av Club: "The driver encounters characters who recall troubling incidents in Russia's past and present, including various hitchhikers and vagabonds, as well as an underage prostitute and hostile soldiers.
"After eluding the authorities, à la Stalker, young truck driver Viktor Nemets chooses to head down a forbidden road and embarks on an episodic journey that creeps to the edge of the surreal and supernatural without going over the line." Scott Tobias at the Av Club: "The driver encounters characters who recall troubling incidents in Russia's past and present, including various hitchhikers and vagabonds, as well as an underage prostitute and hostile soldiers.
- 9/30/2011
- MUBI
Taylor Lautner’s “Abduction” has taken a critical beating. It’s only been rated as high as 3% on Rotten Tomatoes and audiences have also turned away from it, giving it a 55% rotten rating. Let’s dive right in and see what everyone hates about it: “[A] blockhead espionage thriller…[N]one of [the action] has anything to do with abduction.”– Benjamin Mercer, The Village Voice “Lautner’s fan base–which I would presume to be young and female and interested in viewing his hairless and monumental chest–isn’t super-likely to read reviews before rushing out to see the movie. On the other hand, if you’re here reading this, the likelihood that you’re actually going to pay...
- 9/27/2011
- by monique
- ShockYa
"I imagine those who had written off Cam Archer as yet another Gus Van Sant acolyte after seeing his debut, Wild Tigers I Have Known (2006), will be in for a shock when confronted with his latest film, Shit Year (2011), a mature work with a distinct, idiosyncratic approach to difficult questions." Travis Jeppesen for Artforum: "The film is ostensibly about Colleen West (Ellen Barkin), a middle-aged actress retiring from the industry and settling into a life of intensive self-isolation in a forest cabin. This deceptively simple premise serves as a convincing departure point for a prolonged meditation on solitude."
Archer "appears to have watched John Cassavetes's Opening Night, about a middle-aged actress, and rather more than a few avant-garde films as well," suggests Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Shot in handsome, often vividly contrasting black and white, [Shit Year] weighs in as an attempt at poetic expressionism, a bid to...
Archer "appears to have watched John Cassavetes's Opening Night, about a middle-aged actress, and rather more than a few avant-garde films as well," suggests Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Shot in handsome, often vividly contrasting black and white, [Shit Year] weighs in as an attempt at poetic expressionism, a bid to...
- 9/21/2011
- MUBI
Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, that showcase of contemporary British acting, has opened in the UK this weekend, and that roundup has been updated through today. The entry on Gus Van Sant's Restless has been updated with pointers to pieces related to the Museum of the Moving Image's retrospective, running through September 30. And of course, we've got roundups running on Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive and Rod Lurie's remake of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Meantime, two weeks after the release of Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, we've entered the think piece stage, so that roundup's been kept up-to-date through today as well.
"Imagine that a semi-pagan society quietly survives in the heartland of Russia, amid the leftover Soviet-era factories, the old shops and stores strung along the roadsides, the new concrete towns with their shopping malls." Stuart Klawans in the Nation: "Imagine that the people of...
"Imagine that a semi-pagan society quietly survives in the heartland of Russia, amid the leftover Soviet-era factories, the old shops and stores strung along the roadsides, the new concrete towns with their shopping malls." Stuart Klawans in the Nation: "Imagine that the people of...
- 9/17/2011
- MUBI
"'Even a Man Who is Pure in Heart': Filmic Horror, Popular Religion and the Spectral Underside of History," an essay that appeared in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture in 2005, piqued Michael Guillén's interest in its author, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, "a native Montrealer and 'monster kid' who teaches courses on genre cinema and monsters in the Humanities department of John Abbott College." So they met up a few weeks ago at the Fantasia International Film Festival and Michael's transcription of their conversation — touching on national identities, filmmakers who straddle the high and the low, "the knowledge systems of ordinary people" and more — is one of the week's best reads, which is why I wanted to point it out right at the top of this little roundup of horror-related items.
The splashiest of these will surely be Jason Zinoman's survey of "a diverse collection of filmmakers about the scariest movie they'd...
The splashiest of these will surely be Jason Zinoman's survey of "a diverse collection of filmmakers about the scariest movie they'd...
- 8/21/2011
- MUBI
"The sleeper hit of the 2010 film-festival and indie-awards circuit, Mike Ott's moody micro-budget Littlerock patiently observes the California road trip of college-aged Japanese siblings Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka, also the film's co-writer) and Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto)." Karina Longworth in the Voice: "En route to Manzanar (the filmmakers leave viewers to draw on their own knowledge, if any, of what that destination portends until the film's very end), their car breaks down in the tiny desert town of Littlerock, where they soon fall in with a local crowd of young layabouts."
"Amid the keggers and daytime bike rides is plenty of drug use, an overdue loan, and a menacing alpha-male bigot (Ryan Dillon)," notes Bill Weber in Slant, "but Ott uses the threat of violence as a mere layer of mood, keeping his focus on the mutable, and often unspoken, themes of identity and the nature of attempts to explore and redefine it…...
"Amid the keggers and daytime bike rides is plenty of drug use, an overdue loan, and a menacing alpha-male bigot (Ryan Dillon)," notes Bill Weber in Slant, "but Ott uses the threat of violence as a mere layer of mood, keeping his focus on the mutable, and often unspoken, themes of identity and the nature of attempts to explore and redefine it…...
- 8/12/2011
- MUBI
Although I’ve really been enjoying all the scoop you’ve been posting from Sunday’s MuchMusic Video Awards, I couldn’t help but notice that we haven’t heard anything from The Vampire Diaries’ Kat Graham, who I know for a fact was in attendance! Any reason why? — Jess
The TV Addict: Simply put, much like her stunning dress, Graham was holding her cards a little too close to the vest when it came to sharing season three spoilers. Well, except to reveal that there is one thing we’re fairly certain she won’t be worrying about when it comes to what’s in store for Bonnie during the third season of The Vampire Diaries. That thing of course being: Death! “Technically, I already died in the second season finale, so I’m not too worried,” joked Graham when asked if she was at all concerned with Jeremy’s history of dearly-departed girlfriends.
The TV Addict: Simply put, much like her stunning dress, Graham was holding her cards a little too close to the vest when it came to sharing season three spoilers. Well, except to reveal that there is one thing we’re fairly certain she won’t be worrying about when it comes to what’s in store for Bonnie during the third season of The Vampire Diaries. That thing of course being: Death! “Technically, I already died in the second season finale, so I’m not too worried,” joked Graham when asked if she was at all concerned with Jeremy’s history of dearly-departed girlfriends.
- 6/23/2011
- by theTVaddict
- The TV Addict
We all know that Covert Affairs has been off to a mighty slow start this season, especially after the intense build-up that fans experienced last year. I'm still holding out hope that the series will return to its roots and re-focus on Annie's development with the Agency and her interaction with such trusty folks as Auggie and Jai (or are they trustworthy?). It is also more fun to watch her deceive others (for the good of the USA, of course) instead of being the one who is deceived a la Ben Mercer.
read more...
read more...
- 6/21/2011
- by PJ Yurcak
- Filmology
Every once in a while the stars align and a wish is granted. In this case, a very special glimpse behind the curtain of the smash hit summer series Covert Affairs. Invited to attend a special press day at the Covert Affairs film set in Toronto, Canada, the press were not only given an in-depth tour of all the sets, but we also had the chance to interview a few of the people who make the magic happen, including stars Piper Perabo, Chris Gorham, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Kari Matchett, special guest Eion Bailey, and executive producer Doug Liman. (Alas, M.I.A. that day were co-stars Peter Gallagher and Anne Dudek who were not on set filming that day.)
The sets of the CIA headquarters (including Auggie’s office, Annie’s desk, Joan’s office, and Arthur’s office) were as grand and prestigious in real life as they look on screen. Just...
The sets of the CIA headquarters (including Auggie’s office, Annie’s desk, Joan’s office, and Arthur’s office) were as grand and prestigious in real life as they look on screen. Just...
- 6/21/2011
- by Tiffany Vogt
- The TV Addict
Of all the movies that have opened this weekend, the one that's generated the most interesting press by far is Page One: Inside The New York Times. The usual round of promotional interviews, for example, turns out to have been not so usual. Talking with writer-director-cinematographer Andrew Rossi and co-writer Kate Novack, a husband-and-wife team of a documentary filmmaker and a former media reporter, Eric Hynes acknowledges that his piece for the Voice can't help but lay on another layer of meta. Right off, he has Novack commenting on Page One's focus on the Nyt media desk: "It was journalists reporting on journalism, and we were working as journalists covering that."
So it goes in other interviews: Drew Taylor's with Rossi for the Playlist; Stephen Saito's with Rossi and Nyt media reporter David Carr, indisputably the star of Page One, for IFC; Sarah Ellison's with Gay Talese, author of the 1969 classic,...
So it goes in other interviews: Drew Taylor's with Rossi for the Playlist; Stephen Saito's with Rossi and Nyt media reporter David Carr, indisputably the star of Page One, for IFC; Sarah Ellison's with Gay Talese, author of the 1969 classic,...
- 6/18/2011
- MUBI
Skolimowski at work, from the December 1968 issue of Films and Filming,
via chained and perfumed.
Jerzy Skolimowski's comeback as a director after a break of nearly two decades threw many for a loop. The year was 2008, the venue was Cannes and the film was Four Nights with Anna. "Wait, what is this, exactly?" asked Daniel Kasman here in The Notebook. The answer Patrick Z McGavin settled on: "a small but crucial movie," and Skolimowski would follow it up with Essential Killing, which provoked far more resolute reactions, both positive and negative, when it premiered last fall in Venice.
Last month, Deep End (1970) emerged from legal limbo and, restored, it's currently touring the UK and sees a release on DVD in July. Now the full-blown retrospective The Cinema of Jerzy Skolimowski is on at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York through July 3 and, in Los Angeles, Cinefamily...
via chained and perfumed.
Jerzy Skolimowski's comeback as a director after a break of nearly two decades threw many for a loop. The year was 2008, the venue was Cannes and the film was Four Nights with Anna. "Wait, what is this, exactly?" asked Daniel Kasman here in The Notebook. The answer Patrick Z McGavin settled on: "a small but crucial movie," and Skolimowski would follow it up with Essential Killing, which provoked far more resolute reactions, both positive and negative, when it premiered last fall in Venice.
Last month, Deep End (1970) emerged from legal limbo and, restored, it's currently touring the UK and sees a release on DVD in July. Now the full-blown retrospective The Cinema of Jerzy Skolimowski is on at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York through July 3 and, in Los Angeles, Cinefamily...
- 6/12/2011
- MUBI
After last season’s agonizing cliffhanger — is Ben Mercer alive or dead? — the opening shot of season 2 doesn’t quite answer any questions other than “Does Piper Perabo look good in a bikini?” (You know the answer to that one). CIA trainee Annie Walker emerges from the sea in a picturesque tropical setting to plant a lingering kiss on … you guessed it, Ben — but is this all a dream?
Lucky for us, it’s not. The ever-elusive Ben is healing up from his multiple gunshot wounds in a hospital in Guam, and for once, he and Annie have a moment of peace,...
Lucky for us, it’s not. The ever-elusive Ben is healing up from his multiple gunshot wounds in a hospital in Guam, and for once, he and Annie have a moment of peace,...
- 6/8/2011
- by Stephan Lee
- EW.com - PopWatch
Got a scoop request? An anonymous tip you’re dying to share? Just want to say hi? Send any/all of the above to askausiello@tvline.com
Question: It’s been a while since we’ve had any really good True Blood scoops. Please change that for us. —Jessica S.
Ausiello: As I bragged revealed on Twitter Monday night, Cliff Clavin left a nice surprise in my mailbox Monday afternoon: the first three episodes of Season 4! I can’t wait to watch them sometime this weekend! Kidding! I’d barely sat down on my couch when I had those bad boys finished off.
Question: It’s been a while since we’ve had any really good True Blood scoops. Please change that for us. —Jessica S.
Ausiello: As I bragged revealed on Twitter Monday night, Cliff Clavin left a nice surprise in my mailbox Monday afternoon: the first three episodes of Season 4! I can’t wait to watch them sometime this weekend! Kidding! I’d barely sat down on my couch when I had those bad boys finished off.
- 6/7/2011
- by Michael Ausiello
- TVLine.com
Why so serious, Annie?
Piper Perabo begins her second season on "Covert Affairs" Tuesday night (June 7), and from the photos of her USA provided, she's got a lot on her mind. As we mentioned in our preview piece, the episode opens with Annie in Guam, looking after Ben Mercer (Eion Bailey) as he recovers from being shot. She's appropriately island-attired in the shot above, but also a little worried-looking.
Soon it's back to Washington, though, where she gets her latest assignment: serving as the handler for an Estonian tennis player who's also a CIA asset. Again, she appears pensive.
She's still all serious in this shot, which looks to be of her taking lunch to her desk (nice touch with the Five Guys cup, by the way; the burger chain is everywhere in D.C. and northern Virginia).
So can we get one smile, maybe? Please? Ah, there it is:
"Covert Affairs" premieres at 10 p.
Piper Perabo begins her second season on "Covert Affairs" Tuesday night (June 7), and from the photos of her USA provided, she's got a lot on her mind. As we mentioned in our preview piece, the episode opens with Annie in Guam, looking after Ben Mercer (Eion Bailey) as he recovers from being shot. She's appropriately island-attired in the shot above, but also a little worried-looking.
Soon it's back to Washington, though, where she gets her latest assignment: serving as the handler for an Estonian tennis player who's also a CIA asset. Again, she appears pensive.
She's still all serious in this shot, which looks to be of her taking lunch to her desk (nice touch with the Five Guys cup, by the way; the burger chain is everywhere in D.C. and northern Virginia).
So can we get one smile, maybe? Please? Ah, there it is:
"Covert Affairs" premieres at 10 p.
- 6/7/2011
- by editorial@zap2it.com
- Zap2It - From Inside the Box
Chicago – In an era where America’s budget concerns are front and center, a TV series celebrating the awesomeness of the CIA seems a bit ill-timed. Piper Perabo portrays an undercover operative in the second season premiere of USA Network’s “Covert Affairs.”
TV Rating: 3.0/5.0
The series does score some points for intrigue, mostly through the character of Arthur Campbell (Peter Gallagher), who portrays the CIA Director of the National Clandestine Service. He’s in a bit of a legal pickle regarding his the division’s actions, and the whole agency is on pins and needles regarding it. In the foreground is Perabo’s Annie Walker, who is the centerpiece agent of the assignment du jour.
The second season opens with a flashback. Annie is romping on the beach, remembering a mission in Sri Lanka, where a former rogue operative Ben Mercer (Eion Bailey) is injured in a firefight trying...
TV Rating: 3.0/5.0
The series does score some points for intrigue, mostly through the character of Arthur Campbell (Peter Gallagher), who portrays the CIA Director of the National Clandestine Service. He’s in a bit of a legal pickle regarding his the division’s actions, and the whole agency is on pins and needles regarding it. In the foreground is Perabo’s Annie Walker, who is the centerpiece agent of the assignment du jour.
The second season opens with a flashback. Annie is romping on the beach, remembering a mission in Sri Lanka, where a former rogue operative Ben Mercer (Eion Bailey) is injured in a firefight trying...
- 6/7/2011
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
USA Network’s Covert Affairs is on a not-so-top-secret mission to be bigger, better and, yes, sexier in its second season (premiering Tuesday at 10/9c).
When last we tuned into the spy-drama, CIA plebe Annie Walker (played by Piper Perabo) had proved her ass-kicking, multilingual mettle as well as divined that the reason for her surge up the Agency ladder was because of her ties to ex-boyfriend/rogue agent Ben Mercer (Eion Bailey). With support from her super-techy (and sightless) handler, Auggie (Christopher Gorham), and CIA officer Jai Wilcox (Sendhil Ramamurthy), Annie eventually made contact with Awol Ben, only to...
When last we tuned into the spy-drama, CIA plebe Annie Walker (played by Piper Perabo) had proved her ass-kicking, multilingual mettle as well as divined that the reason for her surge up the Agency ladder was because of her ties to ex-boyfriend/rogue agent Ben Mercer (Eion Bailey). With support from her super-techy (and sightless) handler, Auggie (Christopher Gorham), and CIA officer Jai Wilcox (Sendhil Ramamurthy), Annie eventually made contact with Awol Ben, only to...
- 6/7/2011
- by Matt Webb Mitovich
- TVLine.com
The opening of "Covert Affairs" Season 2 may give you a little bit of deja vu: Annie Walker, on a beach, with the mysterious Ben Mercer.
Except it's not a flashback: When the series returns to USA Tuesday (June 7), we're very much in the present -- in show time, only a few days have passed.
When we last saw Annie (Piper Perabo), she was being helicoptered out of Sri Lanka along with Ben (Eion Bailey), who had just been shot. The Season 2 premiere picks up pretty much right where that left off, with Ben recovering at a hospital in Guam and Annie spending some quality time with her once and apparently future guy.
We still don't know a whole lot about Ben -- whether his motives in returning to the CIA were entirely pure, and how, now that he's more or less back in the fold, that might affect Annie's status at the agency.
Except it's not a flashback: When the series returns to USA Tuesday (June 7), we're very much in the present -- in show time, only a few days have passed.
When we last saw Annie (Piper Perabo), she was being helicoptered out of Sri Lanka along with Ben (Eion Bailey), who had just been shot. The Season 2 premiere picks up pretty much right where that left off, with Ben recovering at a hospital in Guam and Annie spending some quality time with her once and apparently future guy.
We still don't know a whole lot about Ben -- whether his motives in returning to the CIA were entirely pure, and how, now that he's more or less back in the fold, that might affect Annie's status at the agency.
- 6/7/2011
- by editorial@zap2it.com
- Zap2It - From Inside the Box
On June 2nd, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences gave a sneak peek screening of the second season premiere of Covert Affairs to a select number of guild members, guests, and fans. Appearing at this fun event were cast members Piper Perabo and Chris Gorham, along with show creators Matt Corman and Chris Ord, and executive producers David Bartis and Doug Liman. Then moderating the evening’s event was TV Guide’s William Keck.
Briefly highlighting the genesis of the show and how the research was done to add as much realism to the show as possible, it was explained that, while the CIA does not exactly provide tours of its facilities, they were able to find a contact who got them access to tour at the Langley facility. It was to their surprise to find that the CIA actually has a Starbucks and a Burger King directly inside the building.
Briefly highlighting the genesis of the show and how the research was done to add as much realism to the show as possible, it was explained that, while the CIA does not exactly provide tours of its facilities, they were able to find a contact who got them access to tour at the Langley facility. It was to their surprise to find that the CIA actually has a Starbucks and a Burger King directly inside the building.
- 6/7/2011
- by Tiffany Vogt
- The TV Addict
"With his Bud Cort haircut and morbid sensibility, Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) is too smart for Swansea, Wales, an industrial city mired in some seriously mid-80s Thatcherite doldrums," begins Vadim Rizov at GreenCine Daily. "The trouble with Oliver is that he knows he's clever, which could justify anything: surreptitiously monitoring his parents' sex life, taunting an overweight girl to make local cutie Jordana (Yasmin Paige) notice him as a real livewire, or trying to trash the house of downhill neighbor Graham Purvis (Paddy Considine) who may be having an affair with mom (Sally Hawkins). Fortunately, Submarine, Richard Ayoade's feature debut, is aware of Oliver's self-justifying nature and the ways it could warp him…. Acutely aware of the long tradition of films about disaffected young men coming to terms with themselves, Ayoade doesn't duck the precedent: instead, like Oliver…, he nods to seemingly every single precursor. There's a 400 Blows-quoting dash across the beach,...
- 6/3/2011
- MUBI
Of course there'll be another roundup on The Tree of Life. But first, let's give a little breathing room to some of the other films opening this Memorial Day Weekend.
"The extreme leftists of the 1960s and 70s who sought to change the world one bomb at a time might have been unhappy to know that their revolutionary legacy is doing nice business at that bourgeois temple, the art house," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It's a legacy that in recent years and specifically since 9/11 has been romanticized and critiqued in movies like The Motorcycle Diaries (a prehistory involving the young Che Guevara); Che (about his campaigns in Cuba and Bolivia); The Baader Meinhof Complex (German leftists who embraced violence); Good Morning, Night (the kidnapping of the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades); Carlos (the Venezuelan Marxist turned mercenary). United Red Army tells much the same story,...
"The extreme leftists of the 1960s and 70s who sought to change the world one bomb at a time might have been unhappy to know that their revolutionary legacy is doing nice business at that bourgeois temple, the art house," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It's a legacy that in recent years and specifically since 9/11 has been romanticized and critiqued in movies like The Motorcycle Diaries (a prehistory involving the young Che Guevara); Che (about his campaigns in Cuba and Bolivia); The Baader Meinhof Complex (German leftists who embraced violence); Good Morning, Night (the kidnapping of the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades); Carlos (the Venezuelan Marxist turned mercenary). United Red Army tells much the same story,...
- 5/27/2011
- MUBI
"Romanian films set in the era after the fall of Communism suggest the nation suffers a hell of a hangover from the ideology," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "For instance, Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective attacks draconian drug laws left over from the old regime. Tuesday, After Christmas presents a very different vision of Romania. Its characters can afford to buy expensive Christmas gifts; one of them picks up a 3,300 Euro telescope. It may not be entirely accurate to call the film apolitical, but the most political thing about it is its avoidance of Eastern European miserabilism and its depiction of people who could be living much the same lifestyles in Western Europe."
Damon Smith introduces an interview with director Radu Muntean for Filmmaker: "Tuesday, After Christmas, which premiered at Cannes last year, opens on a dreamy scene: sunlight bathes a naked couple, middle-aged Paul (Mimi Branescu) and pretty,...
Damon Smith introduces an interview with director Radu Muntean for Filmmaker: "Tuesday, After Christmas, which premiered at Cannes last year, opens on a dreamy scene: sunlight bathes a naked couple, middle-aged Paul (Mimi Branescu) and pretty,...
- 5/26/2011
- MUBI
From TorontoFilm.Net, comes the new poster supporting Season 2 of USA Network's Toronto-lensed spy-action TV series "Covert Affairs", (from the producers of "The Bourne" feature film trilogy), premiering June 7, 2011 :
"...CIA trainee, 'Annie Walker' (Perabo), is mysteriously sent out into the field, to capture her ex-boyfriend, with 'Auggie Anderson' (Gorham), a blind officer, acting as the new guide in her new life..."
Other cast characters include 'Conrad Sheehan III' (Eric Lively), a senior CIA officer and 'womanizer' who enjoys a spicy rapport with Annie, 'Jai Wilcox' (Sendhil Ramamurthy), a CIA officer, 'Danielle' (Anne Dudek), Annie's older sister, unaware of Annie's real career, 'Ben Mercer' (Eion Bailey), Annie's ex-boyfriend, targeted by the CIA and 'Arthur Campbell' (Peter Gallagher), the CIA director of 'Clandestine Services'.
Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "Covert Affairs"...
"...CIA trainee, 'Annie Walker' (Perabo), is mysteriously sent out into the field, to capture her ex-boyfriend, with 'Auggie Anderson' (Gorham), a blind officer, acting as the new guide in her new life..."
Other cast characters include 'Conrad Sheehan III' (Eric Lively), a senior CIA officer and 'womanizer' who enjoys a spicy rapport with Annie, 'Jai Wilcox' (Sendhil Ramamurthy), a CIA officer, 'Danielle' (Anne Dudek), Annie's older sister, unaware of Annie's real career, 'Ben Mercer' (Eion Bailey), Annie's ex-boyfriend, targeted by the CIA and 'Arthur Campbell' (Peter Gallagher), the CIA director of 'Clandestine Services'.
Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "Covert Affairs"...
- 5/11/2011
- by Michael Stevens
- SneakPeek
"A onetime yakuza turned jailbird turned filmmaking enfant terrible, the now-75-year-old Japanese director Kōji Wakamatsu has long been loved by cinema cultists for an outrageous string of 1960s provocations made under the guise of the pinku eiga — or 'pink' film." Steve Dollar at GreenCine Daily: "These typically low-budget sex romps could be as insane, surreal, or mind-bending as possible, as long as they included a minimum amount of nudity and softcore humping. Wakamatsu, seizing the opportunity, used the form to pursue the extremes, reveling in obsessive sex and violence as a leftist critique of Japanese society. Beyond the outrage and sleaze of The Embryo Hunts in Secret [1966]; Go, Go Second-Time Virgin [1969]; and Ecstasy of the Angels [1972], was a form of perverse shock treatment. Wakamatsu took a break from the camera in 1977, and didn't return for 27 years. But he still wants to mess with your head."
Steve Erickson for Moving...
Steve Erickson for Moving...
- 5/8/2011
- MUBI
"African cinema is generally woefully overlooked by the West, and the filmmaking being done in Republic of Chad has been particularly invisible," begins Farihah Zaman in Reverse Shot. "The oversight is not entirely unreasonable; decades of civil war have left the local film industry all but nonexistent — for thirty years there was not even a single movie theater in the entire country. That changed in 2010 when Mahamet-Saleh Haroun won the Cannes Jury Prize for A Screaming Man. His film, the first from his country to screen in competition at the prestigious French festival, now has another distinction, having convinced a government in the midst of war the importance of investing a million dollars in building a movie theater specifically so that it could be shown."
In this "ingenious and moving take on Fw Murnau's classic The Last Laugh," writes the New Yorker's Richard Brody, "Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), a former swimming...
In this "ingenious and moving take on Fw Murnau's classic The Last Laugh," writes the New Yorker's Richard Brody, "Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), a former swimming...
- 4/18/2011
- MUBI
"A hybrid fable about the cosmic interconnectedness of all things and a document of rural daily existence, Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino's beguiling Le Quattro volte (The Four Times) presents life as cycle and the earth as circuit, a feedback loop of matter and quiet splendor." Benjamin Mercer in Reverse Shot: "Frammartino and his cinematographer, Andrea Locatelli, employ the static long shots and extended single takes used by so many contemporary makers of documentary-inflected, landscape-fixated fiction features, from Lisandro Alonso to Jia Zhangke, to tell a story of the transmigration of a soul from a man to a goat to a tree to a burlap sack of charcoal — the almost complete absence of dialogue also underscores the primacy of the visuals (and of voiceless living beings) in Le Quattro volte. The film's events all take place in the Calabria region of Italy, marked by rolling hillsides and intact medieval villages,...
- 10/7/2010
- MUBI
Yeah this one's pretty late, sorry :) The finale came and went and left everybody clinging to the question whether one of Covert Affairs' beloved characters is going to survive for season 2. So here we go,
Annie and Auggie are at some middle-of-the-day ceremony, where Arthur is giving an old-timer a medal. The way Annie and Auggie are downing the drinks, you cant tell they're only there for the freebies. Annie gives Auggie a faux clink with her plastic cup. Cut to a professor at a blackboard and a student taking notes. Two men come in, with a look that says we're not here for tutoring, and they proceed to chase the professor up to the school's top floor, grabbing him as he tries to get out a window. With a steely look, one of the goons says Ben Mercer can't save you now.
Back at the ceremony Joan comes in and collects Annie,...
Annie and Auggie are at some middle-of-the-day ceremony, where Arthur is giving an old-timer a medal. The way Annie and Auggie are downing the drinks, you cant tell they're only there for the freebies. Annie gives Auggie a faux clink with her plastic cup. Cut to a professor at a blackboard and a student taking notes. Two men come in, with a look that says we're not here for tutoring, and they proceed to chase the professor up to the school's top floor, grabbing him as he tries to get out a window. With a steely look, one of the goons says Ben Mercer can't save you now.
Back at the ceremony Joan comes in and collects Annie,...
- 9/22/2010
- by clydefamous
I’ve unfortunately been unable to keep up with writing up my thoughts on Covert Affairs in recent weeks after the Auggie episode, but even if I did write each week, it’d feel like I was banging the same, boring drum every time. You know, kind of how the series has done to us over the summer. That said, I figured it was smart to come back to the “two-hour” finale — which was really just two entirely separate episodes packaged together — just to see if anything had really changed or there were some more optimistic prospects for season two. In short: nothing has and no there is not.
Both of these episodes have individual moments there were somewhat memorable, but neither pull it together to create an interesting narrative that really hooked me in. “I Can’t Quit You, Baby” sees Annie go abroad in hopes of catching some...
Both of these episodes have individual moments there were somewhat memorable, but neither pull it together to create an interesting narrative that really hooked me in. “I Can’t Quit You, Baby” sees Annie go abroad in hopes of catching some...
- 9/16/2010
- by Cory Barker
- TVovermind.com
If you're planning on watching the "Covert Affairs" summer finale, be sure to tune in an hour early.
The action-packed two-hour affair airing Tuesday, Sept. 14 will (hopefully) wrap up at least one arc that's been plaguing us all season.
In the first hour, Annie is London-bound so some smugglers will try and recruit her. Ooh, undercover again, Annie? Does that mean she'll put on a British accent? Let's hope because Piper Perabo does an incredibly charming British accent (have you seen "Imagine Me & You" in which she romances "Terminator: Tscc" Lena Headey?).
Moving into Hour 2, we see that Ben Mercer (Eion Bailey) is back and not just being all mysterious showing up in Annie's bedroom, but confronting the CIA. We love the dude who says "Hands up now" in that Terminator voice:
Next we see Annie actually listening in on Ben's polygraph debriefing, which we've always wanted to do behind that one-way glass.
The action-packed two-hour affair airing Tuesday, Sept. 14 will (hopefully) wrap up at least one arc that's been plaguing us all season.
In the first hour, Annie is London-bound so some smugglers will try and recruit her. Ooh, undercover again, Annie? Does that mean she'll put on a British accent? Let's hope because Piper Perabo does an incredibly charming British accent (have you seen "Imagine Me & You" in which she romances "Terminator: Tscc" Lena Headey?).
Moving into Hour 2, we see that Ben Mercer (Eion Bailey) is back and not just being all mysterious showing up in Annie's bedroom, but confronting the CIA. We love the dude who says "Hands up now" in that Terminator voice:
Next we see Annie actually listening in on Ben's polygraph debriefing, which we've always wanted to do behind that one-way glass.
- 9/14/2010
- by editorial@zap2it.com
- Zap2It - From Inside the Box
Christopher Gorham has dropped hints about the season finale of Covert Affairs. Gorham, who plays Auggie, explained that the episode will be emotional for Annie (Piper Perabo). "The finale is Annie's version of the Auggie episode," he told TV Guide. "[That] was such an overwhelming and emotional episode for Auggie, and the finale is that for Annie. "She has to confront Ben and their past. A lot of different things come to a head. It's very poignant for Annie and wraps a lot of things, but also leaves a few loose ends hanging. In the second hour especially, there's a lot of Ben Mercer." Gorham also claimed that the finale will feature a "deepening of the Auggie-Annie relationship" and suggested that the romance between the pair is a "potential". "Auggie's tortured," he continued. "He's (more)...
- 9/14/2010
- by By Catriona Wightman
- Digital Spy
The freshman season of Covert Affairs is coming to a close tonight with a special two hour finale. USA will be airing Episode 10, "I Can't Quit You, Baby," and Episode 11, "When the Levee Breaks," back-to-back on Tuesday, Sept 14. About the Covert Affairs Season 1 Finale: The incredible first season of Covert Affairs goes out with a double-barreled bang this Tuesday at a special time: 9/8C! In the premiere of "I Can't Quit You Baby", Annie is sent to London to be a "mark" attempting to be recruited by a group of smugglers. Meanwhile, back at the CIA, the chain of command is tested as Arthur and Joan are forced to bring Henry Wilcox back into the fold. In hour two, Annie is forced to confront her past when Ben Mercer walks into CIA Headquarters, and the two are sent to Sri Lanka together to rescue Ben's former asset in ...
- 9/14/2010
- by Alexis James-Whitehead
- BuzzFocus.com
This week Annie tags along with her sister Danielle to Niagara Falls since her husband cancelled at the last minute. The trip is welcomed because after being knocked out last week and all the Ben Mercer drama, Annie could use some time off.
But the vacation is cut short when Yahya (pronounced ya-ya) an Iranian who wants to exchange information for asylum in America, contacts the CIA.
Annie picks Yahya up and he's definitely excited to be coming to America and that his dream is to get married and live in a house in New Jersey (The real housewives of New Jersey might change his mind). But Annie makes sure he understands that she's just there to check if his information has any value to the CIA, not to carry him to America. Annie tells Joan that Yahyah's documents claim that Iran is buying military technology in violation of Un sanctions.
But the vacation is cut short when Yahya (pronounced ya-ya) an Iranian who wants to exchange information for asylum in America, contacts the CIA.
Annie picks Yahya up and he's definitely excited to be coming to America and that his dream is to get married and live in a house in New Jersey (The real housewives of New Jersey might change his mind). But Annie makes sure he understands that she's just there to check if his information has any value to the CIA, not to carry him to America. Annie tells Joan that Yahyah's documents claim that Iran is buying military technology in violation of Un sanctions.
- 9/8/2010
- by clydefamous
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