UK director Lynne Ramsay enjoyed international recognition early on in her career after short films Small Deaths and Gasman were invited to the Cannes and won the Jury Prize in its short film competition in 1996 and 1998 respectively.
“That was the first film festival I went to. It was so overwhelming,” Ramsay told a masterclass for the Doha Film Institute this week . “When Gasman won a prize and [Francis Ford] Coppola gave me the prize, that opened the way for me to make other films.”
The film’s reception in L.A., when Ramsay showed them there as part of a British Film Institute talent showcase in the late 1990s, was less enthusiastic.
Revolving around a young girl who slowly discovers a puzzling side to her father’s life during an outing to a Christmas party, Gasman shows the protagonist and other characters from the waist down only in the opening scene and other parts of the film.
“That was the first film festival I went to. It was so overwhelming,” Ramsay told a masterclass for the Doha Film Institute this week . “When Gasman won a prize and [Francis Ford] Coppola gave me the prize, that opened the way for me to make other films.”
The film’s reception in L.A., when Ramsay showed them there as part of a British Film Institute talent showcase in the late 1990s, was less enthusiastic.
Revolving around a young girl who slowly discovers a puzzling side to her father’s life during an outing to a Christmas party, Gasman shows the protagonist and other characters from the waist down only in the opening scene and other parts of the film.
- 3/17/2023
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
A new take on Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Fall of the House of Usher," Patrick Picard's The Bloodhound is one of the January releases on Arrow Video's streaming service ahead of its Blu-ray release on March 23rd, and we've been provided with an exclusive clip to share with Daily Dead readers.
You can watch a disturbing dream come to life in our exclusive clip below, as well as details on Arrow's January lineup:
Press Release: London, UK - Arrow Video is excited to announce the January 2021 lineup of their new subscription-based Arrow platform, available now in the US and Canada, coming soon to the UK. Building on the success of the Arrow Video Channel and expanding its availability across multiple devices and countries, Arrow boasts a selection of cult classics, hidden gems and iconic horror films, all curated by the Arrow team.
The lineup begins with...
You can watch a disturbing dream come to life in our exclusive clip below, as well as details on Arrow's January lineup:
Press Release: London, UK - Arrow Video is excited to announce the January 2021 lineup of their new subscription-based Arrow platform, available now in the US and Canada, coming soon to the UK. Building on the success of the Arrow Video Channel and expanding its availability across multiple devices and countries, Arrow boasts a selection of cult classics, hidden gems and iconic horror films, all curated by the Arrow team.
The lineup begins with...
- 1/22/2021
- by Derek Anderson
- DailyDead
As the industry looks ahead to a post-lockdown future, Time’s Up U.K. is commissioning key research to improve the experiences of women in the workplace, while realigning its priorities in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Time’s Up U.K. chair Heather Rabbatts tells Variety that as the industry resets after the worst of the pandemic, it can’t revert to old norms, and nor must the movement. “We want to build it in a way that speaks to our values and aspirations.”
A new strategy involves greater scrutiny of intersectionality across the Time’s Up U.K. campaigns, as well as an industry survey on microaggression — a term used to describe daily undermining behaviours and comments directed towards marginalized groups — that will inform a dedicated app to help women in film and television, as well as other industries.
“We’ve done research and have been talking to different sectors,...
Time’s Up U.K. chair Heather Rabbatts tells Variety that as the industry resets after the worst of the pandemic, it can’t revert to old norms, and nor must the movement. “We want to build it in a way that speaks to our values and aspirations.”
A new strategy involves greater scrutiny of intersectionality across the Time’s Up U.K. campaigns, as well as an industry survey on microaggression — a term used to describe daily undermining behaviours and comments directed towards marginalized groups — that will inform a dedicated app to help women in film and television, as well as other industries.
“We’ve done research and have been talking to different sectors,...
- 1/7/2021
- by Manori Ravindran
- Variety Film + TV
Heyday Television, the production company run by Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Marriage Story producer David Heyman, has acquired the film and TV rights to Ashley Audrain’s debut novel The Push.
Heyday triumphed in a nine-way bidding war for the Penguin Michael Joseph book, which is set to be published next year and has drawn comparisons with We Need To Talk About Kevin, the Lionel Shriver psychological thriller the was adapted into a Tilda Swinton film in 2011.
The Push is described as a “suspenseful, visceral novel, exploring how an unspeakable act can reverberate through generations.” The publisher adds that it “will ignite discussion around the expectations of motherhood that we’re taught not to question, such as the concept of nature vs nurture, and the notion of unconditional love.”
Audrain will serve as an executive producer on Heyday’s adaptation. The NBCUniversal International Studios-backed company optioned...
Heyday triumphed in a nine-way bidding war for the Penguin Michael Joseph book, which is set to be published next year and has drawn comparisons with We Need To Talk About Kevin, the Lionel Shriver psychological thriller the was adapted into a Tilda Swinton film in 2011.
The Push is described as a “suspenseful, visceral novel, exploring how an unspeakable act can reverberate through generations.” The publisher adds that it “will ignite discussion around the expectations of motherhood that we’re taught not to question, such as the concept of nature vs nurture, and the notion of unconditional love.”
Audrain will serve as an executive producer on Heyday’s adaptation. The NBCUniversal International Studios-backed company optioned...
- 10/16/2020
- by Jake Kanter
- Deadline Film + TV
If Apple TV+ is slightly on the back foot in the war of the streaming services it’s not for want of trying. With this latest crime drama it has definitely brought out the big guns – and it’s really paid off in terms of quality. On a more widely subscribed service, Defending Jacob could easily become the next hot button series garnering buzz like Bodyguard or Apple Tree Yard.
Based on the best selling novel by William Landay, Defending Jacob is a clever and complex courtroom drama packed with ambiguities and moral quandaries that makes some smart deviations from the novel and adding extra layers of tension in the best possible way.
Framed around a court hearing to determine whether or not an unspecified case should be pursued, Defending Jacob stars Captain America’s Chris Evans as Andy Barber, an assistant district attorney whose 14-year-old son Jacob has been...
Based on the best selling novel by William Landay, Defending Jacob is a clever and complex courtroom drama packed with ambiguities and moral quandaries that makes some smart deviations from the novel and adding extra layers of tension in the best possible way.
Framed around a court hearing to determine whether or not an unspecified case should be pursued, Defending Jacob stars Captain America’s Chris Evans as Andy Barber, an assistant district attorney whose 14-year-old son Jacob has been...
- 4/24/2020
- by Rosie Fletcher
- Den of Geek
Ezra Miller appears to have choked a woman at a bar in Reykjavik, Iceland in a video that surfaced online late Sunday night.
Despite confusion online over whether the video was a joke — with memes already emerging on Twitter, where Miller’s name has been trending — a source at the establishment, Prikið Kaffihús, has confirmed to Variety that this was a serious altercation at the bar, and that the man, whom they identify as Miller, was escorted off the premises.
The seven-second video shows a man saying, ”Oh, you wanna fight? That’s what you wanna do?” to a young woman, who appears to be jokingly preparing herself for a fight and is smiling.
Miller then grabs the girl by the throat, and throws her to the ground. At this point, the person filming says, “Woah, bro. Bro,” and stops shooting, with the footage ending abruptly.
Variety has confirmed the incident took place around 6 p.
Despite confusion online over whether the video was a joke — with memes already emerging on Twitter, where Miller’s name has been trending — a source at the establishment, Prikið Kaffihús, has confirmed to Variety that this was a serious altercation at the bar, and that the man, whom they identify as Miller, was escorted off the premises.
The seven-second video shows a man saying, ”Oh, you wanna fight? That’s what you wanna do?” to a young woman, who appears to be jokingly preparing herself for a fight and is smiling.
Miller then grabs the girl by the throat, and throws her to the ground. At this point, the person filming says, “Woah, bro. Bro,” and stops shooting, with the footage ending abruptly.
Variety has confirmed the incident took place around 6 p.
- 4/6/2020
- by Tim Dams and Manori Ravindran
- Variety Film + TV
Amy Jenkins, the creator and showrunner of the BBC series “This Life” and writer on Netflix’s “The Crown,” is set to adapt Allison Pataki’s “Sisi” novels, which are based on the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria.
The female-driven period TV series is being developed by Picture Perfect Federation, the joint venture between former Lionsgate honcho Patrick Wachsberger and Federation Entertainment’s Pascal Breton, as well as Michael Shamberg’s (“Erin Brockovich”) Mas Production.
Based on Pataki’s two bestselling novels, “The Accidental Empress” and “Sisi: Empress on Her Own,” the modern series will tell the journey of a strong-willed woman who learns to accept and embrace her power in a male dominated world. Shedding light on one of Europe’s most powerful royal families, the series will span the period from 1853 up until the start of World War I.
“Sisi was an extraordinary young empress,” Jenkins said.
The female-driven period TV series is being developed by Picture Perfect Federation, the joint venture between former Lionsgate honcho Patrick Wachsberger and Federation Entertainment’s Pascal Breton, as well as Michael Shamberg’s (“Erin Brockovich”) Mas Production.
Based on Pataki’s two bestselling novels, “The Accidental Empress” and “Sisi: Empress on Her Own,” the modern series will tell the journey of a strong-willed woman who learns to accept and embrace her power in a male dominated world. Shedding light on one of Europe’s most powerful royal families, the series will span the period from 1853 up until the start of World War I.
“Sisi was an extraordinary young empress,” Jenkins said.
- 10/10/2019
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
Toni Collette, Jessie Buckley & David Thewlis Join Charlie Kaufman’s ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things‘
Following his stop-motion animation Anomalisa, Charlie Kaufman will return to the realm of live-action with I’m Thinking of Ending Things, an adaptation of Iain Reid’s hit novel. As production begins on the psychological thriller, Netflix has now announced the final cast which has a switch-up.
While Jesse Plemons is still on board, Brie Larson has been replaced by Jessie Buckley, who broke out in last year’s Beast. Also joining the cast is Toni Collette and David Thewlis. The story is told from Buckley’s perspective as she goes on a road trip with her boyfriend Jake but secretly harbors the idea of breaking up with him. In perhaps the most exciting update, the film will be shot by Cold War and Ida cinematographer Łukasz Żal.
Having just read the book, one imagines that Collette and Thewlis will play Jake’s parents. If Kaufman faithfully adapts the twisty novel,...
While Jesse Plemons is still on board, Brie Larson has been replaced by Jessie Buckley, who broke out in last year’s Beast. Also joining the cast is Toni Collette and David Thewlis. The story is told from Buckley’s perspective as she goes on a road trip with her boyfriend Jake but secretly harbors the idea of breaking up with him. In perhaps the most exciting update, the film will be shot by Cold War and Ida cinematographer Łukasz Żal.
Having just read the book, one imagines that Collette and Thewlis will play Jake’s parents. If Kaufman faithfully adapts the twisty novel,...
- 3/27/2019
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Captain Marvel star Brie Larson is set to star in the new Charlie Kaufman Netflix film I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
The film is based on Iain Reid’s 2016 novel, and the plot centers on Jake, “who is on a road trip to meet his parents on their secluded farm with his girlfriend (Larson), who is thinking of ending things. When Jake makes an unexpected detour leaving her stranded, a twisted mix of palpable tension, psychological frailty and sheer terror ensues.”
That sounds like it will make for an interesting film that is right up Kaufman’s ally. It will be interesting to see how he implements his quirky style and humor into the film.
Here’s a more detailed description of the story from the book:
I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always.
Jake once said,...
The film is based on Iain Reid’s 2016 novel, and the plot centers on Jake, “who is on a road trip to meet his parents on their secluded farm with his girlfriend (Larson), who is thinking of ending things. When Jake makes an unexpected detour leaving her stranded, a twisted mix of palpable tension, psychological frailty and sheer terror ensues.”
That sounds like it will make for an interesting film that is right up Kaufman’s ally. It will be interesting to see how he implements his quirky style and humor into the film.
Here’s a more detailed description of the story from the book:
I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always.
Jake once said,...
- 12/5/2018
- by Joey Paur
- GeekTyrant
Lynne Ramsay’s fourth film is a nightmarish vision of a killer’s quest for redemption
In 2011, I named Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsay’s third feature, a brilliant adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, as my favourite film of the year. Since then, Ramsay has talked enticingly of making “Moby-Dick in space” and walked away from the female-led western Jane Got a Gun. In the process, she’s apparently earned a reputation for being “difficult”, a term first whispered during her battles to bring Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones to the screen, an ambition eventually realised by Peter Jackson, with dismal results.
Now, with her fourth film (from a novella by Jonathan Ames), Ramsay offers a riposte to anyone who ever doubted her talent or her working methods. Combining the visual poetry of Ratcatcher with the dizzying first-person fugues of Morvern Callar, You Were Never Really Here...
In 2011, I named Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsay’s third feature, a brilliant adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, as my favourite film of the year. Since then, Ramsay has talked enticingly of making “Moby-Dick in space” and walked away from the female-led western Jane Got a Gun. In the process, she’s apparently earned a reputation for being “difficult”, a term first whispered during her battles to bring Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones to the screen, an ambition eventually realised by Peter Jackson, with dismal results.
Now, with her fourth film (from a novella by Jonathan Ames), Ramsay offers a riposte to anyone who ever doubted her talent or her working methods. Combining the visual poetry of Ratcatcher with the dizzying first-person fugues of Morvern Callar, You Were Never Really Here...
- 3/11/2018
- by Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
- The Guardian - Film News
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They’ve made some of the best thrillers of the past six years. We list some of the best modern thriller directors currently working...
Director Guillermo del Toro once described suspense as being about the withholding of information: either a character knows something the audience doesn’t know, or the audience knows something the character doesn’t. That’s a deliciously simple way of describing something that some filmmakers often find difficult to achieve: keeping viewers on the edges of their seats.
The best thrillers leave us scanning the screen with anticipation. They invite us to guess what happens next, but then delight in thwarting expectations. We can all name the great thriller filmmakers of the past - Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, Brian De Palma - but what about the current crop of directors? Here’s our pick of the filmmakers who’ve made some great modern thrillers over the past six years - that is, between the year 2010 and the present.
Jeremy Saulnier - Blue Ruin, Green Room
To think there was once a time when Jeremy Saulnier was seriously quitting the film business.
“To be honest," Saulner told us back in 2014, “Macon and I had really given up on our quest to break into the industry and become legitimate filmmakers. So what we were trying to do with Blue Ruin was archive our 20 year arc and bring it to a close. Really just revisit our stomping grounds and use locations that were near and dear to us and build a narrative out of that.”
Maybe this personal touch explains at least partly why Blue Ruin wound up getting so much attention in Cannes in 2013, signalling not the end of Saulnier and his star Macon Blair’s career, but a brand new chapter. But then again, there’s more than just hand-crafted intimacy in Saulnier’s revenge tale; there’s also its lean, minimal storytelling and the brilliance of its characterisation. Blue Ruin is such an effective thriller because its protagonist is so atypical: sad-eyed, inexperienced with guns, somewhat soft around the edges, Macon Blair’s central character is far from your typical righteous avenger.
Green Room, which emerged in the UK this year, explores a similar clash between very ordinary people and extraordinary violence. A young punk band shout about anarchy and aggression on stage, but they quickly find themselves out of their depth when they’re cornered by a group of bloodthirsty neo-Nazis. In Saulnier’s films, grubby, unseemly locations are matched by often beautiful locked-off shots. Familiar thriller trappings are contrasted by twists of fortune that are often shocking.
Denis Villeneuve - Sicario, Prisoners
Here’s one of those directors who can pack an overwhelming sense of dread in a single image: in Sicario, his searing drug-war thriller from last year, it was the sight of tiny specks of dust falling in the light scything through a window. That single shot proved to be the calm before the storm, as Villeneuve unleashed a salvo of blood-curdling events: an attempted FBI raid on a building gone horribly awry. And this, I think, is the brilliance of Villeneuve’s direction, and why he’s so good at directing thrillers like Sicario or 2013’s superb Prisoners - he understands the rhythm of storytelling, and how scenes of quiet can generate almost unbearable tension.
Another case in point: the highway sequence in Sicario, where Emily Blunt’s FBI agent is stuck in a traffic jam outside one of the most violent cities in the world. Villeneueve makes us feel the stifling heat and the claustrophobia; something nasty’s going to happen, we know that - but it’s the sense of anticipation which makes for such an unforgettable scene.
Prisoners hews closely to the template of a modern mystery thriller, but it’s once again enriched by Villeneuve’s expert pacing and the performances he gets out of his actors. Hugh Jackman’s seldom been better as a father on the hunt for his missing child, while Jake Gyllenhaal mesmerises as a cop scarred by his own private traumas.
Lynne Ramsay - We Need To Talk About Kevin
Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin may be the most effective psychological thriller of recent years. About the difficult relationship between a mother (Tilda Swinton) and her distant, possibly sociopathic son (Ezra Miller), Ramsay’s film is masterfully told from beginning to end - which is impressive, given that the source novel by Lionel Shriver is told via a series of letters. Ramsay takes the raw material from the book and crafts something cinematic and highly disturbing: a study of guilt, sorrow and recrimination. Tension bubbles even in casual conversations around the dinner table. Miller is an eerie, cold-eyed blank. Swinton is peerless. One scene, in which Swinton’s mother comes home in the dead of night, is unforgettable. Here’s hoping Ramsay returns with another feature film very soon.
Morten Tyldum - Headhunters
All kinds of thrillers have emerged from Scandinavia over the past few years, whether on the large or small screen or in book form. Morten Tyldum’s Headhunters is among the very best of them. The fast-paced and deliriously funny story of an art thief who steals a painting from the wrong guy, Headhunters launched Tyldum on an international stage - Alan Turing drama The Imitation Game followed, and the Sony sci-fi film Passengers is up next. It isn’t hard to see why, either: Headhunters shows off Tyldum’s mastery of pace and tone, as his pulp tale hurtles from intense chase scenes to laugh-out-loud black comedy.
Joel Edgerton - The Gift
Granted, Joel Edgerton’s better known as an actor, having turned in some superb performances in the likes of Warrior, Zero Dark Thirty and Warror. But with a single film - The Gift, which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in - Edgerton established himself as a thriller filmmaker of real promise. About a successful, happily married couple whose lives are greatly affected by an old face from the husband’s past, The Gift is an engrossing, unsettling movie with superb performances from Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall as well as Edgerton.
A riff on the ‘killer in our midst’ thrillers of the 80s and 90s - The Stepfather, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and so on - The Gift is all the more effective because of its restraint. We’re never quite sure who the villain of the piece is, at least at first - and Edgerton’s use of the camera leaves us wrong-footed at every turn. The world arguably needs more thrillers from Joel Edgerton.
If you haven’t seen The Gift yet, we’d urge you to track it down.
David Michod - Animal Kingdom
The criminals at play in this true-life crime thriller are all the more chilling because they’re so mundane - a bunch of low-level thieves, murderers and gangsters who prowl around the rougher parts of Melbourne, Australia. Writer-director David Michod spent years developing Animal Kingdom, and it was worth the effort: it’s an intense, engrossing film, for sure, but it’s also a believable glimpse of the worst of human nature. Ben Mendelsohn and Jacki Weaver play villains of different kinds; the latter a manipulative grandmother who looks over her brood of criminals, the former a spiteful thief. Crafting moments of incredible tension from simple exchanges, Michod launched himself as a formidable talent with this feature debut.
Ben Affleck - The Town, Argo
Affleck’s period drama-thriller Argo won all kinds of awards, but we’d argue his earlier thrillers were equally well made. Gone Baby Gone was a confident debut and an economical adaptation of Dennis LeHane’s novel. The Town, released in 2010, was a heist thriller that made the most of its Boston setting. One of its key scenes - a bank robbery in which the thieves wear a range of bizarre outfits, including a nun’s habit - is masterfully staged. With Affleck capable of teasing out great performances from his actors and staging effective set-pieces, it’s hardly surprising he’s so heavily involved in making at least one Batman movie for Warner - as well as playing the hero behind the mask.
Anton Corbijn - The American, A Most Wanted Man
The quiet, almost meditative tone of Anton Corbijn’s movies mean they aren’t necessarily to everyone’s taste, but they’re visually arresting and almost seductive in their rhythm and attention to detail. Already a celebrated photographer, Corbijn successfully crossed over into filmmaking with Control, an exquisitely-made drama about Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis. Corbijn took a markedly different direction with The American, a thriller about an ageing contract killer (George Clooney) who hides out in a small Italian town west of Rome. Inevitably, trouble eventually comes calling.
Corbijn’s direction remains gripping because he doesn’t give us huge action scenes to puncture the tension. We can sense the capacity for violence coiled up beneath the hitman’s calm exterior, and Corbijn makes sure we only see rare flashes of that toughness - right up until the superbly-staged climax.
A Most Wanted Man, based on the novel by John le Carre, is a similarly astute study of an isolated yet fascinating character - in this instance, the world-weary German intelligence agent Gunther Bachmann, brilliantly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Tragically, the film proved to be one of the last before Hoffman’s death in 2014.
Paul Greengrass - Green Zone, Captain Phillips
Mention Greengrass’ name, and the director’s frequent use of handheld cameras might immediately spring to mind. But time and again, Greengrass has proved a master of his own personal approach - you only have to look at the muddled, migraine-inducing films of his imitators to see how good a director Greengrass is. Part of the filmmakers’ visual language rather than a gimmick, Greengrass’ camera placement puts the viewer in the middle of the story, whether it’s an amnesiac agent on the run (his Bourne films) or on a hijacked aircraft (the harrowing United 93). While not a huge hit, Green Zone was an intense and intelligent thriller set in occupied Iraq. The acclaimed Captain Phillips, meanwhile, was a perfect showcase for Greengrass’ ability to fuse realism and suspense; the true story of a merchant vessel hijacked by Somali pirates, it is, to quote Greengrass himself, “a contemporary crime story.”
John Hillcoat - Lawless, Triple 9
We can’t help thinking that, with a better marketing push behind it, Triple 9 could have been a much bigger hit when it appeared in cinemas earlier this year. It has a great cast - Chiwetel Ejiofor, Norman Reedus, Anthony Mackie and Aaron Paul as a group of seasoned thieves, Kate Winslet cast against type as a gangland boss - and its heist plot rattles along like an express train.
Hillcoat seems to have the western genre pulsing through his veins, and he excels at creating worlds that are desolate and all-enveloping, whether his subjects are period pieces (The Proposition, Lawless) or post-apocalyptic dramas (The Road). Triple 9 sees Hillcoat make an urban western that is both classic noir and entirely contemporary; his use of real cops and residents around the film’s Atlanta location give his heightened story a grounding that is believable in the moment. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the scene in which Casey Affleck’s cop breaches a building while hunkered down behind a bullet-proof shield. Hillcoat places us right there in the scene with Affleck and the cops sneaking into the building behind him; we sense the claustrophobia and vulnerability.
Hillcoat explained to us in February that this sequence wasn’t initially written this way in the original script; it changed when the director and his team discovered how real-world cops protect themselves in real-world situations. In Triple 9, research and great filmmaking combine to make an unforgettably intense thriller.
Jim Mickel - Cold In July
Seemingly inspired by such neo-Noir thrillers as Red Rock West and Blood Simple, 2014‘s Cold In July is a genre gem from director Jim Mickle (Stake Land, We Are What We Are). Michael C Hall plays an ordinary guy in 80s America who shoots an intruder who breaks into his home, and becomes drawn into a moody conspiracy that takes in crooked cops, porn and a private eye (who's also keen pig-rearer) played by Don Johnson. Constantly shifting between tones, Mickel’s thriller refuses to stick to genre expectations. In one scene, after Hall shoots the burglar dead, Mickel’s camera lingers over the protagonist as he cleans up the blood and glass. It’s touches like these that make Cold In July far more than a typical thriller.
Mickel’s teaming up with Sylvester Stallone next; we’re intrigued to see what that partnership produces.
Martin Scorsese - Shutter Island
As a filmmaker, Scorsese needs no introduction. As a director of thrillers, he’s in a class of his own: from Taxi Driver via the febrile remake of Cape Fear to the sorely underrated Bringing Out The Dead, his films are full of suspense and the threat of violence. Shutter Island, based on the Dennis LeHane novel of the same name, saw Scorsese plunge eagerly into neo-noir territory. A murder mystery set in a mental institution on the titular Shutter Island, its atmosphere is thick with menace. Like a combination of Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man and Adrian Lyne’s cult classic Jacob’s Ladder, Shutter Island’s one of those stories where we never know who we can trust - even the protagonist, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
David Fincher - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl
After the trial by fire that was Alien 3, David Fincher found his footing in the 90s with such hits as Seven and The Game. In an era where thrillers were in much greater abundance, from the middling to the very good, Seven in particular stood out as a genre classic: smartly written, disturbing, repulsive and yet captivating to look at all at once. Fincher’s affinity for weaving atmospheric thrillers continued into the 2010s, first with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a superb retelling of Stieg Larsson’s book which didn’t quite find the appreciative audience deserved, and Gone Girl, an even better movie which - thankfully - became a hit.
Based on Gillian Flynn’s novel (and adapted by the author herself), Gone Girl is both a gripping thriller and a thoroughly twisted relationship drama. Fincher’s mastery of the genre is all here: his millimetre-perfect composition, seamless touches of CGI and subtle yet effective uses of colour and shadow. While not a straight-up masterpiece like the period thriller Zodiac, Gone Girl is still a glossy, smart and blackly funny yarn in the Hitchcock tradition. If there’s one master of the modern thriller currently working, it has to be Fincher.
See related John Hillcoat interview: Triple 9, crime, fear of comic geniuses Jim Mickle interview: Cold In July, thrillers, Argento Jeremy Saulnier interview: Green Room, John Carpenter Jeremy Saulnier interview: making Blue Ruin & good thrillers Denis Villeneuve interview: Sicario, Kurosawa, sci-fi, ugly poetry Morten Tyldum interview: The Imitation Game, Cumberbatch, Headhunters Paul Greengrass interview: Captain Phillips & crime stories Movies Feature Ryan Lambie thrillers 15 Jun 2016 - 06:11 Cold In July Triple 9 Shutter Island Gone Girl David Fincher Martin Scorsese John Hillcoat Directors thrillers movies...
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They’ve made some of the best thrillers of the past six years. We list some of the best modern thriller directors currently working...
Director Guillermo del Toro once described suspense as being about the withholding of information: either a character knows something the audience doesn’t know, or the audience knows something the character doesn’t. That’s a deliciously simple way of describing something that some filmmakers often find difficult to achieve: keeping viewers on the edges of their seats.
The best thrillers leave us scanning the screen with anticipation. They invite us to guess what happens next, but then delight in thwarting expectations. We can all name the great thriller filmmakers of the past - Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, Brian De Palma - but what about the current crop of directors? Here’s our pick of the filmmakers who’ve made some great modern thrillers over the past six years - that is, between the year 2010 and the present.
Jeremy Saulnier - Blue Ruin, Green Room
To think there was once a time when Jeremy Saulnier was seriously quitting the film business.
“To be honest," Saulner told us back in 2014, “Macon and I had really given up on our quest to break into the industry and become legitimate filmmakers. So what we were trying to do with Blue Ruin was archive our 20 year arc and bring it to a close. Really just revisit our stomping grounds and use locations that were near and dear to us and build a narrative out of that.”
Maybe this personal touch explains at least partly why Blue Ruin wound up getting so much attention in Cannes in 2013, signalling not the end of Saulnier and his star Macon Blair’s career, but a brand new chapter. But then again, there’s more than just hand-crafted intimacy in Saulnier’s revenge tale; there’s also its lean, minimal storytelling and the brilliance of its characterisation. Blue Ruin is such an effective thriller because its protagonist is so atypical: sad-eyed, inexperienced with guns, somewhat soft around the edges, Macon Blair’s central character is far from your typical righteous avenger.
Green Room, which emerged in the UK this year, explores a similar clash between very ordinary people and extraordinary violence. A young punk band shout about anarchy and aggression on stage, but they quickly find themselves out of their depth when they’re cornered by a group of bloodthirsty neo-Nazis. In Saulnier’s films, grubby, unseemly locations are matched by often beautiful locked-off shots. Familiar thriller trappings are contrasted by twists of fortune that are often shocking.
Denis Villeneuve - Sicario, Prisoners
Here’s one of those directors who can pack an overwhelming sense of dread in a single image: in Sicario, his searing drug-war thriller from last year, it was the sight of tiny specks of dust falling in the light scything through a window. That single shot proved to be the calm before the storm, as Villeneuve unleashed a salvo of blood-curdling events: an attempted FBI raid on a building gone horribly awry. And this, I think, is the brilliance of Villeneuve’s direction, and why he’s so good at directing thrillers like Sicario or 2013’s superb Prisoners - he understands the rhythm of storytelling, and how scenes of quiet can generate almost unbearable tension.
Another case in point: the highway sequence in Sicario, where Emily Blunt’s FBI agent is stuck in a traffic jam outside one of the most violent cities in the world. Villeneueve makes us feel the stifling heat and the claustrophobia; something nasty’s going to happen, we know that - but it’s the sense of anticipation which makes for such an unforgettable scene.
Prisoners hews closely to the template of a modern mystery thriller, but it’s once again enriched by Villeneuve’s expert pacing and the performances he gets out of his actors. Hugh Jackman’s seldom been better as a father on the hunt for his missing child, while Jake Gyllenhaal mesmerises as a cop scarred by his own private traumas.
Lynne Ramsay - We Need To Talk About Kevin
Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin may be the most effective psychological thriller of recent years. About the difficult relationship between a mother (Tilda Swinton) and her distant, possibly sociopathic son (Ezra Miller), Ramsay’s film is masterfully told from beginning to end - which is impressive, given that the source novel by Lionel Shriver is told via a series of letters. Ramsay takes the raw material from the book and crafts something cinematic and highly disturbing: a study of guilt, sorrow and recrimination. Tension bubbles even in casual conversations around the dinner table. Miller is an eerie, cold-eyed blank. Swinton is peerless. One scene, in which Swinton’s mother comes home in the dead of night, is unforgettable. Here’s hoping Ramsay returns with another feature film very soon.
Morten Tyldum - Headhunters
All kinds of thrillers have emerged from Scandinavia over the past few years, whether on the large or small screen or in book form. Morten Tyldum’s Headhunters is among the very best of them. The fast-paced and deliriously funny story of an art thief who steals a painting from the wrong guy, Headhunters launched Tyldum on an international stage - Alan Turing drama The Imitation Game followed, and the Sony sci-fi film Passengers is up next. It isn’t hard to see why, either: Headhunters shows off Tyldum’s mastery of pace and tone, as his pulp tale hurtles from intense chase scenes to laugh-out-loud black comedy.
Joel Edgerton - The Gift
Granted, Joel Edgerton’s better known as an actor, having turned in some superb performances in the likes of Warrior, Zero Dark Thirty and Warror. But with a single film - The Gift, which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in - Edgerton established himself as a thriller filmmaker of real promise. About a successful, happily married couple whose lives are greatly affected by an old face from the husband’s past, The Gift is an engrossing, unsettling movie with superb performances from Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall as well as Edgerton.
A riff on the ‘killer in our midst’ thrillers of the 80s and 90s - The Stepfather, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and so on - The Gift is all the more effective because of its restraint. We’re never quite sure who the villain of the piece is, at least at first - and Edgerton’s use of the camera leaves us wrong-footed at every turn. The world arguably needs more thrillers from Joel Edgerton.
If you haven’t seen The Gift yet, we’d urge you to track it down.
David Michod - Animal Kingdom
The criminals at play in this true-life crime thriller are all the more chilling because they’re so mundane - a bunch of low-level thieves, murderers and gangsters who prowl around the rougher parts of Melbourne, Australia. Writer-director David Michod spent years developing Animal Kingdom, and it was worth the effort: it’s an intense, engrossing film, for sure, but it’s also a believable glimpse of the worst of human nature. Ben Mendelsohn and Jacki Weaver play villains of different kinds; the latter a manipulative grandmother who looks over her brood of criminals, the former a spiteful thief. Crafting moments of incredible tension from simple exchanges, Michod launched himself as a formidable talent with this feature debut.
Ben Affleck - The Town, Argo
Affleck’s period drama-thriller Argo won all kinds of awards, but we’d argue his earlier thrillers were equally well made. Gone Baby Gone was a confident debut and an economical adaptation of Dennis LeHane’s novel. The Town, released in 2010, was a heist thriller that made the most of its Boston setting. One of its key scenes - a bank robbery in which the thieves wear a range of bizarre outfits, including a nun’s habit - is masterfully staged. With Affleck capable of teasing out great performances from his actors and staging effective set-pieces, it’s hardly surprising he’s so heavily involved in making at least one Batman movie for Warner - as well as playing the hero behind the mask.
Anton Corbijn - The American, A Most Wanted Man
The quiet, almost meditative tone of Anton Corbijn’s movies mean they aren’t necessarily to everyone’s taste, but they’re visually arresting and almost seductive in their rhythm and attention to detail. Already a celebrated photographer, Corbijn successfully crossed over into filmmaking with Control, an exquisitely-made drama about Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis. Corbijn took a markedly different direction with The American, a thriller about an ageing contract killer (George Clooney) who hides out in a small Italian town west of Rome. Inevitably, trouble eventually comes calling.
Corbijn’s direction remains gripping because he doesn’t give us huge action scenes to puncture the tension. We can sense the capacity for violence coiled up beneath the hitman’s calm exterior, and Corbijn makes sure we only see rare flashes of that toughness - right up until the superbly-staged climax.
A Most Wanted Man, based on the novel by John le Carre, is a similarly astute study of an isolated yet fascinating character - in this instance, the world-weary German intelligence agent Gunther Bachmann, brilliantly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Tragically, the film proved to be one of the last before Hoffman’s death in 2014.
Paul Greengrass - Green Zone, Captain Phillips
Mention Greengrass’ name, and the director’s frequent use of handheld cameras might immediately spring to mind. But time and again, Greengrass has proved a master of his own personal approach - you only have to look at the muddled, migraine-inducing films of his imitators to see how good a director Greengrass is. Part of the filmmakers’ visual language rather than a gimmick, Greengrass’ camera placement puts the viewer in the middle of the story, whether it’s an amnesiac agent on the run (his Bourne films) or on a hijacked aircraft (the harrowing United 93). While not a huge hit, Green Zone was an intense and intelligent thriller set in occupied Iraq. The acclaimed Captain Phillips, meanwhile, was a perfect showcase for Greengrass’ ability to fuse realism and suspense; the true story of a merchant vessel hijacked by Somali pirates, it is, to quote Greengrass himself, “a contemporary crime story.”
John Hillcoat - Lawless, Triple 9
We can’t help thinking that, with a better marketing push behind it, Triple 9 could have been a much bigger hit when it appeared in cinemas earlier this year. It has a great cast - Chiwetel Ejiofor, Norman Reedus, Anthony Mackie and Aaron Paul as a group of seasoned thieves, Kate Winslet cast against type as a gangland boss - and its heist plot rattles along like an express train.
Hillcoat seems to have the western genre pulsing through his veins, and he excels at creating worlds that are desolate and all-enveloping, whether his subjects are period pieces (The Proposition, Lawless) or post-apocalyptic dramas (The Road). Triple 9 sees Hillcoat make an urban western that is both classic noir and entirely contemporary; his use of real cops and residents around the film’s Atlanta location give his heightened story a grounding that is believable in the moment. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the scene in which Casey Affleck’s cop breaches a building while hunkered down behind a bullet-proof shield. Hillcoat places us right there in the scene with Affleck and the cops sneaking into the building behind him; we sense the claustrophobia and vulnerability.
Hillcoat explained to us in February that this sequence wasn’t initially written this way in the original script; it changed when the director and his team discovered how real-world cops protect themselves in real-world situations. In Triple 9, research and great filmmaking combine to make an unforgettably intense thriller.
Jim Mickel - Cold In July
Seemingly inspired by such neo-Noir thrillers as Red Rock West and Blood Simple, 2014‘s Cold In July is a genre gem from director Jim Mickle (Stake Land, We Are What We Are). Michael C Hall plays an ordinary guy in 80s America who shoots an intruder who breaks into his home, and becomes drawn into a moody conspiracy that takes in crooked cops, porn and a private eye (who's also keen pig-rearer) played by Don Johnson. Constantly shifting between tones, Mickel’s thriller refuses to stick to genre expectations. In one scene, after Hall shoots the burglar dead, Mickel’s camera lingers over the protagonist as he cleans up the blood and glass. It’s touches like these that make Cold In July far more than a typical thriller.
Mickel’s teaming up with Sylvester Stallone next; we’re intrigued to see what that partnership produces.
Martin Scorsese - Shutter Island
As a filmmaker, Scorsese needs no introduction. As a director of thrillers, he’s in a class of his own: from Taxi Driver via the febrile remake of Cape Fear to the sorely underrated Bringing Out The Dead, his films are full of suspense and the threat of violence. Shutter Island, based on the Dennis LeHane novel of the same name, saw Scorsese plunge eagerly into neo-noir territory. A murder mystery set in a mental institution on the titular Shutter Island, its atmosphere is thick with menace. Like a combination of Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man and Adrian Lyne’s cult classic Jacob’s Ladder, Shutter Island’s one of those stories where we never know who we can trust - even the protagonist, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
David Fincher - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl
After the trial by fire that was Alien 3, David Fincher found his footing in the 90s with such hits as Seven and The Game. In an era where thrillers were in much greater abundance, from the middling to the very good, Seven in particular stood out as a genre classic: smartly written, disturbing, repulsive and yet captivating to look at all at once. Fincher’s affinity for weaving atmospheric thrillers continued into the 2010s, first with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a superb retelling of Stieg Larsson’s book which didn’t quite find the appreciative audience deserved, and Gone Girl, an even better movie which - thankfully - became a hit.
Based on Gillian Flynn’s novel (and adapted by the author herself), Gone Girl is both a gripping thriller and a thoroughly twisted relationship drama. Fincher’s mastery of the genre is all here: his millimetre-perfect composition, seamless touches of CGI and subtle yet effective uses of colour and shadow. While not a straight-up masterpiece like the period thriller Zodiac, Gone Girl is still a glossy, smart and blackly funny yarn in the Hitchcock tradition. If there’s one master of the modern thriller currently working, it has to be Fincher.
See related John Hillcoat interview: Triple 9, crime, fear of comic geniuses Jim Mickle interview: Cold In July, thrillers, Argento Jeremy Saulnier interview: Green Room, John Carpenter Jeremy Saulnier interview: making Blue Ruin & good thrillers Denis Villeneuve interview: Sicario, Kurosawa, sci-fi, ugly poetry Morten Tyldum interview: The Imitation Game, Cumberbatch, Headhunters Paul Greengrass interview: Captain Phillips & crime stories Movies Feature Ryan Lambie thrillers 15 Jun 2016 - 06:11 Cold In July Triple 9 Shutter Island Gone Girl David Fincher Martin Scorsese John Hillcoat Directors thrillers movies...
- 6/14/2016
- Den of Geek
Odd List Simon Brew Ryan Lambie 17 Feb 2014 - 06:24
Whether they're bleak, shocking or sad, the endings to these 22 movies have haunted us for years...
Warning: There are spoilers to the endings for every film we talk about in this article. So if you don't want to know an ending for a film, then don't read that entry.
It's probably best to start by talking about what this article isn't. It's not a list of the best movie endings, the best twists, the most depressing endings or anything like that. Instead, we're focusing here on the endings that seeped into our brain and stayed there for some time after we'd seen the film. The endings that provoke in an interesting way, and haunt you for days afterwards.
As such, whilst not every ending we're going to talk about here is a flat out classic - although lots of them are...
Whether they're bleak, shocking or sad, the endings to these 22 movies have haunted us for years...
Warning: There are spoilers to the endings for every film we talk about in this article. So if you don't want to know an ending for a film, then don't read that entry.
It's probably best to start by talking about what this article isn't. It's not a list of the best movie endings, the best twists, the most depressing endings or anything like that. Instead, we're focusing here on the endings that seeped into our brain and stayed there for some time after we'd seen the film. The endings that provoke in an interesting way, and haunt you for days afterwards.
As such, whilst not every ending we're going to talk about here is a flat out classic - although lots of them are...
- 2/14/2014
- by ryanlambie
- Den of Geek
From new voices like NoViolet Bulawayo to rediscovered old voices like James Salter, from Dave Eggers's satire to David Thomson's history of film, writers, Observer critics and others pick their favourite reads of 2013. And they tell us what they hope to find under the tree …
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida,...
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida,...
- 11/24/2013
- by Ali Smith, Robert McCrum, Tim Adams, Kate Kellaway, Rachel Cooke, Sebastian Faulks, Jackie Kay
- The Guardian - Film News
Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Mohsin Hamid, Ruth Rendell, Tom Stoppard, Malcolm Gladwell, Eleanor Catton and many more recommend the books that impressed them this year
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate) is a brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China. It made me think and laugh. I also love Dave Eggers' The Circle (Hamish Hamilton), which is a sharp-eyed and funny satire about the obsession with "sharing" our lives through technology. It's convincing and a little creepy.
William Boyd
By strange coincidence two of the most intriguing art books I read this year had the word "Breakfast" in their titles. They were Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Greig (Jonathan Cape) and Breakfast at Sotheby's by Philip Hook (Particular). Greig's fascinating, intimate biography of Lucian Freud was a revelation. Every question I had about Freud – from the aesthetic to the intrusively gossipy – was...
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate) is a brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China. It made me think and laugh. I also love Dave Eggers' The Circle (Hamish Hamilton), which is a sharp-eyed and funny satire about the obsession with "sharing" our lives through technology. It's convincing and a little creepy.
William Boyd
By strange coincidence two of the most intriguing art books I read this year had the word "Breakfast" in their titles. They were Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Greig (Jonathan Cape) and Breakfast at Sotheby's by Philip Hook (Particular). Greig's fascinating, intimate biography of Lucian Freud was a revelation. Every question I had about Freud – from the aesthetic to the intrusively gossipy – was...
- 11/23/2013
- by Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Mohsin Hamid, Tom Stoppard, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, William Boyd, Bill Bryson, Shami Chakrabarti, Sarah Churchwell, Antonia Fraser, Mark Haddon, Robert Harris, Max Hastings, Philip Hensher, Simon Hoggart, AM Homes, John Lanchester, Mark Lawson, Robert Macfarlane, Andrew Motion, Ian Rankin, Lionel Shriver, Helen Simpson, Colm Tóibín, Richard Ford, John Gray, David Kynaston, Penelope Lively, Pankaj Mishra, Blake Morrison, Susie Orbach
- The Guardian - Film News
Books and films have been joined at the hip ever since the earliest days of cinema, and adaptations of novels have regularly provided audiences with the classier end of the film spectrum. Here, the Guardian and Observer's critics pick the 10 best
• Top 10 family movies
• Top 10 war movies
• Top 10 teen movies
• Top 10 superhero movies
• Top 10 westerns
• Top 10 documentaries
• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s
10. Planet of the Apes
Although the source novel, La Planète des Singes, was written by Frenchman Pierre Boule and originally reached its futureshock climax in Paris, this enduring sci-fi fantasy is profoundly American, putting Charlton Heston's steel-jawed patriotism to incredible use. It also holds up surprisingly well as a jarring allegory for the population's fears over escalating cold war tensions.
Beginning with a spaceship crash-landing on an unknown planet after years of cryogenic sleep, Franklin J Schaffner's film soon gets into gear as Heston's upstanding...
• Top 10 family movies
• Top 10 war movies
• Top 10 teen movies
• Top 10 superhero movies
• Top 10 westerns
• Top 10 documentaries
• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s
10. Planet of the Apes
Although the source novel, La Planète des Singes, was written by Frenchman Pierre Boule and originally reached its futureshock climax in Paris, this enduring sci-fi fantasy is profoundly American, putting Charlton Heston's steel-jawed patriotism to incredible use. It also holds up surprisingly well as a jarring allegory for the population's fears over escalating cold war tensions.
Beginning with a spaceship crash-landing on an unknown planet after years of cryogenic sleep, Franklin J Schaffner's film soon gets into gear as Heston's upstanding...
- 11/15/2013
- The Guardian - Film News
Australian actor currently riding high with rave reviews for Blue Jasmine is to direct adaptation of Herman Koch's 2009 bestseller
Cate Blanchett will make her debut as a director on a dark thriller based on Herman Koch's bestselling 2009 novel, The Dinner, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Blanchett, currently riding high on the back of rave reviews for her barnstorming performance in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, will work from a screenplay adapted by Oren Moverman (Rampart, The Messenger). Koch's book has been compared to Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, itself the basis for a critically-acclaimed 2011 film by Lynne Ramsay.
Described as a novel which explores how far people will go to protect their children, The Dinner tells the story of two middle class families, each with a 15-year-old son caught up in the brutal murder of a homeless woman whose death was captured on mobile phones.
Cate Blanchett will make her debut as a director on a dark thriller based on Herman Koch's bestselling 2009 novel, The Dinner, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Blanchett, currently riding high on the back of rave reviews for her barnstorming performance in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, will work from a screenplay adapted by Oren Moverman (Rampart, The Messenger). Koch's book has been compared to Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, itself the basis for a critically-acclaimed 2011 film by Lynne Ramsay.
Described as a novel which explores how far people will go to protect their children, The Dinner tells the story of two middle class families, each with a 15-year-old son caught up in the brutal murder of a homeless woman whose death was captured on mobile phones.
- 9/20/2013
- by Ben Child
- The Guardian - Film News
Independent was founded by CEO Luc Roeg who has over twenty years experience in the film business. His team of highly motivated and experienced professionals with expertise in project development, production, structured finance, sales and marketing has also recently established a U.K. Distribution specializing in the acquisition and distribution of content across all media channels in the U.K. (theatrical, TV, DVD, digital, etc.).
They most recently produced John Banville’s Booker Prize winning novel, The Sea which is currently in post production starring Ciarán Hinds, Charlotte Rampling, Rufus Sewell and Sinéad Cusack. Previously, having produced the Tolstoy - based film Boxing Day which had its World Premiere at Venice last year. In 2011 they produced the critically acclaimed adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly. The film had its world premiere in competition in Cannes and won the Best British Film Award at the London Critic's Circle.
In addition to developing, producing and distributing its own content, Independent also acquires third party rights to manage through its sales and distribution divisions. Latest titles include Roman Coppola’s A Glimpse Inside The Mind Of Charles Swan, Sean Ellis’ Sundance Audience Award winner Metro Manila and Multi Award winner documentary AI WeiWei: Never Sorry. The company has an excellent network of buyers all over the world and attends all relevant markets throughout the year showcasing highly acclaimed films.
For more information on their films and Cannes line up go here...
They most recently produced John Banville’s Booker Prize winning novel, The Sea which is currently in post production starring Ciarán Hinds, Charlotte Rampling, Rufus Sewell and Sinéad Cusack. Previously, having produced the Tolstoy - based film Boxing Day which had its World Premiere at Venice last year. In 2011 they produced the critically acclaimed adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly. The film had its world premiere in competition in Cannes and won the Best British Film Award at the London Critic's Circle.
In addition to developing, producing and distributing its own content, Independent also acquires third party rights to manage through its sales and distribution divisions. Latest titles include Roman Coppola’s A Glimpse Inside The Mind Of Charles Swan, Sean Ellis’ Sundance Audience Award winner Metro Manila and Multi Award winner documentary AI WeiWei: Never Sorry. The company has an excellent network of buyers all over the world and attends all relevant markets throughout the year showcasing highly acclaimed films.
For more information on their films and Cannes line up go here...
- 5/21/2013
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
The rise of Lena Dunham, Adele and Christina Hendricks might challenge the tyranny of thin, but our obsession with body size is still out of control, argues Lionel Shriver
We're used to actors stripping on camera by now, so, in the many episodes of Girls in which Lena Dunham tugs her dress over her head, what's shocking isn't the bare breasts, but the belly: it's convex. Though Dunham could hardly be called fat, her stomach displays a distinct little jiggle. Has she no shame? No, as a matter of fact. She doesn't.
By increments, the tyranny of the thin is seeing cultural pushback. The bouncing roly-poly Beth Ditto and the formidable what-are-you-looking-at? Christina Hendricks in Mad Men project an audacious aesthetic alternative to the functional-anorexic ideal. So incendiary has the issue of physical size become in the west that weight takes on the character of a political statement. The rise...
We're used to actors stripping on camera by now, so, in the many episodes of Girls in which Lena Dunham tugs her dress over her head, what's shocking isn't the bare breasts, but the belly: it's convex. Though Dunham could hardly be called fat, her stomach displays a distinct little jiggle. Has she no shame? No, as a matter of fact. She doesn't.
By increments, the tyranny of the thin is seeing cultural pushback. The bouncing roly-poly Beth Ditto and the formidable what-are-you-looking-at? Christina Hendricks in Mad Men project an audacious aesthetic alternative to the functional-anorexic ideal. So incendiary has the issue of physical size become in the west that weight takes on the character of a political statement. The rise...
- 5/11/2013
- by Lionel Shriver
- The Guardian - Film News
Feature Ryan Lambie 21 Mar 2013 - 05:53
As Jude Law becomes the latest name to leave the indie western, Jane Got A Gun, Ryan looks at the production's continuing drama...
When news broke on Tuesday that director Lynne Ramsay had failed to turn up for the first day of shooting on her latest film, Jane Got A Gun, the story immediately conjured faintly comical images in our tiny minds. Of Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton and the rest of the 150-strong cast and crew standing around on a set somewhere in Santa Fe, drinking coffee out of polystyrene cups and wondering what the hell was going on. "It's just going to voice mail," producer Scott Steindorff says in our imaginary version of things, as he walks anxiously in circles with his mobile phone.
But really, the continued reports from the set of are but the tip of what we suspect is a...
As Jude Law becomes the latest name to leave the indie western, Jane Got A Gun, Ryan looks at the production's continuing drama...
When news broke on Tuesday that director Lynne Ramsay had failed to turn up for the first day of shooting on her latest film, Jane Got A Gun, the story immediately conjured faintly comical images in our tiny minds. Of Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton and the rest of the 150-strong cast and crew standing around on a set somewhere in Santa Fe, drinking coffee out of polystyrene cups and wondering what the hell was going on. "It's just going to voice mail," producer Scott Steindorff says in our imaginary version of things, as he walks anxiously in circles with his mobile phone.
But really, the continued reports from the set of are but the tip of what we suspect is a...
- 3/20/2013
- by ryanlambie
- Den of Geek
BBC sports presenter, praised for knowledgeable, engaging style during London 2012, wins achievement of the year
Capping a summer that was almost as golden for her as it was for the winning athletes, Clare Balding was recognised on Friday for the Olympic and Paralympic coverage that prompted national admiration of her presenting skills, as she collected achievement of the year at the Women in Film and Television awards.
The sports presenter – praised for her knowledgeable, engaging style during London 2012 – was the best known of three women honoured for their roles in broadcasting the Olympic Games.
Joining her on the awards podium were Tracey Seaward, who took the producer award for her work on Danny Boyle's spectacular opening ceremony, while Barbara Slater, the BBC's first female director of sport, won the inspirational woman award.
"I take the award on behalf of all of the women in sports television," Balding said after accepting her award.
Capping a summer that was almost as golden for her as it was for the winning athletes, Clare Balding was recognised on Friday for the Olympic and Paralympic coverage that prompted national admiration of her presenting skills, as she collected achievement of the year at the Women in Film and Television awards.
The sports presenter – praised for her knowledgeable, engaging style during London 2012 – was the best known of three women honoured for their roles in broadcasting the Olympic Games.
Joining her on the awards podium were Tracey Seaward, who took the producer award for her work on Danny Boyle's spectacular opening ceremony, while Barbara Slater, the BBC's first female director of sport, won the inspirational woman award.
"I take the award on behalf of all of the women in sports television," Balding said after accepting her award.
- 12/8/2012
- by Vicky Frost
- The Guardian - Film News
(In Alphabetical order)
Meek’s Cutoff
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Kelly Reichardt had a stellar if hushed 2000s, and then she commenced the current decade with a film that is already beginning to feel like an unsung modern classic. Meek’s Cutoff is one of those exhilarating instances in which a marriage of disparate styles produces something tricky to imagine, but perfect to behold: a period piece set in mid-1800’s Oregon, shot in academy ratio and classically beautiful for it, but with Reichardt’s signature severe naturalism. The result is so stark and understated that it begins to feel graceful, weirdly epic. A small caravan of settlers (featuring Michelle Williams and a once again devout Paul Dano) hires a guide, big-talking Stephen Meek, to help them navigate the Oregon Trail. As the terrain grows less forgiving and water evermore scarce, the settlers begin to wonder if the route Meek...
Meek’s Cutoff
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Kelly Reichardt had a stellar if hushed 2000s, and then she commenced the current decade with a film that is already beginning to feel like an unsung modern classic. Meek’s Cutoff is one of those exhilarating instances in which a marriage of disparate styles produces something tricky to imagine, but perfect to behold: a period piece set in mid-1800’s Oregon, shot in academy ratio and classically beautiful for it, but with Reichardt’s signature severe naturalism. The result is so stark and understated that it begins to feel graceful, weirdly epic. A small caravan of settlers (featuring Michelle Williams and a once again devout Paul Dano) hires a guide, big-talking Stephen Meek, to help them navigate the Oregon Trail. As the terrain grows less forgiving and water evermore scarce, the settlers begin to wonder if the route Meek...
- 9/26/2012
- by Ricky
- SoundOnSight
A female vicar will join Keith Allen in taking ecstasy on a controversial new Channel 4 programme about drugs. The minister will join the 'Trainspotting' actor, award-winning author Lionel Shriver, a former MP and an ex-sas soldier to take 83mg of Mdma, the pure form of ecstasy, on 'Drugs Live: The Ecstasy Trial'. A show source told the Daily Mirror newspaper: ''We've got a real mix of people taking drugs from all walks of life, it's going to be like a drugs version of 'Big Brother' and will be must-see TV. ''Where else would you see a vicar, Keith Allen and an...
- 7/19/2012
- Virgin Media - TV
A female vicar will join Keith Allen in taking ecstasy on a controversial new Channel 4 programme about drugs. The minister will join the 'Trainspotting' actor, award-winning author Lionel Shriver, a former MP and an ex-sas soldier to take 83mg of Mdma, the pure form of ecstasy, on 'Drugs Live: The Ecstasy Trial'. A show source told the Daily Mirror newspaper: ''We've got a real mix of people taking drugs from all walks of life, it's going to be like a drugs version of 'Big Brother' and will be must-see TV. ''Where else would you see a vicar, Keith Allen and an...
- 7/18/2012
- Virgin Media - TV
Director Lynne Ramsay’s last film was 2002’s Morvern Callar and involved a woman’s psychological struggle with her life. Her new film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, is an equally troubling portrait of a mother struggling with a hateful child and a husband who refuses to see the light.
Eva and Franklin (Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly) are a happy young couple in New York City with thriving careers and a cozy apartment. This is soon upended when they welcome a baby boy named Kevin. As an infant, he screams and cries in the company of his mother, only to quiet down and coo around his father.
Kevin is an unhealthy child psychologically, as he has no friends or interest in knowing anyone, including his parents. He quickly draws a line in the sand between his parents, manipulating and pitting them against each other as the he gets older.
Eva and Franklin (Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly) are a happy young couple in New York City with thriving careers and a cozy apartment. This is soon upended when they welcome a baby boy named Kevin. As an infant, he screams and cries in the company of his mother, only to quiet down and coo around his father.
Kevin is an unhealthy child psychologically, as he has no friends or interest in knowing anyone, including his parents. He quickly draws a line in the sand between his parents, manipulating and pitting them against each other as the he gets older.
- 6/21/2012
- by Derek Botelho
- DailyDead
Chicago – Many critics failed to take Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” seriously, dismissing it as an art house retread of “The Omen.” Such a simplistic label fails to take into account the film’s carefully textured portrait of a deeply fractured mother-son relationship. Though the film takes its premise to melodramatic extremes, it does harbor considerable insight into the repercussions of a disconnect between parent and child.
Eva (Tilda Swinton) is the sort of mother who causes strangers to wince while passing her in the supermarket. She can barely contain the intense dislike that she feels for her child. Motherhood is a form of entrapment in her eyes, and her attempts to care for her young son lack any sense of genuine compassion. When she snaps on a hollow smile to calm her crying son, the moment is both chilling and darkly funny. It only gets...
Eva (Tilda Swinton) is the sort of mother who causes strangers to wince while passing her in the supermarket. She can barely contain the intense dislike that she feels for her child. Motherhood is a form of entrapment in her eyes, and her attempts to care for her young son lack any sense of genuine compassion. When she snaps on a hollow smile to calm her crying son, the moment is both chilling and darkly funny. It only gets...
- 6/1/2012
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
Lynne Ramsay likes to trudge through the dark depths of the human spirit, and after a nine year period without a film in the can, she’s made a return to form that surpasses her early work in nearly every way. We Need To Talk About Kevin is a masterfully made, soul pummeling psychological drama about the depth of motherly responsibility, and the malicious psychopathy of unwavering evil. Her third feature shines with a power house performance by the always wonderful Tilda Swinton, as well as strong showings by a cast of different aged kids (from eldest to youngest – Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell, and Rocky Duer) that portray her utterly terrifying son with unhinged brilliance. But it’s not just the astute acting that shines. Ramsay’s choice in seamless non-linearity, and a striking visual palette that constantly prophesies the violent climax we all knew was inevitable, culminate to make...
- 5/30/2012
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Director Lynne Ramsay made a long-anticipated return to filmmaking, after a nine-year absence, in 2011 with "We Need To Talk About Kevin," and it was worth the wait. A tough but equally rewarding film, the picture starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly and Ezra Miller tells the tale of a mother's fractured relationship with her son, which grows more distant and hostile before he commits an act of unspeakable horror. The film premiered in-competition at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and went on to earn accolades from critics and a plethora of awards and nominations. And we've got some pretty great prizes for fans of the film.
One lucky winner will receive a poster of the film signed by Tilda Swinton, the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack of the movie, as well as the novel by Lionel Shriver. 2 runners-up will snag prize packs that include the novel and combo Blu-ray/DVD.
One lucky winner will receive a poster of the film signed by Tilda Swinton, the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack of the movie, as well as the novel by Lionel Shriver. 2 runners-up will snag prize packs that include the novel and combo Blu-ray/DVD.
- 5/29/2012
- by Kevin Jagernauth
- The Playlist
This week on DVD/Blu-ray: A mother/son drama you should avoid at all costs from watching with your mother; Ralph Fiennes' stellar directorial debut; a touching documentary on the life of Harry Belafonte; a revealing look at legendary designer Halston; and two Ingmar Bergman classics restored by The Criterion Collection. #1. "We Need To Talk About Kevin" The incomparable Tilda Swinton gives one of her most memorable leading turns in "We Need to Talk About Kevin," Lynne's Ramsay anticipated follow-up to "Movern Callar," which came out a decade ago. Luckily Ramsay's lost none of her edge, and she has her perfect collaborator in Swinton. Based on Lionel Shriver's 2003 award-winning novel, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" stars Swinton as a free-spirited and career orientated woman who gives birth to a boy she never warms to. The film is told in flashbacks, leading up to a horrifying incidient of which her son,...
- 5/29/2012
- by Nigel M Smith
- Indiewire
Since starring in the surprise hit "Black Swan," and winning an Oscar for her troubles, Natalie Portman's been decidedly picky about her choice of roles. It's partly because she became a mother last year, and has been taking a little time off. But also, she's clearly not wanted to rush into a decision, and while films like the Wachowski's "Jupiter Ascending" and Ridley Scott's "The Counselor" have chased the actress, she seemingly turned the projects down. She has decided to return to acting at last: she'll spend the second half of the year shooting Terrence Malick's double-header "The Knight of Cups" and the film formerly known as "Lawless," before she segues into the contractual obligations of "Thor 2." But it's clearly harder than ever to get the actress' attention.
Unless you're "We Need To Talk About Kevin" director Lynne Ramsay, that is. The Hollywood Reporter bring news that Ramsay,...
Unless you're "We Need To Talk About Kevin" director Lynne Ramsay, that is. The Hollywood Reporter bring news that Ramsay,...
- 5/22/2012
- by Oliver Lyttelton
- The Playlist
We were very much on the fence for a long time in terms of covering We Need to Talk About Kevin, and I'm glad we came to our senses because what we have here is a truly chilling tale of madness. The good news? You can see it for yourself this May!
We Need to Talk About Kevin stars Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell, and Ashley Gerasimovich.
Per DVD Active, Oscilloscope Pictures has announced DVD ($29.99) and Blu-ray ($34.99) releases of We Need to Talk About Kevin for May 29th. Extras will include extra footage from the famous "La Tomatina" tomato festival in Spain, an interview with author Lionel Shriver, two featurettes ("Behind the Scenes of Kevin", "In Conversation - Telluride Film Festival Honors Tilda Swinton"), the original theatrical trailer, and an exclusive essay by psychologist Mark Stafford.
Synopsis
Kevin's mother struggles to love her strange child, despite...
We Need to Talk About Kevin stars Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell, and Ashley Gerasimovich.
Per DVD Active, Oscilloscope Pictures has announced DVD ($29.99) and Blu-ray ($34.99) releases of We Need to Talk About Kevin for May 29th. Extras will include extra footage from the famous "La Tomatina" tomato festival in Spain, an interview with author Lionel Shriver, two featurettes ("Behind the Scenes of Kevin", "In Conversation - Telluride Film Festival Honors Tilda Swinton"), the original theatrical trailer, and an exclusive essay by psychologist Mark Stafford.
Synopsis
Kevin's mother struggles to love her strange child, despite...
- 4/2/2012
- by Uncle Creepy
- DreadCentral.com
★★★★★ Arguably the best film of 2011 - yet heinously overlooked at both the BAFTAs and Academy Awards - We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay's groundbreaking adaptation of the Lionel Shriver novel, finally makes its way onto DVD and Blu-ray this week. Featuring a startling central performance from the birdlike Tilda Swinton, plus fine support from John C. Reilly and Ezra Miller, the emotional and physical impact of Ramsay's latest truly needs to be seen (and actually felt) to be believed.
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- 2/27/2012
- by CineVue
- CineVue
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Quite deliberately, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) provokes discussion. Why is Kevin evil? Was he born that way? Did his mother make him that way by withholding love? Is he a manifestation of his mother’s own hatred toward humanity? Questions one could argue that director Lynne Ramsay and screenwriter Rory Kinnear (adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel) never intended their audience to be able to answer satisfactorily.
To describe the film as ‘arty’ would be doing everyone involved a disservice, but there is no getting away from its obvious stylisation. Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, production designer Judy Becker and costume designer Catherine George deserve credit for combing their talents to form a cohesive palette which incorporates flashes, splashes and swathes of deep red. Incidentally, Lynne Ramsay...
Quite deliberately, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) provokes discussion. Why is Kevin evil? Was he born that way? Did his mother make him that way by withholding love? Is he a manifestation of his mother’s own hatred toward humanity? Questions one could argue that director Lynne Ramsay and screenwriter Rory Kinnear (adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel) never intended their audience to be able to answer satisfactorily.
To describe the film as ‘arty’ would be doing everyone involved a disservice, but there is no getting away from its obvious stylisation. Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, production designer Judy Becker and costume designer Catherine George deserve credit for combing their talents to form a cohesive palette which incorporates flashes, splashes and swathes of deep red. Incidentally, Lynne Ramsay...
- 2/27/2012
- by Chris Laverty
- Clothes on Film
We Need to Talk About Kevin; The Greatest Movie Ever Sold; A Useful Life; In Time; Jack Goes Boating
Whatever happens at the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood tonight, you can be sure of one thing: there won't be any statuettes handed out to the very best film of the year. While the board-sweeping success of a near-silent B&W beauty is a reason to be cheerful, not even the rule-breaking brilliance of Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist can outshine the excellence of my favourite film of 2011, which saw the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay making a triumphant return to our screens after a nine-year absence. Welcome back!
Superbly adapted (by screenwriters Ramsay and Rory Kinnear) from Lionel Shriver's supposedly unfilmable bestseller, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Artificial Eye, 15) inhabits a painterly netherworld pitched somewhere between the subtle hues of European psychodrama and the bolder strokes of populist paedophobic horror.
Whatever happens at the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood tonight, you can be sure of one thing: there won't be any statuettes handed out to the very best film of the year. While the board-sweeping success of a near-silent B&W beauty is a reason to be cheerful, not even the rule-breaking brilliance of Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist can outshine the excellence of my favourite film of 2011, which saw the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay making a triumphant return to our screens after a nine-year absence. Welcome back!
Superbly adapted (by screenwriters Ramsay and Rory Kinnear) from Lionel Shriver's supposedly unfilmable bestseller, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Artificial Eye, 15) inhabits a painterly netherworld pitched somewhere between the subtle hues of European psychodrama and the bolder strokes of populist paedophobic horror.
- 2/26/2012
- by Mark Kermode
- The Guardian - Film News
The much-anticipated film based on Lionel Shriver's Orange Prize-winning novel about a mother at odds with her dangerous son.
London Film Festival best picture winner We Need To Talk About Kevin is adapted from a best-selling novel by Lionel Shriver, which has garnered legions of morbidly fascinated followers since publication eight years ago. This immensely disturbing tale is the closest immensely disturbing tales come to being mainstream classics.
The film opens to show Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) living by herself in a ramshackle...
London Film Festival best picture winner We Need To Talk About Kevin is adapted from a best-selling novel by Lionel Shriver, which has garnered legions of morbidly fascinated followers since publication eight years ago. This immensely disturbing tale is the closest immensely disturbing tales come to being mainstream classics.
The film opens to show Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) living by herself in a ramshackle...
- 2/21/2012
- by Sophie Monks Kaufman
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
What if you were scared of your own child? We Need to Talk About Kevin, based on Lionel Shriver's award-winning novel, is an intense glance at the relationship between Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) and her son Kevin (played in teenage form by Ezra Miller). The editing is stream-of-consciousness style, as memories of Eva's pre-motherhood life mix with Kevin's childhood mixed with her current life as a social outcast. The viewer has to piece together why she's now living alone in a town full of people who detest her so strongly.
Through glimpses/flashbacks, we see Kevin's antipathy towards others start at a young age. Try as she might, Eva cannot connect with him. She rolls a ball to her toddler son and he just blankly stares back at her. Her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) seems to have no problem getting along with their son, and is oblivious to Eva's worries.
Through glimpses/flashbacks, we see Kevin's antipathy towards others start at a young age. Try as she might, Eva cannot connect with him. She rolls a ball to her toddler son and he just blankly stares back at her. Her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) seems to have no problem getting along with their son, and is oblivious to Eva's worries.
- 2/2/2012
- by Elizabeth Stoddard
- Slackerwood
In The Library Book, published for National Libraries Day on 4 February, twenty-three of the UK’s most outstanding writers describe libraries real or imagined, past, present, and future – why they matter and to whom.
Recognising that without libraries we would not have the writers of today and tomorrow, The Library Book’s contributors are all donating their royalties to The Reading Agency, the independent charity working to inspire more people to read more.
Included in the book are Anita Anand, Julian Barnes, Bella Bathurst, Alan Bennett, Michael Brooks, James Brown, Ann Cleeves, Stephen Fry, Seth Godin, Susan Hill, Tom Holland, Hardeep Singh Kohli, Lucy Mangan, Val McDermid, China Miéville, Caitlin Moran, Kate Mosse, Julie Myerson, Bali Rai, Lionel Shriver, Karin Slaughter, Zadie Smith and Nicky Wire.
Read more...
Recognising that without libraries we would not have the writers of today and tomorrow, The Library Book’s contributors are all donating their royalties to The Reading Agency, the independent charity working to inspire more people to read more.
Included in the book are Anita Anand, Julian Barnes, Bella Bathurst, Alan Bennett, Michael Brooks, James Brown, Ann Cleeves, Stephen Fry, Seth Godin, Susan Hill, Tom Holland, Hardeep Singh Kohli, Lucy Mangan, Val McDermid, China Miéville, Caitlin Moran, Kate Mosse, Julie Myerson, Bali Rai, Lionel Shriver, Karin Slaughter, Zadie Smith and Nicky Wire.
Read more...
- 2/2/2012
- Look to the Stars
Horror fans might not be familiar with the name Ezra Miller, but once Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk about Kevin hits theaters on February 3rd, they will. Co-starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, directed by Ramsay (Morvern Callar), and based on the novel by Lionel Shriver, Miller plays the titular Kevin, a teenage sociopath who ultimately commits an atrocious crime at his high school. The film is told primarily through the perspective of his mother Eva (Swinton), as the two engage in a vicious cycle of resentment born of desperation. We Need to Talk about Kevin isn't a psychological horror film in the traditional sense; instead it's a full-on investigation of the parental psyche. The film, like the relationship between...
- 2/1/2012
- FEARnet
There’s the distinct feeling as 2011 has now come and gone that it will not be remembered among the stronger years of recent cinema; countless prestige pics (The Iron Lady, J. Edgar, The Lady) proved disappointing, more so than is regularly anticipated, while blockbuster fare, though solid, didn’t deliver any Inception or Toy Story 3-caliber outings. There were, however, some wonderful genre films populating the later months of the year, including peculiarly tantalising sci-fi and sports films, as well as the British horror scene’s most diverting entry in years. Add to that some profound meditations on parenting, the film industry, memory, addiction, animal cruelty and domestic abuse, and you have what is nevertheless as diverse a year as any, even if it possibly lacked that one affirmative zeitgeist film that is going to be talked about not only in art house circles but in pub discussions for years to come.
- 1/25/2012
- by Shaun Munro
- Obsessed with Film
With the ever-reliable award season upon us, here are my favourite movies of 2011. All of these films were released in the UK in 2011 (which is a long way of saying I haven’t seen Shame). That still doesn’t mean I saw all the year’s releases, and there are probably movies that equally deserved a place, but these are all films I have either already seen more than once or eagerly look forward to watching again.
10. Midnight In Paris
I remember Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild New Year’s Eve party. It was April. Scott had just written Great Expectations, and Gertrude Stein and I read it and we said it was a good book but there was no need to have written it, because Charles Dickens had already written it. And we laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth. –
Woody Allen,...
10. Midnight In Paris
I remember Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild New Year’s Eve party. It was April. Scott had just written Great Expectations, and Gertrude Stein and I read it and we said it was a good book but there was no need to have written it, because Charles Dickens had already written it. And we laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth. –
Woody Allen,...
- 1/22/2012
- by Adam Whyte
- Obsessed with Film
Silent tribute to Hollywood's golden era takes three prizes at critics' awards, continuing promising run up to Oscars
The Artist continued its promising run up to the Oscars after taking three major prizes at the London Film Critics' Circle awards.
Michel Hazanavicius's silent, black-and-white tribute to Hollywood's golden era took home gongs for film of the year, director of the year and actor of the year (Jean Dujardin) at the ceremony in central London, ahead the announcement of the Oscar nominations next Tuesday. The evening's other big winner was Golden Globe-winning Iranian film A Separation, which took the foreign language film of the year, screenwriter of the year award for its director, Asghar Farhadi, and supporting actress of the year for Sareh Bayet.
No other film was garlanded with more than one award. British film of the year went to Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin,...
The Artist continued its promising run up to the Oscars after taking three major prizes at the London Film Critics' Circle awards.
Michel Hazanavicius's silent, black-and-white tribute to Hollywood's golden era took home gongs for film of the year, director of the year and actor of the year (Jean Dujardin) at the ceremony in central London, ahead the announcement of the Oscar nominations next Tuesday. The evening's other big winner was Golden Globe-winning Iranian film A Separation, which took the foreign language film of the year, screenwriter of the year award for its director, Asghar Farhadi, and supporting actress of the year for Sareh Bayet.
No other film was garlanded with more than one award. British film of the year went to Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin,...
- 1/20/2012
- by Ben Child
- The Guardian - Film News
Written as a series of confessional letters from a wife to her husband in the aftermath of their son’s Columbine-like killing spree, Lionel Shriver’s harrowing novel We Need To Talk About Kevin shocks more as a portrait of maternal ambivalence than for its evocation of school massacres. The narrator’s misgivings about being a parent—and the way those misgivings might or might not have affected how her child turned out—violates a cultural taboo; the irony embedded in the title is that she can’t talk about Kevin, because the shame associated with lamenting her own child ...
- 1/12/2012
- avclub.com
We Need to Talk About Kevin represents an immensely exciting piece of filmmaking from Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar). That might seem like an odd label for this adaptation of Lionel Shriver‘s best-selling novel, considering the relentlessly harrowing subject matter in question, but it’s hard to come up with any other phrase to describe the sheer vivacity of Ramsay‘s directorial approach. This is indeed a film that keeps your emotions in constant flux — terrorized by the actions of the titular character in one moment, happily floored by Ramsay’s consistently fresh choices the next.
It’s worth mentioning, too, that Ramsay, along with Rory Kinnear, wrote the film’s screenplay, which is a unique feat of adaptation in its own right. Like a few recent films — Sean Durkin‘s Martha Marcy May Marlene jumps immediately to mind — We Need to Talk About Kevin bleeds the past into the present,...
It’s worth mentioning, too, that Ramsay, along with Rory Kinnear, wrote the film’s screenplay, which is a unique feat of adaptation in its own right. Like a few recent films — Sean Durkin‘s Martha Marcy May Marlene jumps immediately to mind — We Need to Talk About Kevin bleeds the past into the present,...
- 1/9/2012
- by jpraup@gmail.com (thefilmstage.com)
- The Film Stage
Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories The past nine years have surely been strange and frustrating ones for Lynne Ramsay. After completing Morvern Callar in 2002, it appeared that she was tapped to direct The Lovely Bones for DreamWorks - but instead, amidst (one imagines) some Hollywood inside-baseball moves, she was ditched in favor of Peter Jackson (and we all saw how well that turned out). Finally, Ramsay returned at this year's Cannes Film Festival with her latest feature, We Need To Talk About Kevin. An adaptation of the award-winning novel by Lionel Shriver, the film is a heavily formalist, highly stylized portrait of how one woman's (Tilda Swinton) life is undone by a violent event perpetrated by her unhinged son (Ezra Miller). Also in the film is the coming-apart of the marriage between the woman, Eva, and her husband (John C. Reilly), which is not dealt with head-on, yet is painfully apparent...
- 1/9/2012
- TribecaFilm.com
The first of several top ten film lists from the writers of WhatCulture!
We’ve reached the end of another calendar year, with what could, for once, be an interesting awards season just around the corner. While many of the big contenders for the BAFTAs and Oscars have yet to see the light of day in cinemas, it’s as good a time as any for me to look back on the year that was. And while we have had to endure many a stinker from Messrs. Bay, Snyder and Marshall, and see a number of good directors come unstuck (Ron Howard and Terence Davies spring to mind), there has overall been much to celebrate.
The Coen Brothers kicked things off optimistically with True Grit; while a semi-skimmed effort by their standards, it is far superior to the original. Wake Wood showed that the reborn Hammer is here to stay,...
We’ve reached the end of another calendar year, with what could, for once, be an interesting awards season just around the corner. While many of the big contenders for the BAFTAs and Oscars have yet to see the light of day in cinemas, it’s as good a time as any for me to look back on the year that was. And while we have had to endure many a stinker from Messrs. Bay, Snyder and Marshall, and see a number of good directors come unstuck (Ron Howard and Terence Davies spring to mind), there has overall been much to celebrate.
The Coen Brothers kicked things off optimistically with True Grit; while a semi-skimmed effort by their standards, it is far superior to the original. Wake Wood showed that the reborn Hammer is here to stay,...
- 1/1/2012
- by Daniel Mumby
- Obsessed with Film
Tilda Swinton had long admired the work of director Lynne Ramsay ("Ratcatcher"). When Swinton learned Ramsay was planning a film adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel "We Need to Talk About Kevin," centering on a malevolent child's impact on a family, Swinton was determined to help get the film made. Initially, she was not committed to playing the starring role. But as the project evolved and it became clear the story was going to be told from the mother's point of view—"her experiences, isolation, memories, and fantasies," Swinton enumerates—the actor was enthusiastic about tackling the part.Co-starring John C. Reilly as her husband and Ezra Miller as Kevin, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is a bone-chilling look at a mother's anguish and conflicted feelings in the face of her evil youngster. With subtlety and nuance, Swinton brings to life a woman who knows something is terribly wrong with her son,...
- 12/20/2011
- by help@backstage.com (Simi Horwitz)
- backstage.com
While Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s previous films, Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002), took linear (albeit drifting and dreamlike) forms, for her first film in nine years she has chosen a more ambitiously fragmented approach. Based on the novel by Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin concerns the experience of a mother struggling with the aftermath of a school massacre carried out by her own son. Incorporating the intense, sensual cinematography of her previous work with a more rigorous and archly stylized approach, Ramsay lures us into the world of Eva (Tilda Swinton, the perfect mix of iciness...
- 12/13/2011
- Pastemagazine.com
Alright, I'm pushing through these this week, so we're calling it on yesterday's limerick contest. Congratulations to John G who wins our screenplay giveaway. John, if you're reading, please drop me a line with your address so we can get you your prizes. (And Sharkman, you were one of the "Rango" winners, so do the same so I can mail yours out, too.) Moving right along, I have a pair of books -- source material for two of the season's contenders: Lionel Shriver's "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and Jonathan Foer's "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close." On the surface, these two stories have absolutely nothing in common. But both film...
- 12/13/2011
- by Kristopher Tapley
- Hitfix
We Need to Talk About Kevin, the harrowing drama directed by Lynne Ramsey, arrives in theaters today after buzzy festival runs at Cannes, Telluride and Toronto. It stars Tilda Swinton as Eva Khatchadourian, a woman struggling to survive after her teenage son, Kevin (Ezra Miller), commits an act of shocking violence. Swinton, 51, gives a performance that’s already won awards from the National Board of Review and European Film Awards and spurred unsurprising Oscar chatter. EW got a chance to sit down with the Oscar-winner:
Entertainment Weekly: How familiar were you with the 2003 Lionel Shriver book of the same name...
Entertainment Weekly: How familiar were you with the 2003 Lionel Shriver book of the same name...
- 12/9/2011
- by Sara Vilkomerson
- EW - Inside Movies
For the third consecutive year, Tilda Swinton has given us one of the year's best performances. In 2009, she offered us "Julia," in which she portrayed the alcoholic nightmare that is the film's title character, a woman who kidnaps a boy in hopes of successfully blackmailing his grandfather for $2 million (only to find herself bonding with him). Last year, it was "I Am Love," which saw Swinton taking on the role of an wealthy Italian matriach coping with some extraordinary drama as her life - and the lives of her children - begins to unravel. Completing what Swinton has referred to as "the mother lode trilogy," her powerful performance in "We Need To Talk About Kevin" is debuting in theaters this weekend for an Oscar-qualifying run (before expanding nationwide in early 2012). Directed by Lynne Ramsay, "Kevin" is an adapation of Lionel Shriver's award-winning novel of the same name. It finds Swinton.
- 12/9/2011
- Indiewire
Not being a parent myself, I can’t say for sure whether or not “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” has a chapter about preventing your child from turning into a teen sociopath. But if it does, it’s a given that Eva (Tilda Swinton) skipped it. Eva’s haphazard parenting, and its ultimate effects on her twisted son, is at the heart of “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” writer-director Lynne Ramsay’s attempt to adapt the novel by Lionel Shriver and to make some sense of why a normal-seeming kid would suddenly snap...
- 12/9/2011
- by Alonso Duralde
- The Wrap
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