51st New York Film Festival: Watching Film’s Future at the Shorts Program
Countless legendary film careers began with short films. This is one reason every major film festival, from Cannes to Toronto to New York, showcases short films—these same filmmakers often end up returning with their features a few years later (sometimes extended versions of those shorts), having used their short as a launching pad for successful careers. Martin Scorsese might have gotten onto the map with Mean Streets, but it was his 1963 short What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This,...
Transformations: Matthew McConaughey & Jared Leto on Dallas Buyers Club
If the adage that dramatic weight loss or gain is the key to Oscar glory, then Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto are shoo-ins this year. Both transformed their bodies to play characters battling AIDS at the height of the epidemic in Dallas Buyers Club. But there’s a whole lot more to their performances than just the physical changes they submitted their bodies to—the transformations helped each actor achieve a near spiritual connection to characters rarely seen in mainstream films...
Chatting With Director Jim Mickle of We Are What We Are
For a key scene in the new drama We Are What We Are (opened Sept. 27), director/co-writer/editor Jim Mickle found himself up a creek holding a pile of bones.
“At some point, I think it was myself, it was a bunch of PAs, it was the prop gang, it was the art department, everyone had a stack of bones and they were just upcreek, just throwing it into the water,” Mickle told The Credits of the scene when the sins of the father,...
A Visual Guide to the 51st New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival was created in 1963 at the Lincoln Center as the non-competitive "festival of festivals." As Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote, "it was a time when the medium was still struggling to be taken seriously as an art form. Lincoln Center's own chairman, John D. Rockefeller III, thought the event had no business being there, protesting, 'Movies are like baseball.' " Film no longer has that problem, and the NYFF has become one of the truly great film festivals on the planet,...
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 & 7 Delicious Food Films
You might find it odd to begin a brief glimpse into some amazing films about, or crucially influenced by, food by starting with an animated film for children. But you’d be forgetting that one of the great food films of this age, or any other, was Pixar’s Ratatouille.
Sony Pictures' Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 premise is almost The Island of Dr. Moreau-esque—inventor Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) finds out that his infamous water-into-food invention survived his attempt to destroy it,...
Director Steve McQueen & his Actors Open up About 12 Years a Slave
There’s a reason they call it buzz. The electricity was visceral in the theaters as the lights came up. The after-shocks spread into the rooms where interviews took place. The reaction 12 Years a Slave elicited at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)—stunned silence, shock, applause, was monumental. And just like that, British director Steve McQueen’s harrowing drama established itself as the Oscar front-runner, even before it won the fest’s top prize.
The film is based on the 1853 autobiography by Solomon Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor),...
An Evening With Haifaa Al Mansour, Writer/Director of the Historic Wadjda
There have been many objects of fascination that have been a crucial part of great films. Think of the Red Ryder BB gun in A Christmas Story, or, to use an even more famous example, Rosebud from Citizen Kane. In Haifaa Al Mansour’s fantastic, ground-breaking Wadjda (the first feature length film to be shot entirely in the Kingdom), the object is a beautiful green bicycle. This is what the titular star of the film,...
The Future of Film, Television (& More): 5 New Mind Blowing Technologies
There are so many scintillating technologies in the works one imagines looking back on James Cameron’s Avatar as almost quaint. As absurd as that sounds, looking around the technology space is like looking into a future that would have seemed nearly impossibly only a decade ago. With the truly mind blowing speed with which the internet, smart phones and digital cameras have increased in functionality and ubiquity, so to has the ways in which you can shoot, and distribute...
Inspired by Enough Said: Five Fake Romantic Comedies We’d Love to see
Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said was one of those movies that’s so good it makes you mad, and you wonder why didn’t I think of that? Her premise is simple and brilliant; Julia Louis-Drefyus is Eva, a divorced single parent whose daughter is about to leave for college. She begins seeing Albert (James Gandolfini—if you need a dose of Gandolfini love, there have been great tributes to him, and you can read some of those here,...
Building the Perfect Engine: The Filmmakers Behind Universal’s Rush
Ron Howard’s Rush hits theaters September 20, and early reviews are hailing it as one of the greatest racing movies of all time. Centered on the intense, often brutal rivalry between Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) and James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) during the 1976 Formula 1 season, Rush itself was built with the scrutiny and care of a great race car team. Once Peter Morgan's script made the rounds, an incredible team of filmmakers was assembled to create one of the year's most exciting films,...
Jake Gyllenhaal & Director Denis Villeneuve on Prisoners & Enemy
Scorsese has De Niro and DiCaprio. Steve McQueen has Michael Fassbender. Nicole Holofcener has Catherine Keener. Now Denis Villeneuve, whose 2010 Incendies earned a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination, also has a muse: Jake Gyllenhaal. The actor teamed with the French Canadian director in two films that sparked plenty of buzz earlier this month when they screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The higher profile of their one-two punch is the thriller Prisoners,...
Bras in Space: The Incredible True Story Behind Upcoming Film Spacesuit
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." – President John F...
Vision Quest: 5 Cinematographers & Their Unique Techniques
The role of cinematographer is a sort of hybrid between translator (of a director’s vision), guru (they impart wisdom to everyone on set on how a scene can be blocked, shot) and first mate. They’re as close to a director’s equal as you can get in the dictatorship that is a film. While every member of a film crew, to varying degrees, shapes the final product that we see in the theater, the cinematographer is second only to the director to the power they exert...
Now Go Get Your Big Break: 6 Great Film and TV Jobs For Grads
Summer is coming to a close, and with it, we welcome the return of many recent grads from ‘gap summers.’ Armed with a newfound ambition and a healthy dose of reality once the slow-burn of summer traveling loses its allure, young people everywhere will be descending upon Starbucks and other free WiFi-wielding outlets to tweak their resumes, draft euphemistic cover letters, and seize that just-posted Craigslist job opening.
Of course, it goes without saying that for many (read: most) freshly-degreed adults,...
Director David Twohy on how he Crafted the Riddick Trilogy’s Exoplanets
The basic premise behind each installment of writer and director David Twohy’s sci-fi film trilogy—Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick and Riddick—is pretty straightforward. Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, finds himself on a hostile alien planet inhabited by creatures that want to kill him. To add flare to what otherwise could become a tired storyline, Twohy constructs his films around dramatic human storylines and builds them up from a foundation of real-world science...
Could This Fall be the Best Film Season in Years?
There are major themes being explored in film in the coming months, in what looks to be a diverse and deeply challenging (in a good way) season of releases. Just going by the excitement of audiences at TIFF, there is reason to hope that we’re looking at one of the most quality-packed stretches in recent cinematic memory.
The plots are diverse, the casts are a mix of globally renown stars and newcomers, but the themes are universal. Family,...
Hollywood Studios Add Cinematic Flair to Instagram
From gradient sunsets, to antique-filtered airplane wings, gourmet food dishes, and pets being cute – Instagram has fast become the preferred platform for sharing important and trivial moments alike with followers near and far.
The social image-sharing platform now boasts 130 million active monthly users, which means there’s a lot more to behold than ‘hot dog legs’ and ‘eyebombing.’
Since its inception in 2010, Instagram has become a veritable channel for staying engaged with and informed by influencers...
What’s it Like to be a Science Advisor for Alfonso Cuarón’s Upcoming Gravity?
In Alfonso Cuarón’s upcoming film Gravity (opening Oct. 4), George Clooney and Sandra Bullock play an astronaut and a medical engineer stranded in space.
Cuarón reportedly spent five years perfecting the look of scenes set in zero gravity, but figuring out how to film floating actors was just one of many technical details necessary for a movie set entirely in space. And one key player in the film’s accuracy never stepped foot on the set...
Talking Title Sequences With Creator of ‘Art of the Title’
Art of the Title is the most comprehensive online resource of title sequence design you’ll find.
Ian Albinson’s our kind of movie lover—appreciating all the work that goes into the film experience, not just the bold face names.
“From the tense closeups of Kim Novak’s face in 1958’s Vertigo to the singing ruby lips of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975; from the graceful, three-and-a-half minute crane shot in 1958’s ...
7 Films We’re Excited About Playing at Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) starts tonight, and the slate is packed with enticing projects. An Elmore Leonard adaptation (the last of his illustrious career, Life of Crime, based on his 1978 crime novel “The Switch”), Spike Jonze’s intriguing Her, and the hotly anticipated return to the director’s chair for Alfonso Cuaron in his space-disaster epic Gravity.
TIFF’s movie schedule is dense with films we’re really excited about, so we’ve compiled our short list with accompanying trailers...
