SXSW 2016: Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some a Perfect Festival Opener
There are few filmmakers out there who have had as big of an impact on their city as Richard Linklater has had on Austin. Festival director Janet Pierson introduced Everybody Wants Some, saying that Linklater was the reason she moved to Austin in the first place. She then handed the reigns over to Lewis Black, founder of the Austin Chronicle and cofounder of Austin's SXSW festival, as well as the director of the documentary Richard Linklater: dream is destiny,
SXSW Alumni: Lena Dunham’s Start in Austin
Girls creator Lena Dunham can credibly say that her career officially began at the SXSW Film Festival. It started with the rejection of her short film Creative Nonfiction. Instead of giving up on it, Dunham kept working on it and re-submitted the film. The determination paid off— Creative Nonfiction was accepted. When she came to Austin with the film, she not only had what she called "the best week of her life"
The Hilarious Writer/Director Michael Showalter Discusses Hello, My Name Is Doris
Hello, My Name is Doris, the latest comedy from Wet Hot American Summer co-creator Michael Showalter, stars Sally Field as a woman falling in love for the first time. We talk to the writer/director about creating a new type of comic protagonist, landing Sally Field and having to be the bad guy on set.
Hello, My Name is Doris started as a short film.
Watch the new International Trailer for Ghostbusters
We were thrilled when the first official trailer for Paul Feig's Ghostbusters dropped on March 3. Frankly, if you're not excited about watching Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones battle the supernatural in New York, well, maybe you need to have your head examined (or you're a humorless ghost). The new Ghostbusters movie,
SXSW 2016: A Brief List of Some of the Narrative Features We’re Excited About
This week we're headed to the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, where we'll once again run around like lunatics, trying to figure out how to parse 139 features (52 of them from first-time filmmakers), 89 World Premieres, 13 North American Premieres and 8 U.S. Premieres. This is to say nothing of the TV lineup, which has grown in recent years, and includes some hottest properties this year from Cinemax, HBO, AMC and more.
Here's just a brief glance at some of what we're excited to see in the narrative feature category.
Writer/Director Dominique Schilling on her Film A Reason
Writer/director Dominieque Schilling's film A Reason centers on a generational clash, moving in often surprising, funny, and all-too-believably painful ways. So in other words, it feels like watching an actual family. We meet Serena (Magda Apanowicz), a young, introverted lesbian and her controlling older brother Nathan (Nathan Hilgrim), who gather, along with the rest of their family, at the house of their elegant, opionionated elderly Aunt Irene (Marion Ross) to hear the reading of her will.
Watch the Short That put 10 Cloverfield Lane Director Dan Trachtenberg on the map
10 Cloverfield Lane will be released this Thursday, and while the film has generated considerable hype, including embedding subliminal images into the trailers it released to theaters, we actually don’t know that much about it. A few things we do know is that it’s peripherally related to Cloverfield (but not a sequel), it was written by Drew Goddard (the Oscar nominated screenwriter of The Martian),
10 Cloverfield Lane Drops Two New IMAX TV Spots
In one week, on March 11, the enigmatic 10 Cloverfield Lane will be roaring into theaters, which is exactly when (and not a moment before) we'll finally figure out what Dan Trachtenberg's film is all about. Today, Paramount Pictures (via IMAX) has released two new 10 Cloverfield Lane IMAX TV spots. What we do know is it's not a proper sequel to Cloverfield,
We've already written about the wild subliminal messages
Jennifer Lawrence Narrates Gorgeous A Beautiful Planet Doc
A Beautiful Planethas a bunch of things going for it; a stunning portrait of our marvel of a planet, an extremely potent visualization of the effect humans are having on Earth, and the narration by one of the most beloved actresses on the globe, Jennifer Lawrence .Walt Disney Studios and IMAX released the trailer for their new nature documentary, and it's a stunner.
A Beautiful Planetbenefits greatly from the fact it was created in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),
Watch the First Official Ghostbusters Trailer
The first official trailer for Ghostbusters is here, and it takes only 40 seconds for Kristen Wiig's Erin Gilbert to be covered in ectoplasm. A brief set up introduces who our Ghostbusters are; Erin Gilbert (Wiig) is the brainiac ("Erin, no one's better at quantum physics than you!); Kate McKinnon is Jilian Holtzman, the brilliant engineer, Melissa McCarthy is Abby Yates, the team leader, and Leslie Jones is Patty Tolan, the one who knows New York City inside and out.
American Aggression & American Vulnerability Go Hand-in-Hand in Alex Gibney’s Zero Days
The tinfoil hat crowd is going to love Alex Gibney’s new documentary, Zero Days, because the chilling feature will likely confirm many of their fears. The film, which had its European premiere at the 66th Berlinale, examines the phenomenon of Stuxnet, the self-replicating super virus discovered by international IT experts in 2010. Commissioned by the Bush administration, and continued under President Obama, the American and Israeli governments used the program, officially code-named Olympic Games,
Go Deep With New Finding Dory Trailer
Ellen DeGeneres and Albert Brooks return for the long-awaited sequel to Finding Nemo, which picks up six months after the first film. In Finding Dory, the titular clown fish (DeGeneres) is enjoying a quiet life, that is, until she joins Nemo on a class trip to see manta rays migrate back home, compelling the practically amnesiac Dory to find out where her original home was.
Dory's home turns out to be the California Marine Biology Institute,
Showrunner Kahane Cooperman on Amazon’s The New Yorker Presents
The New Yorker Presents, a 10-episode half-hour series that debuted February 16 on Amazon Prime, brings the venerable magazine, The New Yorker, to life through a cinematic smorgasbord of short documentaries, narrative films, poetry readings, animated spots and more based on the publication’s content. Produced by award-winning documentarian Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions and Condé Nast Entertainment, The New Yorker Presents boasts a distinguished crew and cast,
Filmmaker Antonio Oreña-Barlin on Why Short Films Are Crucial
This article originally appeared on MPA-i.org. It was written by filmmaker Antonio Oreña-Barlin, about his film Drawcard and the experience of showing it at Tropfest, in Australia. You can check out the film here.
"My day at Tropfest Australia and why making short films doesn't mean getting short changed."
By Antonio Oreña-Barlin.
Late last year, the Drawcard team found out we were one of only 16 finalists from over 600 entries selected to screen at the 24th annual Tropfest.
Oscars 2016: Spotlight Surprises With Best Picture Win
A genuinely surprising Oscars wrapped with Tom McCarthy's Spotlight winning Best Picture over equally likely contenders The Revenant and The Big Short. Mad Max: Fury Road cleaned up the technical awards, which wasn't surprising, but Mark Rylance beating out Sylvester Stallone for Best Supporting Actor sure was. Despite five nominations, Star Wars: The Force Awakens didn't pick up a single award (but droids C-3PO,
Beyond Triple 9: The Cinematic Tradition of the Heist
There are few things more cinematic than the film heist. In fact, the notable subgenre of the crime film had its beginnings shortly after the advent of film itself with Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery in 1903. In the ‘40s, as the popularity of the gangster film and the film noir rose, and the traditional format of the heist film surfaced in the form of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle,
Chatting With Director Asif Kapadia About his Oscar-Nominated Doc Amy
When Asif Kapadia made BAFTA-winning 2011 film Senna about Brazilian race car driver Ayrton Senna, he had a world-class archive of professionally-shot film and video assets to draw from. For his Oscar-nominated Amy, which chronicles the rise and fall of Amy Winehouse from her effervescent teen years to death at age 27 from alcohol poisoning, Kapadia had to start from scratch. He says "Technically the Sienna camera work was incredible —
The Most Anticipated Horror Films of 2016
The highly awaited Sundance hit The Witch finally premiered in theaters last weekend after months of being shrouded in mystery, and with its arrival begins a deluge of high-pedigree horror that will stalk and stumble its way onto screens throughout the rest of 2016. There are some highly awaited sequels (spiritual and otherwise), many offerings from burgeoning auteurs and a few bigger budget productions that could set the genre up for one of its most prestigious years yet.
Chatting With Day out of Days Writer/Director Zoe Cassavetes
In Day Out Of Days, starring Alexia Landeau and Melanie Griffith, writer/director Zoe Cassavetes follows the struggles of a forty-year-old actress trying to stay relevant in Hollywood. We talk to Cassavetes about making her second feature film, crowd-funding and what she learned from her trailblazer parents, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.
I was reading that you chose to go down the crowd-funding route to finance the film so you could cast your friend and co-writer,
Know Your Oscar Nominees: Live Action, Animated & Documentary Short Films
We've covered a slew of the either often overlooked or misunderstood nominated categories for this year's Oscars. Earlier today we published our technical guide to visual effects, and in the past week or so we've looked at editing, costume design, and sound mixing and editing. Now we're going to shift our focus a bit and look at the short film category; live action, animated and documentary.
