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‘Black Mass’ Continues Its Awards Buzz at Telluride
22 minutes ago
Warner Bros.’ “Black Mass” is the real deal. The Scott Cooper-directed film got a big thumbs-up in its North American bow Saturday at Telluride, following its Venice world premiere the night before. Audiences on both continents seem to agree that the film merits awards consideration across the board; it’s likely to get more huzzahs as more people see it. With six months to go before the Oscars, the studio’s biggest challenge will be to manage expectations.
Variety has run a rave review by Scott Foundas, and a positive awards prediction from Guy Lodge. There will be plenty more to discuss about the film before the awards season concludes, but suffice it to say, both Foundas and Lodge were right.
It’s been a good week for Oscar’s best-actor contenders. Variety‘s Lodge also touted the virtues of Eddie Redmayne in “The Danish Girl,” while Kristopher Tapley »
- Tim Gray
‘Kill Me Please’: A New Face of Latin American Cinema (Exclusive)
2 hours ago
Playing in Venice Horizons, “Kill Me Please,” the feature debut of Brazil’s Anita Rocha da Silveira, reveals one of the new faces of Latin American cinema.
The pic is part of the growing trend of pan-regional co-production, as it was produced by two of Latin America’s most energetic co-production practitioners: Rio de Janeiro-based Bananeira Films and Argentina’s Rei Cinema, headed by Benjamin Domenech and Santiago.
No favela poverty drama, “Kill Me” is set at an exclusive high school in Rio de Janeiro’s Barra de Tijuca, which will host much of the 2016 Olympics, a zone of new high rises, and seemingly endless real-estate construction.
Produced by a woman — Bananeira’s Vania Catani — “Kill Me, Please” is also directed by a woman, and a new member at that of Latin America’s growing breed of genre auteurs.
Skewering the new Brazilian Dream, and half serial killer suspenser, “Kill Me, »
- John Hopewell
U.S.-based Iranian Auteur Amir Naderi to Shoot ‘Mountain’ in Italy (Exclusive)
2 hours ago
Venice – U.S.-based Iranian auteur Amir Naderi (“The Runner”), who is a Venice fest aficionado, will shoot his first feature in Italian, titled “Mountain,” set in a semi-abandoned village at the foothills of an Alpine peak. It follows his Japan-set “The Cut,” and “Vegas: Based on a True Story,” in competition on the Lido in 2008.
“The Cut,” which was an homage to yakuza movies, opened the fest’s Venice Days section in 2011.
The highly symbolic “Mountain” is set centuries ago in a village under Mount Latemar, in Italy’s Alto Adige region, where a farmer and his wife struggle with the fact that the 2,500-meter tall peak keeps the sun from shining on their crops.
“The film is one hundred percent in Italian, though, like my other movies, there isn’t that much dialogue in it,” Naderi said. “In all my movies I try to push the characters in different cultures, »
- Nick Vivarelli
‘The Clan’ Kicks in International Deals (Exclusive)
2 hours ago
Pablo Trapero’s crime thriller “The Clan,” which unspools in the Venice competition Sunday, continues to pummel all-time box office records for Argentine movies, grossing an extraordinary $13 million in three weeks off an Aug. 13 bow in its native Argentina, where it is distributed by Twentieth Century Fox.
In international, Twentieth Century Fox has acquired rights to all Latin America, while Warner Bros. Pictures Espana will distribute “The Clan” in Spain. Sales agent Film Factory Entertainment has closed Germany (Prokino), France (Diaphana Distribution) and Australia (Vendetta).
Inspired by real events in the 1980s, “The Clan” stars Guillermo Francella (“The Secret in Their Eyes,” “Heart of a Lion”), one of Argentina’s biggest marquee draws, as Arquimedes Puccio, the patriarch of Clan Puccio, a well-heeled Buenos Aires family. It made its money abducting people from its own neighborhood, securing boffo ransoms, and then killing them.
“The most emotional thing for audiences may be the father-son relationship, »
- John Hopewell
With ‘Steve Jobs,’ Fassbender Shoots to the Top of This Year’s Best Actor Oscar Race
2 hours ago
Telluride, Colo. — The truth is I half anticipated Michael Fassbender to be a weak link of Danny Boyle’s “Steve Jobs,” which world premiered as a “work in progress” here Saturday night. Something about the repressed accent in the trailer and the curious casting call in the first place, maybe. Whatever the case, let’s just say the “Shame” and “12 Years a Slave” star crushes the role of the eponymous tortured genius and then some in a film that takes bold strides within a well-worn genre and is sure to take off throughout the season…if the character doesn’t put viewers off, that is.
Because that can sometimes be a hurdle. Jobs is very unlikable throughout. It’s the borderline thesis of the film: “It takes a**holes to invent the future.” But that’s what’s so compelling about the picture in this conception. It’s not a greatest hits biopic. »
- Kristopher Tapley
Gabrielle Burton, Novelist Who Decided to Attend AFI Film School at Age 56, Dies at 76
4 hours ago
Author Gabrielle Burton, known for her groundbreaking and award-winning novels and memoirs “I’m Running Away From Home but I’m Not Allowed to Cross the Street: A Primer of Women’s Liberation,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Impatient With Desire” and “Searching for Tamsen Donner” as well as the screenplay for the MGM film “Manna From Heaven” died in her home on September 3, 2015, after battling stage-four pancreatic cancer for 15 months. She was 76.
Burton decided to attend AFI film school at age 56, and went on to win AFI’s Mary Pickford Prize for top screenplay. Her subsequent honors include a Nicholl Fellowship through the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Her 2003 film “Manna From Heaven” was invited to screen for Congress at the MPAA offices in Washington, D.C., hosted by Sen. Charles Schumer, Rep. Karen McCarthy and MPAA president Jack Valenti.
Burton’s articles, essays, and reviews appeared in national publications including the Los Angeles Times, »
- Variety Staff
Venice Film Review: ‘Janis: Little Girl Blue’
4 hours ago
Without Janis Joplin, there mightn’t have been an Amy Winehouse. The two most prominent female members of the so-called “27 Club” may have worked in different musical registers (while both appropriating a heavy dose of soul), but it was Joplin who blazed a trail for female artists like Winehouse to defy industry standards of appearance, performance and behavior. So it feels like a breach of historical order that Amy Berg’s thoroughly absorbing documentary “Janis: Little Girl Blue” arrives on the heels of Asif Kapadia’s comparable “Amy.” Boasting equivalent depth of research, extensive access to an intimate personal archive, and a selection of galvanizing performance footage, Berg’s film is no stylistic innovator itself, but it’s the satisfying feature-length overview that Joplin’s brief, fiercely brilliant career has long merited. This PBS American Masters entry will take a piece of many a boomer’s heart, especially in ancillary. »
- Guy Lodge
New Label Satine Noir Picks Up ‘Retribution’ for Italy
4 hours ago
Venice – Indie Italian distributor Satine Film has created a genre label, Satine Noir, and made its first acquisition, buying Dani de la Torre’s “Retribution” in a deal broached and sealed at the Venice Festival. Pic unspools in Venice Days.
Satine has also optioned Italian remake rights to Lucas Belvaux’s “Not My Type,” a tragic tale of class snobbery, starring Emilie Dequenne.
Satine Noir will release a highly select numbrer of titles, not just horror fare but thrillers and action movies, taking genre in a broader sense, Satine Film’s acquisitions and co-productions head Claudia Bedogni told Variety.
Produced by Spain’s Vaca Films, and Atresmedia Cine, “Retribution,” an action thriller set against the background of Spain’s banking crisis, will be given an arthouse-style release in the spring, she added.
Bedogni and Film Factory head Vicente Canales sealed the deal at the Venice Film Market.
Since founding Satine »
- John Hopewell
Telluride Film Review: ‘He Named Me Malala’
7 hours ago
Eighty-seven minutes in the company of 18-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai is time very well spent, and that alone merits a recommendation for “He Named Me Malala,” an expectedly stirring portrait of the exceedingly smart and courageous Pakistani teenager who defied the Taliban and lived to tell the tale. But while it’s difficult to feel anything other than awe and respect for this genuinely inspiring figure, whose advocacy for women’s education worldwide has made her a hero to millions and a target for many, it’s also hard not to wish director Davis Guggenheim had approached Yousafzai’s still-growing legacy with a bit less heart-tugging slickness and a greater willingness to delve beneath the surface. Still, as fronted by an internationally beloved subject whose warmth, intelligence and fierce humanity all but radiate from the screen, this classy, crowd-pleasing Fox Searchlight item could emerge as one of »
- Justin Chang
Telluride Film Review: ‘Suffragette’
10 hours ago
“Deeds, not words,” goes the refrain of “Suffragette,” a stolidly well-meaning tribute to the handful of brave women who realized that polite, law-abiding protests weren’t going to get them very far in the battle for voting rights in early 20th-century Britain. But while it boasts no shortage of dramatic activity as it lays bare the challenges and consequences of civil disobedience, this collaboration between director Sarah Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan doesn’t exactly uphold that mantra, insofar as it never seems to deviate from a neatly pre-packaged script of its own. As a lowly wife and mother slowly grabbing hold of her difficult destiny, Carey Mulligan gives an affecting, skillfully modulated performance that lends a certain coherence to this assemblage of real-life incidents, composite characters, noble sentiments, stirring speeches and impeccable production values — all marshaled in service of a picture whose politics prove rather more commendable than its artistry. »
- Justin Chang
Telluride: Brie Larson, Lenny Abrahamson Discuss Why ‘Room’ Is ‘Odd’
11 hours ago
After an enthusiastic Telluride screening of “Room” on Saturday morning, Emma Donoghue admitted her novel and screen adaptation are based on “a really odd premise, but we wanted to shine a light on a universal experience … to find the ordinary in the bizarre.”
It’s the tale of a woman who’s been in one-room captivity for seven years, since she was 17, and her 5-year-old son. In a Q&A following the screening, the six participants talked about the various interpretations of the film.
Director Lenny Abrahamson said it’s fundamentally a love story between a mother and son. Brie Larson, who got one of the morning’s several standing ovations, said, “It’s a movie that deals a lot with expectations — and expectations that can never be met.” Supporting actress Joan Allen said she concentrated on the damage to so many people who are trying to pick up the »
- Tim Gray
Telluride Film Review: ‘Anomalisa’
13 hours ago
In “Anomalisa,” an inspirational speaker in crisis checks into Cincinnati’s (fictional) Al Fregoli hotel, named for a delusional condition in which paranoiacs believe that those around them are not who they appear to be, but a single tormentor hiding behind multiple disguises. That’s a helpful bit of trivia to consider before entering into Charlie Kaufman’s latest brain teaser, this one originally mounted (just twice) for composer Carter Burwell’s “Theater of the New Ear” sound-play experiment and rescued from obscurity by a team of imaginative producers who thought it might make an interesting stop-motion project — which it does, exceptional even, although it’s unclear just who they imagined might be the audience for such a cerebral cult offering.
“Anomalisa’s” existence is a minor miracle on multiple levels, from the Kickstarter campaign that funded it (the credits give “special thanks” to 1,070 names) to the oh-so-delicate way the film creeps up on you, »
- Peter Debruge
‘Room’ Makes an Awards Case for 8-Year-Old Jacob Tremblay
13 hours ago
Telluride, Colo. — It seemed like everyone at the Galaxy theater here Friday night needed a drink following the world premiere of Lenny Abrahamson’s “Room.” Based on the bestseller by Emma Donoghue (who was also tapped to adapt), it tells the story of a woman held captive for seven years, five of them spent with the son she had courtesy of the lunatic imprisoning her as a sex slave.
Suffice it to say, the first half of the film — claustrophobic, icky, stomach-churning for its depiction of a young boy who knows nothing but the small space and the make-believe imagery of a television set — is difficult to watch. The film then shifts in another direction, becoming a story about mourning, parental responsibility and (profoundly so) closure. As Variety critic Justin Chang put it in his review, it’s a film that “finds perhaps the most extreme possible metaphor for how time, »
- Kristopher Tapley
Venice Film Review: ‘Arianna’
14 hours ago
Alternative gender identity is a hot topic in contemporary cinema, surrounding interest in which could secure a larger audience than might otherwise be expected for Italian filmmaker Carlo Lavagna’s dreamy, heat-hazed character study “Arianna.” By framing its eponymous heroine’s condition as a puzzle to be unpicked rather than a subject for candid discussion, however, the pic resists presentation as an “issue movie” — perhaps to its credit as well as its disadvantage. In telling the story of a 19-year-old girl’s belated coming of age over the course of one idyllic summer, Lavagna dramatizes her plight with a mixture of oblique sensual saturation and, later on, more on-the-nose emoting. An uneven but strikingly presented debut for its helmer, it will find a particularly welcoming niche in gender-themed and Lgbtq fest programs.
“I was born three times,” admits the title character (Ondina Quadri, an arrestingly pale-eyed, tousle-haired newcomer) in voiceover »
- Guy Lodge
Kristen Stewart, Nicholas Hoult on On-Screen Intimacy in ‘Equals’
14 hours ago
Venice – Entering their Venice press conference to cheers from a rump of fans, Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult talked about love, film choices and director Drake Doremus’ direction of actors in Venice competition player “Equals.”
Some critics at Venice characterized “Equals” as a date movie for the artier inclined teen crowd; one of the film’s attractions is the easy intimacy shown between Stewart and Hoult’s characters as they connect with their feelings and each other in a futuristic world that has eradicated emotions.
Stewart and Hoult play Switched On Syndrome sufferers who begin to have feelings, then fall for each other.
“Equals” is “basically about two kids who love each other when they’re not supposed to,” Stewart said. “One thing we talked about endlessly was: Do we still exist if love does’t exist, could we live without it. Probably not. If you don’t have passions, »
- John Hopewell
Alicia Vikander May Be the Real Winner From ‘The Danish Girl’
15 hours ago
Venice — Even before Eddie Redmayne scooped a best actor Oscar for his studious, fully immersed inhabitation of Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything,” there had been talk that he could take the gold for “The Danish Girl.” To what might be the eternal aggrievement of Michael Keaton fans, the talk wasn’t quite loud enough to give the Academy pause and decide to wait a year.
“The Danish Girl” boasts many of the advantages that carried “The Theory of Everything” as an awards vehicle, beginning with its production pedigree. Both are Working Title projects from heavyweight producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner — who have shepherded four previous best picture nominees together — with Focus Features as their U.S. distributor. Both are prestige biopics, ever a beloved genre of the Academy, with tony credentials, including an Oscar-winning filmmaker at the helm. In this case, that would be the television-schooled Brit Tom Hooper, »
- Guy Lodge
‘45 Years’ Helmer Andrew Haigh Wants to See the Drama Unfold
15 hours ago
Telluride, Colo. — Andrew Haigh’s “45 Years,” the study of a childless marriage in its autumn, has been touring the globe since debuting at the Berlin Film Festival in February. The film’s stars, Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, won Silver Bear honors their for their performances — beautiful, naturalistic turns that deserve even more accolades as we charge into the season.
The film, expanded from a David Constantine short story, finally makes its way to the U.S. this weekend as part of the 42nd annual Telluride Film Festival lineup. Haigh, who could only accompany his work at the Berlin and Edinburgh fests, is eager to reveal it to American audiences after the film opened in the U.K. last week (to rave notices pretty much across the board). Not long after we both got to town, ahead of the Labor Day weekend tempest, we talked about the visual language of the film, »
- Kristopher Tapley
Box Office: ‘Straight Outta Compton,’ ‘War Room’ in Close Race Again Over Slow Weekend
16 hours ago
N.W.A biopic “Straight Outta Compton” and faith-based drama “War Room” are neck-and-neck at the box office for the second weekend in a row, with “War Room” narrowly beating out “Compton” in Friday grosses.
Sony/Affirm’s “War Room,” having already surprised everyone with a big turnout in its opening weekend, pulled in $2.3 million from 1,526 locations Friday night, putting it on track for a four-day haul of more than $13 million. The Labor Day bump would bring the Christian drama’s total to $29 million.
Already deemed the top faith-based film of the year, “War Room” stars Priscilla Shirer, T.C. Stallings and Karen Abercrombie and was directed by Alex Kendrick.
Universal-Legendary’s “Straight Outta Compton,” which had been expected to rule the B.O. for a fourth straight weekend, generated $2.2 million in Friday receipts at 3,094 locations. As such, “Compton” looks poised to finish Labor Day weekend with $11 million, bringing its total cume past the $150 million mark. »
- Marianne Zumberge
Venice: Eddie Redmayne, ‘Danish Girl’ Helmer Tom Hooper on Transgender Challenges
16 hours ago
Venice — “The Danish Girl,” in which Eddie Redmayne plays Lili Elbe, one of the earliest known recipients of male-to-female gender reassignment surgery, drew long applause from global journos after its Venice world premiere screening and raised plenty of timely transgender issues at its subsequent packed press conference.
Redmayne, whose performance is already generating awards buzz after his Oscar for playing Stephen Hawking, said the whole process for him “was the most mammoth education.”
“I met many people from the trans community, both men and women. I tried to meet people of different generations because the story is set at a time [between 1926 and 1931] when there was no precedent.
“Across the board the generosity of people was amazing. There was one particular couple in Los Angeles, a woman called Cadence and her partner Trista; they had been together when she was living as a man, and they are still together,” Redmayne recounted. “They allowed me to ask anything. »
- Nick Vivarelli
Venice Film Review: ‘The Danish Girl’
19 hours ago
A year after Eddie Redmayne proved his incredible capacity for reinvention in “The Theory of Everything,” the freckle-faced Brit pulls off the ultimate identity overhaul as “The Danish Girl,” portraying gender-reassignment trailblazer Lili Elbe, nee Einar Wegener, who was one of the first to make a “sex change” via surgery. For an actor, there can be few more enticing — or challenging — roles than this, in which the nature of identity, performance and transformation are all wrapped up in the very fabric of the character itself, and Redmayne gives the greatest performance of his career so far, infinitely more intimate — and far less technical — than the already stunning turn as Stephen Hawking that so recently won him the Oscar. Reuniting with “Les Miserables” director Tom Hooper in a return to the handsome, mostly interior style of the helmer’s Oscar-winning “The King’s Speech,” Redmayne finds himself at the heart — one shared by Alicia Vikander, »
- Peter Debruge
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