Madison and Baker discuss how youth and love shape the eponymous character’s trajectory.
The post Interview: Mikey Madison and Sean Baker on Bringing the Freewheeling ‘Anora’ to Life appeared first on Slant Magazine.
Smile 2 picks up right where Smile left off. Well, “six days later,” as onscreen text tells us. It’s a bold move from writer/director Parker Finn that combines with a bravura long-take opening sequence to announce that Smile 2 is going to be a lot. The movie pulls from a variety of sources, from the gaudy pop pageantry of Vox Lux to the sometimes shocking gore of Hollywood’s flirtation with extremity in the 2000s, to deliver an often effective horror film that bites off more than it can chew. Or perhaps it just chews too long? The narrative moves smoothly enough from the first movie to the second, as we follow the trail of the communicable entity at the center of the Smile universe in…
Over the last couple weeks whenever I mentioned I was attending NYFF to a normie, they told me, “oh yeah, I saw the long lines.” What those normies didn’t realize is that the lines they saw were actually to enter […]
The post That’s a Wrap on the New York Film Fest (NYFF) ’24! appeared first on Hammer to Nail.
Goodrich’s modest ambitions yield modest rewards.
The post ‘Goodrich’ Review: Michael Keaton Anchors Warmly Humanist Family Comedy appeared first on Slant Magazine.
The annual Prix Jean Vigo, typically awarded to a rising French director, recently recognized talents like Sophie Letourneur for Énorme, Axelle Ropert for Petite Solange, and Alice Diop for Saint-Omer. This year, the honor goes to another female filmmaker this time — Louise Courvoisier for her debut film Vingt Dieux (aka Holy Cow), a 2024 Cannes Film Festival selection in the Un Certain Regard section, where it also won the Un Certain Regard Youth Prize. Zeitgeist Films landed the distribution rights and have plans to distribute the film in March of next year. In our review, I mentioned “with a blend of playfulness and sincerity, the film captures the complexities of human desperation, inviting audiences to both admire and despise the multiple missteps – you’ll love to hate him, but miss him if he weren’t there type.”… Read the rest
DOC NYC, the world’s largest documentary film festival, has announced the lineup for its influential, distinguished Short List section for its 15th edition. This section features 15 titles that are the top documentary contenders, and is known to overlap with […]
The post DOC NYC Announces Their Influential 2024 Short List Lineup appeared first on Hammer to Nail.
Starring Nick Frost and Synnøve Karlsen star. A couple who find their jovial cab driver diverts them to a remote, haunted road, revealing disturbing motives and his true intentions.
“The world you’re about to see no longer exists. None of us knew what was about to happen.” Writer-director Julia Loktev––whose 13-year hiatus from filmmaking has left cinephiles in a curious stupor––has returned, and it was worth the wait. My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow marks a significant shift for the […]
The post NYFF Review: Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I – The Last Air in Moscow Reveals the Real World Horrors of Anti-War Russian Journalists first appeared on The Film Stage.
Even with all the collective force of human imagination, evidenced by books, scripts and conspiracy theories, nothing can be as wonderfully and sometimes scarily incredible as reality. Some history lessons, even seemingly lesser ones, are so genuinely wild it’s hard to be certain what they teach, if anything at all. One of the stories that fall under this category is the one of Sara Jane Moore, a suburban single mother turned FBI informant after the Patty Hearst kidnapping, who attempted to assassinate US President Gerald Ford in 1975. Her efforts weren’t successful and Moore went to prison for thirty years. Her figure has become almost forgotten, especially next to Charles Manson’s protégé Lynette Fromme, who also attempted to kill Ford, mere weeks prior to Moore….
A plane crashes in the Amazon jungle leaving a sole survivor, a five-year-old child named Rebecca, who is then saved just in time by an Indigenous Iruaté man. Nine years pass, and Rebecca (Helena Zengel) is now widely known as a “miracle” and a faith healer, heavily promoted by her missionary father, Lawrence (Jeremy Xido). As the girl eagerly participates in tent revival sermons, two events occur disrupting the long-established routine. First, a new nurse, Denise (Sabine Timoteo), arrives and suddenly starts questioning the details Rebecca knows about her past. Then, there is the pressing matter of rising tensions between the Iruaté tribe and the loggers destroying their land, and both Lawrence and Rebecca insert themselves into this conflict. Transamazonia, which premiered at the 77th…