By William S. Gooch At first glance, Anthony Fabian draws a strong resemblance to Alan Cummings, so I expected him to be funny, which he was; witty, which he undoubtedly is, and a bit irreverent, which I saw shades of as well. Maybe because he’s British, I was slightly offset by his relaxed charm and …
In an unsurprising piece of news, director Kenny Ortega’s posthumous Michael Jackson documentary Michael Jackson’s This Is It had a sensational gross over the first five days of its release. The film became “…the highest-grossing concert film worldwide” in the five days since its release. The $101 million dollar worldwide gross pushed the film well …
Taking Woodstock Directed by Ang Lee I’ve never been able to sit through more than a few minutes of Michael Wadleigh’s revered documentary Woodstock. Every time it’s on TV, I hope I’m going to catch some footage of Crosby Stills and Nash or Jimi Hendrix. Invariably, what I get is a (split) screenful of hippies …
Cracks Directed by Jordan Scott The opening scene of Cracks is very Madchen in Uniform, as the innocent 1930s school girls stuck on a remote English island sing their hymns, awaiting the arrival of the figurehead: Miss G, the striking, eyeliner-wearing cool teacher, the one the girls all have a pash for, especially head girl …
A Serious Man Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Written by Joel and Ethan Coen 2009, USA The Coens are getting positively prolific these days, treating their hardcore fans with a movie a year, and with their latest release, A Serious Man they have taken the comedic strand of their work into uncharted waters …
The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival announced its winners at the high profile awards ceremony held at London’s Inner Temple this evening. Hosted by journalist and broadcaster, Paul Gambaccini, the six awards were presented by some of the most respected figures in the film world. BEST FILM In recognition of original, intelligent and distinctive …
Screen Plays: How 25 Screenplays Made it to a Theatre Near You – For Better or Worse David S. Cohen, HarperCollins 2008. From the onset, Screen Plays looks like promising reading material for screenwriters and others interested in how screenplays make it from paper to screen. Cohen’s credits are respectable, and the promise of “valuable …
Some people don’t like the first Dune by David Lynch, but of course, they’re crazy. With a stunning cast like the effortless Kyle MacLachlan, badass Sting, the mysterious Jürgen Prochnow, the black-goop-dripping Kenneth McMillan, the incomparable Linda Hunt as Shadout Mapes…coupled with the as-cool-and-strange-as-it-gets-for-1984 effects, not to mention the storyline itself… come on, it rocks! …
Avatar, James Cameron’s $200 million dollar sci-fi epic and the first feature film he’s directed since Titanic, has been surrounded by much hype, anticipation, and now controversy. Sci-fi fans and film bloggers are calling into question Cameron’s ethics as discussions of plagiarism start to make the rounds on the web. Speculation started in full force …
The Informant! Directed by Steven Soderbergh You can’t keep a good executive down. After ENRON, after Lehman Brothers and the continuing fury at executive bonuses it was quite a change to see the corporate executive class as brimming with ineffective buffoons rather than coldly calculated capitalist psychopaths, in The Informant! Matt Damon stars as the …
In the past ten years MODERNCINÉ has been dedicated to making high-quality, groundbreaking and edgy horror films avoiding clichés and complacency in favor of original ideas and memorable performances. Founded by Andrew van den Houten during his college years, Andrew began producing and directing a number of award-winning short films including the 2005 multiple award …
It worked for one seemingly flagging sci-fi franchise, why not another? Apparently, George Miller is taking a page from J.J. Abram’s revisionist book in hopes of rebooting the Aussie action saga he created with his Mad Max trilogy, soon to become a quartet. It remains to be seen whether this latest “mad” installment will be …
The debut of a number of distinctive personalities is one of the important features of film noir. Noir’s main character, for instance, may appropriately be labeled thenoir loser. He is a handsome, middle-aged man who seems to blur the line between protagonist and antagonist. Billy Wilder has very explicitly introduced such personalities as Walter Neff …
The Limits of Control Directed by Jim Jarmusch The Exploding Girl Directed by Bradley Rust In the early 1990s, slacker cinema was all the rage in American independent cinema, with wacky, mumbling characters, slow pacing and the mundanity of everyday life replacing traditional plots, characterisations and drama. Which brings us to these two Amerindie offerings. …
Night of the Living Dead For a horror film, Night of the Living Dead (1968) is set in an usual local; not Transylvania, but Pennsylvania. Almost universally panned by critics when released, the film eventually developed a cult following, playing on the midnight movie circuit for more than a decade and becoming one of the …
The venerable Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise “has acquired the global rights to the property from the Mirage Group and 4Kids Entertainment.” “The global intellectual property rights to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles… cost $60 million.” Nickolodeon already has plans for the newly acquired property: the company’s “sister company Paramount will steer a new Teenage …
Cold Souls Directed by Sophie Barthes Charlie Kaufman’s attorneys must be pleased. The first phrase one grasps at to describe Sophie Barthes debut feature, Cold Souls, is ‘Kaufmanesque’: a metaphysical comedy with an absurd, fantastical central proposition, be it a machine that erases memories of a failed love affair or a puppet master accessing the …
Director Duncan Jones is on a mission to get actor Sam Rockwell an Oscar nomination by getting behind a grassroots fan campaign. Sony Pictures isn’t offering to put any money into any sort of promotion and so we here at Sound On Sight are helping out. Personally I think Duncan should also be nominated for …
Both critically and commercially, District 9 is one of the biggest hits of the year. Now Media Rights Capital has committed to fund filmmaker Neill Blomkamp’s next film, an untitled science fiction film which will be set on another planet. Blomkamp hopes his new film will be commercial but says that “it is very much …
80’s robot is a promising movie theme to begin this column. Basically any movie with this combination could fit in the Best-Worst category but I’ve managed to narrow it down to the three most satisfying. Rocky 4 (1985) Directed Sylvester Stallone. Like the Godfather trilogy, the Rocky series seems to have poor connotations with anything …
1- The Children The concept of killer kids is nothing new, but The Children can safely join the list of great horror movies like The Omen, Home Movie, The Exorcist, The Innocents and Village of the Damned. The film is directed by Tom Shankland who also adapted the script form a story by Paul Andrew …
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus Directed by Terry Gilliam A glance at the film posters could almost convince you that a new Harry Potter was upon us. The troubled final film of Heath Ledger prior to his premature death in February of last year has finally been released after a Herculean effort on the part of the …
The Road Directed by John Hillcoat For fans of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road, the novel’s journey from page to screen has been almost as harrowing as the one endured by the book’s protagonists. Delayed by over a year due to unspecified wrangling within the temple of Miramax, this grim, biblical parable is finally seeing the light of day …