One of Reese Witherspoon’s breakout roles was as the ambitious and persnickety Tracy Flick in Alexander Payne’s second film Election. Since then, the pair has yet to work together, but Deadline reported Wednesday that Witherspoon has joined Payne’s latest film, the much delayed Downsizing. According to The Playlist, Downsizing was first conceived back in 2008 …
Alexander Payne directed and co-wrote only six films, including Election, About Schmidt, Sideways and The Descendants, but he’s regarded as one of the best American filmmakers working today. He’s directed some of the best performances from Hollywood’s top actors, including Paul Giamatti, Jack Nicholson, and George Clooney in starring roles, and he and his writing partner …
Nebraska Written by Bob Nelson Directed by Alexander Payne USA, 2013 It’s become passé in popular culture to mock the elderly, to tweak and jeer at them just enough without being excessively cruel. We can laugh at old people for swearing at each other, or for having regressed physically to the point where they seem …
Venerable Woody Grant (a grizzled Bruce Dern) has a singular purpose in mind, to get from his adopted Montana home to neighbouring Nebraska to collect a million-dollar cheque that a suspiciously speculative postal disclaimer has promised to honour. Elderly and suffering with decaying mental functions, Woody clearly can’t see through the marketing scam, and his wife Kate (June Squibb) and son David (Will Forte) grow increasingly exasperated at his dangerous footbound expeditions before arriving at a mutual solution:
Woody (Bruce Dern, winner of Cannes best actor prize for a nearly wordless performance) is a broke, bitter,recovering alcoholic who barely speaks to his shrewish wife (scene-stealer June Squibb) or grown sons. After falling under the delusion that he’s won a mail-order sweepstakes, he embarks on a cross-country journey, his youngest son David (Will Forte) playing Sancho to his Don Quixote, and making discoveries about his father he never could expect. Telluride favorite Alexander Payne (The Descendants, TFF 2001) explores cruelty, frustration and greed in this Middle American landscape, tempering it with thorough and obvious love. Phedon Papamichael’s bleakly beautiful black-and-white vistas and a superb cast of supporting performers (Stacy Keach, Bob Odenkirk and beautifully picked-and-managed nonprofessionals) make Nebraska Payne’s toughest,most tender and complex work yet.Think Ozu on the modern American prairie.
The BAFTAs is one of those award ceremonies you can count on the go against the norm. Always the one to celebrate more independent films and the actors, actresses and directors snubbed by the Academy Awards have a chance of a nomination. In light of the forthcoming awards ceremony on Sunday 12 February, here are …
Every year at award season, The Hollywood Reporter invites several handpicked actors, actresses and directors who they feel represented some of the best work in the film industry. This year’s director’s roundtable gathered The Descendants‘ Alexander Payne, Beginners‘ Mike Mills, Shame‘s Steve McQueen, Young Adult‘s Jason Reitman, Moneyball‘s Bennett Miller and The Artist‘s Michel Hazanavicius …
The Descendants Directed by Alexander Payne Written by Alexander Payne USA, 2012 The most obvious theme running through the films of Alexander Payne is the wide-eyed angst that all of Payne’s protagonists struggle through. At his best, Payne is a more humorous version of Thomas McCarthy, as he often analyzes small town America and its …
This is a list of our favourite soundtracks of 2011. We are currently working on a list of the best original scores, which should be posted sometime before the end of the year. It hasn’t been the greatest year for movie soundtracks, but I can say that the top five have been spinning in my …
The Descendants Written by Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, based on Kaui Hart Hemmings’s novel Directed by Alexander Payne USA, 2011 If it’s true that filmmakers spend their careers repeatedly remaking the same movie, few filmmakers seem to relish the prospect of repetition to the same degree as Alexander Payne. After cutting his …
The 49th New York Film Festival has announced their main slate which takes place September 30th thru October 16th at Lincoln Center. The closing night selection is Alexander Payne’s The Descendants which joins the gala screenings of opening night’s Roman Polanski’s Carnage, David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, and the Almodóvar/Banderas reunion The Skin I Live …
I’ve always been a big fan of Alexander Payne‘s dark comedy Election, and in my opinion, it is one of the best comedies of the 90’s; The film was adapted from a 1998 novel of the same title by Tom Perrotta and satirizes both suburban high school life and politics. The film received an Academy …