Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum turned out to be 2009’s biggest movie – in film snob circles, that is. Since we’ve already discussed that film, Rick, Simon and special guest Olivier Creurer tackle three of Denis’ other acclaimed features – Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day, and L’Intrus – with varying degrees of success. And [...]
Director Tim Burton never grew up. Normally, this would mean that he should be making Rob Schneider movies. But since he seems to have spent his never-ending childhood making pets out of things he dug up in the graveyard, his dark, simplistic, highly stylized films have taken on the form of gothic fairy tales, [...]
It’s hard to believe that after nearly 200 hous of programming, we’ve never had an episode tailored around the singular talents of one of America’s most revered filmmakers: Martin Scorsese. Shutter Island, the Dennie Lehane adaptation that was unceremoniously delayed for five months, found its way to theaters this past weekend and brought in Scorsese’s [...]
Last Tuesday morning, the Academy of Arts and Sciences released its list of nominations for the 82nd annual edition of its awards – better known as the Oscars. It’s the first time in about seven decades that its coveted Best Picture field has expanded to ten slots, thereby leaving room both for more mainstream fare [...]
Albert and Allen Hughes, better known simply as the Hughes Brothers, have been kicking around since the early nineties, but you’d be forgiven for a bit of confusion thanks to their schizophrenic filmography. After helming some music videos, the twins made an envious feature debut at Cannes in 1993 at only 21 years of age [...]
If I were to make a movie using only my own funds and a home computer, I probably wouldn’t be original enough to do anything other than wire a webcam into my Playskool murder shack. Thankfully, Australia’s Spierig brothers are considerably more inventive then I am. With 2003’s The Undead, they fused home made CGI [...]
There was a time when New Zealand’s Peter Jackson had to cook up his own special effects in his family’s oven in order to execute his low-budget terrors. Those days are long gone now, thanks to his acclaimed adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. His latest, an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely [...]
As the only American member of the Monty Python comedy troupe, Terry Gilliam has long been pegged as the odd one out. That reputation has extended to his career as a director, which has been peppered with roughly equal amounts of crossover success, cult adoration and general puzzlement. Today, we’ll be focusing on two of [...]
With this release of 1991’s Slacker, director Richard Linklater helped usher in the modern day independent film movement, which essentially involves making films out of a neat conversation you had at Burning Man. Since that film, Linklater’s output has run the gamut from studio pictures like the remake of The Bad News Bears to the [...]
Jim Sheridan has made a career out of making the sweeping seem intimate. His trilogy of films starring Daniel Day-Lewis – My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father and The Boxer, helped to sculpt the actor into the award machine he is today. The latter two of that bunch of them took on [...]
A few weeks ago, we took you on a tour of director Todd Solondz’s depraved filmography. If that director has a polar opposite among his contemporaries, it’s probably Wes Anderson, whose films tend to celebrate rather than condemn their characters’ quirks. This week sees the release of Anderson’s latest, the Roal Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. [...]
Some have hailed him as the world’s greatest filmmaker – so why, newcomers might ask, does his name grace the director’s slot on what appears to be a direct-to-video cop thriller from 1995? Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans graced our screens this past weekend, so Simon, Mariko and returning guest Derek [...]
Writer-director Richard Kelly hasn’t been around too long, but his three features have all been the subject of intense debate: Is Donnie Darko the great sci-fi fable of the 2000s or a teen angst pretension pit? Is Southland Tales, as the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman contends, a a “visionary” film, or creative control gone horribly [...]
This weekend, the 14th feature from Joel and Ethan Coen finally hit Montreal, so we’re once again delving into the filmography of the Minnesotan duo. We’ll be talking about that film, a dark 1960s-set comedy entitled A Serious Man, as well as two of the brothers’ cult favorites: their dark neo-noir debut Blood Simple and [...]
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Perhaps, in the early 1980s, while still in film school, Danish director Lars von Trier saw one of the US’ highest grossing feel-good comedies, like Risky Business or Mr. Mom. And then decided to make exact opposite of that film for the rest of his life. If such a thing did [...]
