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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: The Road, The Owl and the Sparrow, and more.
- What We're Watching: North Face, The Lost Coast, Edge of Darkness.
- Explore: Pennebaker and The National.
- Contests: Photo contest winners!
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John Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall take on the challenge of adapting Cormac McCarthy's bleak post-apocalypse novel, and the film "walks a tremendously daring and delicate line between inspiration and horror, and it does so not only in the events it depicts but in its very air and atmosphere," writes Shawn Levy. "It was unforgettable on the page, and it impresses equally, or at least it does so remarkably often, on screen." Adds Empire: "One of the most chillingly effective visions of the world’s end ever put on screen -- and a heart-rending study of parenthood, to boot." See also our Podcast with director Hillcoat. |
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Don't let the simplistic, ensemble plot "discourage you from seeking out writer-director-cinematographer Stephane Gauger's lovely debut," urges Village Voice's Tim Grierson of this fable-ish film set in Saigon, "which tracks a week in the separate lives of three young Vietnamese people. [It] forgoes the usual convoluted narrative coincidences in order to craft a refreshingly simple look at loneliness and tentative connection." Adds TimeOut: "Sentimental without being cloying, the film is a charmer, just like the gravely wide-eyed" girl at its center. |
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This happens about halfway through the German film North Face, in the dining room of a swank hotel in the Swiss alps. Several waiters enter with a giant brown cake on a trolley, adorned with sparklers. This misshapen and thoroughly unappetizing lump of confectionery is a reproduction of the mountain just outside. The head waiter announces that the cake commemorates the imminent conquest of the murderous north face of the Eiger. The diners, nearly all reporters here to cover just such a momentous event, politely applaud... Read more >> |
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Modesty can be quite a virtue where independent film is concerned. You'd think, by their very nature, most indies could not help but be modest, considering their highly limited budgets and the fledgling state of their often first-time filmmakers. Even so, movies that bite off more than can be chewed and pack in everything on a filmmaker's mind pop up with alarming regularity in the independent field. All of which makes The Lost Coast, a film written and directed by Gabriel Fleming which made its DVD debut a few weeks back, something of a quiet, pleasant surprise. ... Read more >> |
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A remake of the highly regarded British miniseries, in the American version is essentially a Michael Clayton-meets- Taken action film that can't capture the best of either of those films. The fun in action movies is less the detailed backstory that leads the villain to do their dastardly deeds and more in figuring out which way the protagonist will lean. Unfortunately, the convoluted plot of Edge takes forever to unfold and our hero, Mel Gibson as Boston detective Thomas Craven, is surprisingly one-dimensional.... Read more >> |
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If the fact that D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus recently directed a live webcast of a performance by The National at Brooklyn's BAM Theater is notable to you, you're probably interested in at least one (and possibly all three) of the following things: The National, the general idea of the concert movie and/or the work of Pennebaker and Hegedus. Vadim Rizov muses on this show, on Pennebaker's work and the concert film in general. More >>
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