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There are over 700 film festivals worldwide, but only a few are devoted entirely to showing old movies -- which is odd, considering that these days, it's just as hard to see most older films in a theater as it is to see any of the new festival darlings. Those that do exist tend towards the obscure...
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Few movies are as incomplete yet overwhelmingly influential as Fritz Lang's 1927 "Metropolis." Any movie you've seen with enormous, gigantic architecture set in an ominous future or a mythical past -- "Brazil," "The Hudsucker Proxy," "The Fifth Element,"...
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On her way out at Spout, Karina Longworth noted a few days ago that the film blogosphere can feel like "hundreds of traffic-chasers, who are essentially blaring the same thing, at the same time, all day long." She doesn't like it one bit. And such was the attitude Focus Features CEO/Ang...
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Marc Levin is still finding pins under the floorboards of his loft in New York's Garment District. He ended up digging far deeper to find the hook for his latest doc about the economic crisis -- "Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags," a startlingly prescient history of the clothing industry...
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The latest film from Pedro Almodóvar, "Broken Embraces," closes the New York Film Festival after coasting in on a wave of mediocre advance word. The most common complaint has been that Almodóvar is blatantly recycling himself, throwing around the same motifs as always (mothers and sons, melodrama...
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Michael Haneke's fondness for scolding didacticism just don't work for some people, myself among them. But "The White Ribbon" is a whole other thing, a movie where anything dreadful that can happen will, just to prove that people are so terrible you can't even count on them not...
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"Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" is, in theory, the miserable story of the titular 300-pound teenage girl (Gabby Sidibe), who's raped into having two children by her dad and abused by her mother (Mo'Nique) until she meets an inspirational teacher (Paula Patton...
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Thu, Oct 1 2009
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Filed under: Festivals, Tyler Perry, New York Film Festival 2009, NYFF, Oprah Winfrey, Monster's Ball, Vittorio de Sica, Lee Daniels, The Woodsman, Two Women, Precious
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Whatever you think of art film's designated provocateur, it's hard to imagine anyone less famous than Harmony Korine getting a movie into major festivals that was conceived of only four months before, shot in two weeks, and consists mainly of dudes in old-person masks fellating tree branches...
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Every year someone makes a fuss over how snobbish/exclusionary/whatever the New York Film Festival is; this year's money quote came from Jeffrey Wells, who complained that the festival committee had become "a gathering of Trappist monks who've been slurping too much goat's milk with...
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At age 87, Alain Resnais has produced one of his boldest films. "Wild Grass," which opened the New York Film Festival on Friday, is just wild, blending the audacity of "Punch Drunk Love" with the mindbinding qualities of Charlie Kaufman. The film's about a married man (André Dussollier...
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In Fantastic Fest's famous secret screenings, the identity of the movie being shown isn't revealed until it's about to begin. While it's a gamble, it's one that prompts devotees to line up for year-in-advance VIP badges -- past secret screenings have included the first-ever looks...
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Sun, Sep 27 2009
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Filed under: Festivals, Alamo Drafthouse, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Noboru Iguchi, Tokyo Gore Police, Fantastic Fest 09, RoboGeisha, New York Asian Film Festival, Marc Walkow, Tim League
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According to a widely cited number from Film-Releases.com I can't actually find on their site, American distributors will release 40% fewer films this award season, compared to last year. (This figure presumably doesn't take into account the five-plus niche releases flooding New York and LA ...
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Happy Labor Day! Here, let Michael Moore make you feel better about working. Most of us, now more than ever, would prefer not to lose our jobs; Moore, on the other hand, views permanently severing himself from his financiers as something to be desired. As Arifa Akbar reports from the Venice Film Festival...
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Mon, Sep 7 2009
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Filed under: Festivals, Michael Moore, Slacker Uprising, Venice 2009, Coming attractions, Capitalism: A Love Story, socialism, Salt of the Earth, Sicko, Fahrenheit 9/11
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So Sundance woke up all sweaty and hungover a few days ago and apparently decided it was time to change its ways. The quirky Fox Searchlight acquisitions, the earnest Amerindie movies like "Sin Nombre" going nowhere slowly but self-righteously...something didn't feel right. Was this the...
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Every major festival has its share of commercial pandering and celebrity showboating, from Sundance's swarms of gifting suites to Cannes rolling out its red carpet for "The Da Vinci Code." A few days ago I wrote about how this year the Venice Film Festival has cobbled together a new 3-D...