Movie Poster Monday: YEAR OF THE FISH

While WALL-E continues being hailed the new standard for animation excellence, today’s movie poster is for an alternative animated style: rotoscoping, in which live action footage is “traced” over. The film is Year of the Fish, a Sundance 2007 selection and festival favorite from Boston to Dallas to San Francisco.

Rotoscoping results in a type of “animated […]

Trailer Tuesday: TRANSSIBERIAN

You may have read our coverage of Transsiberian, Brad Anderson’s (Session 9, Next Stop Wonderland) newest film, the Opening Night feature at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Now the strangers-on-a-train thriller (yep, stole that from Norm) will be opening nationwide on July 18, 2008.

Kingsley at the IFFB Q&A
Transsiberian follows an American couple played by […]

New Trailer: ELEGY with Cruz, Kingsley

You can’t get much better than this cast: Penelope Cruz, Sir Ben Kingsley, Dennis Hopper, and two of our all-time unsung cinema heroes, Patricia Clarkson (movie crush) and Peter Sarsgaard. You could choose three movies from each of their resumes and have one hell of a film festival. Now they’re all in Elegy, from director Isabel Coixet […]

Trailer Tuesday: CHOKE

Chuck Palahniuk already had quite the loyal fan base and the film adaptation of his book, Fight Club, gained him an even larger following. So my initial thought is that Choke, a new film based on another of his novels, is going to do surprisingly well. However, there are two ways this might go wrong:
1) Screenwriter and director […]

Review: BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER*

Chris Bell is a pretty unassuming guy. But in his heart of hearts, he’d rather not be. He’d prefer to be a fist-pumping, super-ripped, California-tanned, smiling superstar. But life didn’t swing that way for Chris — and his documentary on the world of performance-enhancing drugs is better because of it.

The Bell Brothers, with Chris Bell at center
Instead, Chris is […]

Filmmaker Interview: CRAWFORD’s David Modigliani

Documentary director David Modigliani is pissed. He’s angry at the American tidal wave of political rhetoric–and the soapbox filmmaking that comes with it.
But Modigliani has actually done something about it. He’s the guy behind Crawford, an entertaining look inside the tiny Texas town the Bushes suddenly called their own. You know when the President talks about “the ranch?” You’d […]