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2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2006
1-20 of 21 items from 2012 « Prev | Next »
Love Crime – review
15 December 2012 4:01 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Alain Corneau, the French director who died in 2010 at the age of 67, shortly after completing this glossy thriller, was little known in Britain. After working as an assistant to Costa-Gavras he made some notable crime movies, including Choice of Arms (starring Yves Montand) and Série noire, a transposition of Jim Thompson's pulp novel A Hell of a Woman from Chicago to suburban Paris starring Patrick Dewaere. But his masterpiece is the stately 1991 Tous les matins du monde, featuring Depardieu père et fils and set in the world of 17th-century baroque musicians.
Already remade by Brian De Palma as Passion, Love Crime starts well as a psychological drama in which two highfliers – bitchy, sadistic Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas) and seemingly submissive Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier) – come into conflict as their heads batter the glass ceiling of the American multinational they work for in Paris. It goes badly off course, however, when »
- Philip French
Farewell, My Lovely
1 December 2012 4:01 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
(Dick Richards, 1975, Park Circus, 15)
Raymond Chandler's second Philip Marlowe novel has been filmed three times: first in disguise as the 1942 B-movie The Falcon Takes Over, next as the excellent noir thriller Murder My Sweet (1944) starring Dick Powell, and third as this elegant neo-noir with a perfectly cast Robert Mitchum, at 58 the oldest actor to play Marlowe. It appeared during a period of nostalgia for the interwar years (along with The Great Gatsby, The Sting, The Way We Were, Chinatown) and is set in 1941 during the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. To a bluesy score by David Shire, Marlowe goes down the mean streets of a Los Angeles lit by John A Alonzo to resemble paintings by Edward Hopper. He's searching for Velma, the missing moll of gangster Moose Malloy, and following Joe Dimaggio's hitting streak for the Yankees. He's a weary figure, aware that his chivalric values »
- Philip French
Marfa Girl – first look review
12 November 2012 8:51 AM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Not even the novelty of a one-off screening at the Rome film festival, ahead of its online release, can shake the impression that Larry Clark's small-town tale of drifters covers familiar Texan ground
If writer-director Larry Clark is to be believed, the Rome premiere of Marfa Girl is both the first and last time his movie will screen before the public. No traditional theatrical roll-out for Clark. Once the final credits roll, Marfa Girl proceeds straight online where it will be accessible on the director's dedicated website for a fee of $5.99 (£3.77). "This is the future and the future is now," says the director, brightly seeking fresh modes of distribution for a film that nods heavily to his own back catalogue.
From torpid opening to explosive finale, Marfa Girl surfs through familiar Clark country, dragging a dilated eye across the wanton youth of smalltown Texas. "You can't do anything in »
- Xan Brooks
The Evolution of the Serial Killer
24 October 2012 12:18 PM, PDT | Boomtron | See recent Boomtron news »
America has always been crazy about serial killers.
They’re our homegrown werewolves. They click with the fast-food car culture that roars in the country’s busy, busy heart. They fit neatly with our cult-of-celebrity-style national mythology.
These beasts that seem like men, mowing through victims like McDonald’s cheeseburgers, speeding for the televised takedown by John Q. Law – how can the USA not be wild for them?
That love-hate crush has been around since the days of Dr. Henry Holmes’ murder hotel was cutting down the attendance at the Chicago Worlds’ Fair. But the nature of it has changed along with our politics and hemlines.
The mythical figure of the serial killer in our culture has gone through the wringer of our changing standard of living. From the time of the penny dreadfuls and pulps, all the way to mainstream torture porn, serial killers in crime fiction transformed.
They’ve gone from Maniacs, »
- Matthew C. Funk
Emily S. Whitten, In Conversation with Dean Haspiel
2 October 2012 5:00 AM, PDT | Comicmix.com | See recent Comicmix news »
Dean Haspiel strikes me as a creator who’s constantly growing. He’s an artist, he’s a writer, he’s won an Emmy for TV design work, and in the last year he’s started up a new project, Trip City, a “Brooklyn-filtered literary arts salon” with an eclectic mix of comics, stories, realism, sci-fi, and more. Now, don’t get me wrong – I obviously love superhero comics, and the people who create them, but I also love creators who can and do cross genres and try new things. Dean is clearly one of these.
While Dean is perhaps best known for his work with Harvey Pekar (e. g. American Splendor and The Quitter) and for his “last romantic anti-hero” Billy Dogma, his current project that’s caught my attention is Trip City, via the sample booklet Dean shared with me at Baltimore Comic Con. While there’s no »
- Emily S. Whitten
Raising Cain: The work of James M. Cain
18 September 2012 7:13 PM, PDT | SoundOnSight | See recent SoundOnSight news »
Hammett, Chandler, Cain: the modern mystery thriller starts with them. They are the godfathers of that sensibility that would come to be called noir which would, in time, overflow the printed page and onto the stage, the big screen, and eventually even to television. Identified primarily with mysteries, the concept of flawed human beings ethically tripping and stumbling in a moral No Man’s Land, equidistant between Right and Wrong, Good and Bad would bleed across genre lines. There would be noir Westerns (Blood on the Moon, 1948), noir war movies (Attack!, 1956), noir horror (The Body Snatcher, 1945), even noir melodramas like Cain’s own Mildred Pierce, adapted for the screen in 1945.
But they all started with what Hammett, Chandler, and Cain did on the page, and each provided an evolutionary step which took what had once been usually dismissed as a flyweight genre dedicated to colorful private investigators and clever puzzles, »
- Bill Mesce
The Imposter (15) ****; F For Fake (PG) ****
23 August 2012 4:00 PM, PDT | The Independent | See recent The Independent news »
It's fitting that Bart Layton's brilliant documentary The Imposter is being released in the same week that Orson Welles' playful and Quixotic final feature F For Fake (1972) is revived. Both are studies in confidence trickery. The Imposter plays like a film noir. Minus the sex, it's the documentary equivalent of one of those lurid Jim Thompson stories in which human nature is exposed at its very basest. One of its fascinations is its structure. The facts here are already relatively familiar. »
The Imposter (15) **** F For Fake (PG) ****
23 August 2012 4:00 PM, PDT | The Independent | See recent The Independent news »
It's fitting that Bart Layton's brilliant documentary The Imposter is being released in the same week that Orson Welles' playful and Quixotic final feature F For Fake (1972) is revived. Both are studies in confidence trickery. The Imposter plays like a film noir. Minus the sex, it's the documentary equivalent of one of those lurid Jim Thompson stories in which human nature is exposed at its very basest. One of its fascinations is its structure. The facts here are already relatively familiar. »
The Crooked Timber: A Conversation with William Friedkin
13 August 2012 6:09 AM, PDT | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »
"From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." —Immanuel Kant.
Even before I knew what a cinephilic sensibility was, mine was being shaped by the evolving filmic projects of William Friedkin and their focus on humanity's crooked timber. As a participatory member of the Gay Movement of the early 70s, I resisted the scriptural representation in Friedkin's The Boys In the Band (1970) and—a decade later—Cruising (1980), but was undeniably swept up in the Catholicized hysteria surrounding The Exorcist (1973), which I managed to catch at its Bible Belt premiere in Little Rock, Arkansas. The French Connection (1971) challenged Peter Yate's earlier Bullitt (1968) with its iconic car chase and Sorcerer (1977) dazzled me with its suspenseful virtuosity and has continued to intrigue me with its court battle over copyright. To Live And Die in L.A. (1985) introduced me to the talent of such actors as William Petersen and Willem DeFoe; but, »
‘Killer Joe’ Interview with writer Tracy Letts
2 August 2012 7:01 PM, PDT | The Scorecard Review | See recent Scorecard Review news »
Matthew McConaughey continues a summer of jolting performances with Killer Joe, a movie about a family in Texas (comprised of Emile Hirsch, Gina Gershon, Thomas Haden Church, and Juno Temple) who have a wild scheme to kill Church’s ex-wife for her insurance money. Hired to do the job is McConaughey’s title character, who affects the twisted family in ways they could have never imagined.
Playwright Tracy Letts wrote the screenplay for the film, based off his own play which was first staged in 1993. In 2006, Killer Joe director William Friedkin adapted Letts’ play Bug for a film adaptation starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon.
I sat down with Tracy Letts to discuss his story, his relationship with now two-time collaborator Friedkin, and what his impression was of Matthew McConaughey’s romantic comedies before Killer Joe came along.
Killer Joe opens in Chicago on August 3.
Read Jeff Bayer’s “9/10″ SXSW »
- Nick Allen
Interview: Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy Letts Unleashes ‘Killer Joe’
30 July 2012 10:54 AM, PDT | HollywoodChicago.com | See recent HollywoodChicago.com news »
Chicago – Now that I’ve seen William Friedkin’s stunning adaptation of Tracy Letts’ “Killer Joe” with Matthew McConaughey and Juno Temple, I can only imagine what it must have been like to experience its intensity in a small theater in Evanston nearly twenty years ago.
“Killer Joe,” the second play adapted by Letts for the legendary William Friedkin after the two worked together on “Bug,” is a down-and-dirty noir about a hired killer (McConaughey) who enters the life of four morally challenged family members (Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple, Gina Gershon, and Thomas Haden Church) and turns their world upside down. The controversial film faced a battle with the MPAA that earned it an Nc-17 rating for, well, we can’t even explain it to you. Sitting and talking about the play’s origins on the North side of Chicago, the MPAA, and the power of Matthew McConaughey, Letts is »
- adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
[Interview] Matthew McConaughey Talks Twisted, Trashy ‘Killer Joe’ With Writer Tracy Letts
26 July 2012 10:00 AM, PDT | The Film Stage | See recent The Film Stage news »
William Friedkin‘s latest, Killer Joe, is a gritty, trailer-trash madhouse that builds to a climax that is superbly sudden and unexpected. The SXSW premiere was filled with gasps and lots of dark laughter. The following day I was able to sit down for roundtables with the cast and crew and below you can find the results from our talk with Matthew McConaughey and Tracy Letts, as the film heads into limited release this week. We discuss fight sequences, inspirations, the way Friedkin likes to use one shot and move on, and much more.
The Film Stage: We were talking a little bit in the previous conversation about the difference in terms of screening here versus screening in Toronto and Venice. Were you both at those screenings as well?
Matthew McConaughey: I was not.
Tracy Letts: I was at all three, and it’s played very differently at all three places. »
- jpraup@gmail.com (thefilmstage.com)
The Best There Is? – Jason Starr to Write Wolverine Max Comic
5 July 2012 8:42 PM, PDT | Boomtron | See recent Boomtron news »
In news that feels a long time coming, Marvel Comics has finally given angry X-Man Wolverine a mature readers book. For a long time, fans have been asking for this, only for then-eic Joe Quesada to nix the idea, claiming that he was a character that too many kids enjoyed reading and blah blah blah. They even got close – it was rumoured that the Charlie Huston Wolverine: The Best There Is series from 2010-2011 was originally meant to be a Max (Marvel’s mature readers line) book.
Whatever has caused the change of heart, it’s more than welcome news, as IGN has just announced that Wolverine Max is debuting this October. Writing the series is Jason Starr. Starr is primarily known for his crime novels, and has dabbled in comics a few times in the last few years.
Personally, I find Starr to be a little hit or miss – when he’s good, »
- Liam Jose
‘Killer Joe’ is like a nasty little uncle you don’t like or particularly trust
28 June 2012 6:56 PM, PDT | SoundOnSight | See recent SoundOnSight news »
Directed by William Friedkin
Written by Tracey Letts
USA, 2012
It’s not particularly difficult to see what attracted director William Friedkin to the twisted charms of Killer Joe, his new homicidal and unpleasantly hilarious southern baked neo-noir which opens today and seems destined to stir up a minor whirlwind of controversy for its risqué concoction of sexual violence and prepubescent sexuality. During the halcyon period of the early Seventies Friedkin was fettered as one of the saviours of American cinema, and both his critical, commercial and cultural smashes The French Connection and The Exorcist showered him with Oscar nominations and unprecedented box office success, but as is usual with such icarus like rises an inevitable, incendiary fall was soon to follow. After a string of flops over the next two decades with only the cult crime favourite To Live & Die In La distinguishing an increasingly mediocre career – one »
- John
The Top Ten Films Noir According to ‘Road to Perdition’ Writer Max Allan Collins
14 May 2012 9:00 AM, PDT | FilmSchoolRejects.com | See recent FilmSchoolRejects news »
Editor’s Note: Max Allan Collins has written over 50 novels and 17 movie tie-in books. He’s also the author of the Road to Perdition graphic novel, off which the film was based. With his new Mickey Spillane collaboration “Lady, Go Die” in great bookstores everywhere, we thought it would be fun to ask him for his ten best films noir. In true noir fashion, we bit off more than we could handle… We have to begin with a definition of noir, which is tricky, because nobody agrees on one. The historical roots are in French film criticism, borrowing the term noir (black) from the black-covered paperbacks in publisher Gallimard’s Serie Noire, which in 1945 began reprinting American crime writers such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Horace McCoy, Jim Thompson, Mickey Spillane, W.R. Burnett and many others. The films the term was first applied to were low-budget American crime thrillers made during the »
- Guest Author
Friday Noir: The legendary Kubrick impressed early in his film career with ‘The Killing’
11 May 2012 4:26 PM, PDT | SoundOnSight | See recent SoundOnSight news »
The Killing
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson
U.S.A., 1956
Stanley Kubrick, now there is a name evocative of so many immediate thoughts and emotions for movie buffs everywhere. Infuriating, coldly mechanical in his depiction of people, difficult to comprehend. He was also an intelligent screenwriter, deeply profound in the exploration of themes in his films, and meticulous with his sets and camerawork like only a handful of other directors were before his time, during his time, and ever since his passing in 1999. His films consist of a laundry list of all the major film genres, save the western, which he never ventured into. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick seemingly told thought provoking tales through a wide variety of cinematic prisms. Lest it be forgotten that the man began his career as a creator of major motion pictures in the film noir genre. »
- Edgar Chaput
Spanish Prisoners: 5 Indispensable Books of Scam Fiction
1 April 2012 8:37 AM, PDT | Boomtron | See recent Boomtron news »
Neil Gaiman and Jim Thompson bonded by Scam Fiction?
It’s all a scam, isn’t it?
My alarm goes off in the morning and I eat some cereal some marketer scammed me into thinking tastes good and is good for me. I wash myself with products I’ve been scammed into thinking will make me more pleasant company. I buy cigarettes I’ve scammed myself into thinking won’t really shorten my life from a convenience store clerk who scams me into thinking I’m paying a fair price. I go to my day-job and scam my boss into thinking I’m working hard just as he scams me into thinking my paycheck is as much as I deserve. Then I come home and attempt to scam you fine people into thinking I know what I’m talking about when it comes to crime fiction.
But of course, you’re too smart for that. »
- Jimmy Callaway
John Cusack: 'I'm not a scenester'
19 March 2012 2:58 AM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Thirty years after making his debut, John Cusack is still a Hollywood outsider. Now 45, the star of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven talks about mortality, his Brat Pack past – and why he wishes he could work a room
John Cusack is puffing on a fat cigar. It's incongruous, seeing him dressed all in cool, casual black, sucking on a Cohiba, like a goth who has crashed a Hollywood mogul's house party. "Yeah, maybe we shouldn't mention the cigar," he says. "I don't want people to think I'm this movie cliche. I'm certainly not a mogul – in fact, nothing could be further from the truth."
I don't think there's any danger of Cusack being mistaken for a movie mogul. But the cigar begins to feel somehow appropriate. The more he smokes it, the more at ease he becomes with it, until he owns that damn cigar and waggles it like a spare, »
- Jason Solomons
SXSW '12 Interview: Matthew McConaughey & Tracy Letts Talk Working With William Friedkin & Nc-17 Rating For 'Killer Joe'
13 March 2012 10:05 AM, PDT | The Playlist | See recent The Playlist news »
"Killer Joe" is a film primed to mark a comeback for its director and star. Not only has William Friedkin made his best movie in decades with the sordid Texan crime tale, but Matthew McConaughey continues to add to his recent renaissance of fascinating work that has seen him team with with filmmakers like Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh and Jeff Nichols.
"Killer Joe" wowed audiences on the Lido and at Tiff over the last six months (read our Venice review here), but came back to home territory this week for SXSW, and we sat down for a roundtable interview with McConaughey, along with Tracy Letts, who adapted his own acclaimed play for the screen, and whose Pulitzer Prize-winning "August: Osage County," starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, will be filmed later in 2012. Read highlights below, and you'll be able to check out "Killer Joe" for yourselves when it's released later this year. »
- Oliver Lyttelton
Daily Briefing. "The Great Digital Changeover"
29 February 2012 10:06 AM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »
Dr. Strangelove is one of 13 digitally restored classics
to be digitally projected at Film Forum starting Friday
As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson wrap their series, "Pandora's digital box," Film Forum launches another on Friday, This Is Dcp. Leah Churner in a preview for the Voice: "Formalized in 2005 by a collective of the six major studios in Hollywood, the Digital Cinema Package, or Dcp, has replaced 35mm as the standard format for theatrical exhibition. It's a set of high-definition video files delivered on a hard drive encrypted with copyright protection, and it plugs into a system of proprietary servers, software, and projectors. Today, two-thirds of American theaters have converted to Dcp."
Churner's overview is a fine snapshot of what Bordwell calls "the Great Digital Changeover," and Churner cites his observation that, in her words, "one of the odder circumstances of the digital age is that as restoration gets easier, conservation gets harder. »
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