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SXSW: Netflix Snags Global Rights to ‘6 Years’
1 hour ago
Netflix has nabbed global rights to Hannah Fidell’s “6 Years” and plans to debut the drama on its streaming service later this year.
It continues the Internet giant’s aggressive recent moves into the feature film space. Earlier this month, it beat out a range of indie labels for rights to Cary Fukunaga’s feature “Beasts of No Nation” and announced plans to partner with Leonardo DiCaprio on a feature-length documentary about the environment.
Netflix has already fielded Oscar-nominated documentaries, “Virunga” and “The Square,” and signed deals to produce feature films with Adam Sandler.
“6 Years” stars Taissa Farmiga (“American Horror Story”) and Ben Rosenfield (“Boardwalk Empire”) as young lovers at a crossroads. It premiered at SXSW, earning a mixed review from Variety‘s Justin Chang, who wrote the picture “too often veers toward melodramatic overstatement.”
The film is Fidell’s follow-up to “A Teacher,” which courted controversy with its look »
- Brent Lang
SXSW: Magnolia Nabs Rights to Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs Documentary
1 hour ago
Magnolia Pictures has acquired North American rights to “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine,” Alex Gibney’s critical look at the Apple co-founder and the cult of Mac he helped foster.
The picture had its world premiere at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, where it earned strong reviews for its look at Jobs’ prickly leadership style and the influence that he had in shaping Silicon Valley culture. In Variety, Justin Chang praised the film as a “coolly absorbing, deeply unflattering portrait” of Jobs.
Gibney, an Oscar winner for “Taxi to the Dark Side,” is also making headlines with “Going Clear,” his incisive look at Scientology that will air this spring on HBO.
Magnolia Pictures has acquired the theatrical, VOD and home entertainment rights to “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine,” and CNN Films, which backed the film, retained the television broadcast distribution rights.
There’s »
- Brent Lang
Mark Duplass To Young Filmmakers at SXSW: ‘Don’t Be Afraid of VOD’
2 hours ago
At a keynote speech on Sunday morning at SXSW, Mark Duplass told young filmmakers not to worry about theatrical distribution.
“God bless VOD,” Duplass said. “This is a great thing for independent film. Please don’t reject VOD. Please don’t be afraid of it. Please don’t be attached to your early films playing at theaters. You will have no more money to make movies.”
Duplass’ talk, which was told in the second person, was instructional about how to break into the business. Duplass not only touched on acting, directing and producing — he first came to SXSW with 2005’s “The Puffy Chair,” which he made with his brother Jay — but also the expanding role of television.
“We’re going to talk about the bad news and the good news of independent film,” Duplass said. “It’s mostly bad news. Where are the cool $5 million movies that used to break »
- Ramin Setoodeh
Peter Bogdanovich Pushes for Non-‘Titanic’ Tentpoles
3 hours ago
Peter Bogdanovich blames James Cameron’s success with 1997’s “Titanic” for studios pulling the plug on smaller movies, such as his 1971 hit “The Last Picture Show.”
“The worst thing was when Cameron made ‘Titanic’ and spent $150 million,” he said Saturday night after receiving the King Vidor Award from the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival.
“So everyone was predicting a disaster and when it wasn’t, then everyone started spending that much,” said Bogdanovich. “We made ‘The Last Picture Show’ for $1.3 million and it made a ton of money.”
“The Last Picture Show” made nearly $30 million in worldwide grosses. “Titanic” grossed $1.8 billion.
“The Last Picture Show” star Timothy Bottoms held a Q&A with the director at the Fremont Theater prior to a screening of the desolate black-and-white drama, nominated for eight Oscars including best picture and director (Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won for their supporting performances).
“I never »
- Dave McNary
Box Office: ‘Cinderella’ Reigns With $70.1 Million, ‘Run All Night’ Falls Flat
4 hours ago
“Cinderella” enchanted audiences this weekend, racking up a royal $70.1 million to lead the domestic box office and $132 million globally.
The adaptation of the fairy tale follows Walt Disney Studios’ strategy of raiding its animated favorites for live action blockbusters — an approach that led to such prior successes as “Maleficent” and “Alice in Wonderland,” and one the studio plans to employ on “Dumbo” and “Beauty and the Beast.”
“Cinderella’s” popularity left Liam Neeson’s latest action-adventure, “Run All Night,” huffing and puffing at the finish line. The Warner Bros. release pulled in a lackluster $11 million from 3,171 theaters, lower than pre-release tracking which suggested a debut in the $15 million range. The audience was 52% female and 86% over the age of 25.
It’s possible that Neeson, who was recently seen making short work of European bad guys in January’s “Taken 3,” has simply been brandishing the gun a bit too much of late. »
- Brent Lang
‘Camino a La Paz,’ ‘Nosotras’ Win Cartagena Fest’s First PuertoLab
9 hours ago
Argentine Francisco Varone’s road movie “Camino a La Paz’ (Road to La Paz) and Colombia’s Emilce Quevedo Diaz’s “Nosotras” (pictured) shared the 55th Cartagena Festival’s inaugural PuertoLab prize, its first post-production plaudit.
Award was announced Saturday. The two productions, both first features, featured in a five-title lineup at PuertoLab, a pix-in-post competition which marks one of the first innovations at Colombia’s Cartagena Festival under its new artistic director, producer Diana Bustamante (““Crab Trap,” “La Playa D.C.” ). All titles selected are directors’ first, second or third films whose lead producer is based out of a country in Latin America, Spain and Portugal.
Granted by Cinecolor Digital, the PuertoLab award consists in required post-production services – editing, color-grading, sound –through to a Dcp master.
Also written by Varone, presented as a project at San Sebastian’s 2013 Europe-Latin America Co-production Forum and prized by Switzerland’s Fribourg/Nyon »
- John Hopewell
SXSW Film Review: ‘Raiders!’
13 hours ago
There’s a good reason why TV and movies have adopted the disclaimer “Remember kids, don’t try this at home.” As inventive as they were impressionable, pint-sized super-fans Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb nearly killed themselves on multiple occasions attempting to remake the first Indiana Jones movie, breaking it down shot-for-shot and filming each scene as best as their limited resources would allow over the course of eight summers. The result has become the stuff of fan legend, inspiring magazine articles, movie deals and what feels like the perfect Hollywood ending, which the geek-bait documentary “Raiders!” reveals for the first time, as the original trio reunite a quarter-century later to finish the airplane scene they deemed too difficult to film as kids. Often poignant, occasionally pathetic, but never short of entertaining, “Raiders!” captures the obsessive hold movies have on young people’s imaginations, as exemplified by such pics as “Son of Rambow, »
- Peter Debruge
SXSW Film Review: ‘Hello, My Name Is Doris’
13 hours ago
Despite some bumpy tonal shifts and inconsistencies of characterization, “Hello, My Name Is Doris” impresses as a humanely amusing and occasionally poignant dramedy about a spinsterish office drone who develops a romantic fixation on a much younger co-worker. The plot could have been played as a flat-out broad comedy or an anxiety-inducing psychological drama, and there are times when it feels like helmer Michael Showalter is striving for a mash-up of both. But Sally Field keeps the movie on an even keel, for the most part, with an adroit and disciplined lead performance that generates both laughter and sympathy, with relatively few yanks on the heartstrings. Audiences of a certain age might respond warmly, provided they are stoked by savvy marketing and favorable word of mouth.
Anyone who has ever toiled in a honeycomb of office cubicles will recognize Doris Miller (Field), the sort of hard-working but good-natured sixtysomething whose »
- Joe Leydon
SXSW Film Review: ‘The Final Girls’
13 hours ago
An amusingly meta horror-thriller, “The Final Girls” finds a group of modern youths trapped in a cheesy ’80s slasher movie — one whose conventions they’re well aware of, but whose body count they’re also susceptible to joining. Though not quite as inspired or consistent as the similarly self-mocking likes of “The Cabin in the Woods,” “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil,” or the first two “Scream” pics, this is good fun that should delight genre fans. Directing Mark Fortin and Josh Miller’s clever screenplay, Todd Strauss-Schulson (“A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas”) delivers an accessible in-joke that should sell nicely to various territories in all formats.
A prologue shows teenage Max (Taissa Farmiga) driving home with her veteran-actress mom, Amanda (Malin Akerman), who, to her frustration, remains best known for the B-horror movie she made two decades earlier. Unfortunately, a traffic accident puts an immediate tragic end to their mother-daughter synchronicity. »
- Dennis Harvey
SXSW Film Review: ‘Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine’
15 hours ago
Hot on the heels of his riveting Scientology takedown “Going Clear,” the ever-prolific Alex Gibney calls the much farther-reaching cult of Apple into question with “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine,” a coolly absorbing, deeply unflattering portrait of the late Silicon Valley entrepreneur that expands, not altogether convincingly, into a meditation on our collective over-reliance on our favorite handheld gadgets. Once more synthesizing research and reportage into a cinematic essay that makes up in calm analysis what it lacks in fresh revelations, Gibney duly acknowledges Jobs’s artistry, innovation and technological showmanship while making plain just how “ruthless, deceitful and cruel” the man could be. By turns searching and scorching, and more than willing to speak ill of the dead, the CNN-produced item should play on screens big and small, whetting appetites for Universal’s forthcoming Jobs biopic in the process.
Freeing himself from any obligation to deliver a blow-by-blow summary, »
- Justin Chang
SXSW Film Review: ‘Naz & Maalik’
17 hours ago
Two young Muslim men balance their mutual romantic attraction with life in post-9/11 Brooklyn in “Naz & Maalik.” The provocative-sounding feature debut of writer-director Jay Dockendorf earns points for unique subject matter, only to squander its potential on an innocuously blase hangout narrative. Additional fest play following a SXSW bow is a given, and the central hook is specific enough to attract modest attention in certain niches of the indie theatrical and VOD marketplace.
The film opens at the point when reserved Naz (Kerwin Johnson Jr.) and outgoing Maalik (Curtiss Cook Jr.) have formally taken their friendship to the next level, though the religious teens have yet to declare their sexuality to family or friends. They make money by buying lottery tickets, oils and other small items from a local convenience store and hawking them on the streets for a profit. When an innocent encounter with an undercover cop selling guns »
- Geoff Berkshire
Sally Field Gets Cheers for Rare Leading Role in SXSW Romance
18 hours ago
Sally Field took SXSW by storm on Saturday afternoon with “Hello, My Name is Doris,” a dramedy from director Michael Showalter that will certainly be one of the big discoveries out of this year’s festival.
Field plays the titular character, a 60-something hoarder from Staten Island who develops a crush, which quickly escalates into an obsession, on her much younger co-worker (Max Greenfield). The movie is based on a 2011 short by the script’s co-writer Laura Terruso, called “Doris & the Intern.”
“Certainly I’ve never read anything as unique as this character,” Field said at an audience Q&A session following the screening, where she received a standing ovation. “You get to a certain point, after being in the business for a long time, you read the same thing over and over again. There’s nothing that blows your skirt off. This blew my skirt way up.”
Showalter infuses “Hello, »
- Ramin Setoodeh
Sony’s ‘Popeye’ Loses Director Genndy Tartakovsky
22 hours ago
It looks like Genndy Tartakovsky won’t be directing Sony’s adaptation of “Popeye,” after all.
The director told Moviefone that he’s “off that project” essentially over a difference of opinion in the direction the movie was headed. However, the film is still in active development, according to Sony Pictures Animation.
“I was in love with what we were doing, but I think the studio is going through changes and I don’t know if they want to make the ‘Popeye’ that I want to make,” he told Moviefone. “So they’ve got to make a decision.”
Those changes include Tom Rothman stepping in as chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment following Amy Pascal’s ousting. Sony Pictures Digital president Bob Osher was fired soon thereafter, and DreamWorks Animation producer Kristine Belson was hired to take a newly created post as president of Sony Pictures Animation in two other shakeups following the Sony hacking attack. »
- Maane Khatchatourian
‘Ixcanul,’ ‘600 Miles’ Triumph at Mexico’s Guadalajara Fest
22 hours ago
Repeating triumphs at Berlin, Jayro Bustamante’s “Ixcanul” — a traditions-versus-women’s-rights piece set in Guatemala — and Gabriel Ripstein’s Tim Roth starrer “600 Miles” topped the 30th Guadalajara Festival Saturday, “Ixcanul” scooping best picture and director in its Ibero-America Competition and “600 Miles” the Mezcal Prize for best Mexican fiction feature. Celso Garcia’s road movie “The Thin Yellow Line” took a Special Jury Prize in the Ibero-American competish.
“Yellow Line” – which world preemed in Guadalajara – features a deep cast, led by Damian Alcazar then, Joaquin Cosio, Silverio Palacios, Gustavo Sanchez Parra and smoky newcomer Americo Hollander, as a team of loveable screw-ups hired to paint dividers along a long stretch of empty Mexican highway.
Fest-favorite, “600 Miles” had detractors at the confab, mostly tied to script issues, but there was broad enthusiasm for Roth’s work as a manipulator and lead Kristyan Ferrer’s compliance. The film juices gunrunning U.S.-Mexico, »
- James Young
SXSW Film Review: ‘6 Years’
23 hours ago
Having explored an illicit affair between a high-school instructor and student in “A Teacher,” writer-director Hannah Fidell focuses on a doomed relationship of a rather more banal (if age-appropriate) sort in “6 Years.” Although shot and performed in a determinedly raw, naturalistic register, this emotionally roiling portrait of two twentysomething Texas sweethearts too often veers toward melodramatic overstatement, inspiring little empathy or understanding despite the committed performances of promising young leads Taissa Farmiga and Ben Rosenfield. The backing of exec producers Mark and Jay Duplass will draw a measure of attention, but not enough to distinguish this low-budget effort in the indie marketplace.
Staggering home drunk one night from a party, Mel (Farmiga) awakens her boyfriend, Dan (Rosenfield), their groggy banter suddenly exploding into an argument; the scuffle that ensues leaves Dan with a bump on the head, and Mel aghast and apologetic. They’re quick to make up, but the »
- Justin Chang
‘Mallrats 2′ Is in the Works, Kevin Smith Says
14 March 2015 12:26 PM, PDT
On the heels of announcing that he’ll shoot the third and final film in his “Clerks” trilogy this May, Kevin Smith has confirmed that “Mallrats 2″ is also in the works.
“We shoot Clerks III in May. Hit Somebody shoots September to Christmas. Then in Feb 2016, we do Moose Jaws. But after that? I smell a rat…” he tweeted on Thursday.
We shoot Clerks III in May. Hit Somebody shoots September to Christmas. Then in Feb 2016, we do Moose Jaws. But after that? I smell a rat…
— KevinSmith (@ThatKevinSmith) March 12, 2015
The writer-director then confirmed that the “rat” he teased is indeed a sequel to 1995’s “Mallrats,” which he wrapped filming 20 years ago this month. The comedy starred Smith, Ben Affleck, Jason Lee, Shannen Doherty and Jeremy London.
“It’s half scripted right now and we’re pulling our loot together,” he told Tucson’s Rock 102 Kfma on Friday. “We’ve »
- Maane Khatchatourian
‘Selma’s’ Ava DuVernay: ‘Studios Aren’t Lining Up for Black Protagonists’
14 March 2015 11:11 AM, PDT
Ava DuVernay had an epiphany while attending this year’s Oscars ceremony, where “Selma” received two nominations including best picture, but was snubbed in categories like acting and directing.
“It was a room in L.A.,” DuVernay said in her keynote speech at SXSW on Saturday morning. “It’s not anything but a big room with very nice people dressed up. It’s very cool. But my work’s worth is not about what happens in, around or for that room.”
DuVernay delivered a passionate, at times emotional, speech in Austin about her journey making “Selma,” revealing she was Paramount’s seventh choice to direct the drama about the 1965 civil rights marches.
A member of the audience asked DuVernay why it took so long for Hollywood to tell King’s story.
“The studios aren’t lining up to make films about black protagonists,” DuVernay said. “Black people being autonomous and independent. »
- Ramin Setoodeh
SXSW Film Review: ‘Creative Control’
14 March 2015 10:37 AM, PDT
Well timed in light of the unveiling of the Apple Watch, “Creative Control” reps a big step forward for its co-writer/director, Benjamin Dickinson, following his promising 2012 debut, “First Winter.” The story of an ad exec who finds his priorities rewired while testing a pair of eyeglasses that constitute “the first actually convincing augmented-reality system” doesn’t exactly have new things to say about technology and alienation. But a contemplative tone, a zigzagging narrative, superb widescreen black-and-white cinematography and an infusion of dry humor make it feel genuinely fresh. Critical nurturing could help this moody, offbeat indie find its audience.
Dickinson’s “First Winter,” set at a yoga farm, was a survivalist picture that hinged on a reversal of expectations; its characters approached the abyss and stared back. In some ways, “Creative Control” tells a similar tale in the tech realm. David (played by Dickinson) has taken charge of a dream account, »
- Ben Kenigsberg
Box Office: ‘Big Hero 6’ Becomes 2014’s Top Animated Film Worldwide
14 March 2015 10:32 AM, PDT
“Big Hero 6″ has reached yet another milestone. The Disney toon has become 2014’s biggest animated release worldwide.
The Oscar-winning movie has earned $221 million in the U.S. It will pass the $400 million mark at the international box office this weekend, raising its worldwide cume to $620 million and thereby surpassing “Fox’s “How to Train Your Dragon 2’s” global haul.
“Big Hero 6″ opened to $56.2 million in the U.S. on November 7 and has taken off internationally.
Last weekend, it overtook “Tangled” as the third biggest Walt Disney Animation Studios release ever globally, behind only “Frozen” and “The Lion King.” It’s also the studio’s third largest domestic release of all time.
“Big Hero 6″ continues doing strong business in China, where it opened just two weeks ago. After reeling in over $51 million, it’s already surpassed “Frozen” to become the highest-grossing Disney or Pixar animated release in the country. »
- Maane Khatchatourian
‘Citizen Kane’ Screened for First Time at Hearst Castle
14 March 2015 8:42 AM, PDT
The past and present collided Friday night at Hearst Castle, where Orson Welles’ iconic “Citizen Kane” screened for the first time — 74 years after its initial release.
The movie screened at the private theater at the massive hilltop estate — the inspiration for Xanadu in “Citizen Kane” — for about 60 people, most of whom paid $1,000 per ticket to benefit the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival and the Friends of Hearst Castle preservation group.
“I felt the spirit of William Randolph Hearst,” said producer Lincoln Phipps, whose “Hollywood Don’t Surf” documentary had screened Thursday at the fest.
The Hearst family became a part of the festival in 2012 when William Randolph Hearst’s grandson Steven Hearst agreed to a first-ever screening of “Citizen Kane” at the Hearst Castle visitor center — two miles away from Hearst Castle — even though his grandfather had tried unsuccessfully to suppress the 1941 film due to its unflattering portrayal of aspects of his life, »
- Dave McNary
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