Nearly a year after they first landed on UK television screens, the three feature-length films that comprise the “Red Riding” trilogy have reached American audiences – and in the theatrical environment where they belong, no less.
IFC is marketing and distributing “Red Riding,” an adaptation of David Peace’s decade-spanning quartet of crime novels inspired by the [...]

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Nearing the end of January on an awards season run for a film that bowed at Cannes is an odd time to be crossing paths with a filmmaker to talk about the goods, but that’s where I found myself with Quentin Tarantino this year.
Making the publicity rounds in the wake of the DVD and Blu-ray [...]

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Some performances are so selflessly and expertly integrated into a film’s ensemble that awards voters tend to take them for granted, looking instead to more assertive scene-stealers from sometimes starrier names.
Nobody better demonstrates that this season than Anthony Mackie, rising star of stage and screen and the secret weapon of awards heavyweight “The Hurt Locker.”
While [...]

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When you’re coming off of one of the most elaborate and intensive sound mixing gigs in movie history, let alone of your own career, how do you top it with a sequel?
That’s the challenge sound re-recording mixer Greg P. Russell faced when he and his team set about weaving in the various sonic elements of [...]

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Michael Fassbender is unemployed.
This, at least, is what he tells me at the outset of our conversation, and he sounds entirely relaxed about it. As well he sound be: after 18 months of back-to-back film projects, a catholic range spanning the gruelling physical demands of “Hunger,” the arch larking-about of “Inglourious Basterds,” the kitchen-sink grit [...]

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The Coen brothers’ latest film “A Serious Man” opens with a quote from French Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (better known as Rashi):  “Accept with simplicity everything that happens to you.”
It’s obviously quite applicable to the themes of fatalism and inevitability strewn throughout the film.  But that word, “simple,” also comes up over and over again when [...]

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When it comes to extravagant Hollywood blockbusters, we’ve become accustomed to the phrase “the money is up on the screen” – delighting in the filmmakers’ own delight in the tools and tricks at their disposal.
“The Hurt Locker,” however, invites a very different kind of wonder. An independent with a budget of a mere $11 million, [...]

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Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” is the latest entry in the director’s long history of wondrous, fantastical worlds. The film might be best remembered as containing Heath Ledger’s final performance. But Gilliam’s rich imagination is also seen in the work of below-the-line craftspeople who brought his world alive with splendid visuals [...]

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Because some of director Jason Reitman’s work tends to be stylistically traditional and classic, he says there might be the assumption that he’s not a visual filmmaker. But seven years as a commercial director tends to make you as visual as the next guy. And make no mistake.  He is absolutely specific when it [...]

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Jane Campion’s laugh comes as a rather lovely surprise: full, throaty and often directed at herself, it betrays a personality more robust, mischievous even, than one might surmise from her fragile, often solemn films. It’s a disconnect she cheerfully acknowledges, and credits in part to her collaborators.
“As a filmmaker, it helps me to be around [...]

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In a quiet corner of the Four Seasons restaurant late one afternoon, Robert Duvall gives “Crazy Heart” writer/director Scott Cooper a little grief for singing his praises too loudly.
“Oh, quit playing humble,” he says. “Come on, man!”
Earlier, when Cooper tries to pass credit for his film’s financing on to Duvall, the six-time Oscar nominee [...]

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Two striking films in this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race probe the theme of moral drift, both individual and communal, bred in a rural European community – the very opposite of what Hillary Clinton meant by “It takes a village.”
One of them, Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon,” you’ve probably heard of. The other [...]

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Still fully engaging at the end of a long day of interviews, actress Saoirse Ronan seems as eager to dive into the particulars of Peter Jackson’s latest film, “The Lovely Bones,” as she might have been before being asked every question in the book. Her energy is undeniable, as well as her poise, a [...]

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To call Abbie Cornish’s astute, china-delicate performance in “Bright Star” a “breakthrough,” as so many critics this year have done, is to do something of a disservice to her similarly remarkable work in a pair of underseen Australian titles.
No informed viewer should be taken off-guard by the tart questioning and quiet sensuality she brings to [...]

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Bryce Dallas Howard dominated M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village” with a beautiful performance of intensity, ferocity, gentle sensitivity and vulnerability.  She made the audience fall almost instantly in love with her character, the blind, though all-seeing Ivy.
With her flowing red locks, warm smile, and imposing gaze, the young actress appears to be to be an [...]

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