Being outside of the art world, aside from the occasional sensation that comes erupting out of some gallery and to national (and sometimes international) notoriety, the Woodmans were outside my limited vision, but the image that accompanied C. Scott Willis’ documentary in the festival catalogue haunted me.

The Woodmans is just as haunting as the image that presents it, an untitled photograph taken by the immensely talented Francesca Woodman who died at the young age of 22, before her art was really recognized. But Willis’ film isn’t simply a documentary of a young, fragile, despondent artist but an exploration, via a look at Francesca’s life within her family and in the art world, of the pressure, often self inflicted, of success.

Predominantly told through interviews with her parents, both successful artists, we come to meet a talented, self assured young woman who was sure of her talent and tackled her art form head on. She was ahead of the curve and as is usually the case, the art world was slow to take notice, but what of her parents? They’re not portrayed as villains, uncaring parents who saw their daughter’s suffering and didn’t step in to help, but the dynamic in this family of artists shaped the driven person Francesca became and her parents, particularly her father George, seemed to see their daughter as more of a colleague than their daughter.

The Woodmans is, essentially, the story of a young artists’ early passing and how her family has managed to overcome the tragedy of loss through their work and how their work has been affected by the death of their daughter. Accompanied by many of Francesca’s photographs, diary entries and films, along with a beautiful score from David Lang, The Woodmans is an immediately engaging, enlightening look at the life of an artist.

See VIFF screening schedule for show times.

Trailer tucked under the seats.

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And yeah, I’m excited for it.

Adrian Brody is an actor who seems ready willing and able to really branch out with his career choices. After winning his Oscar as an on the run Jew from the Nazis in The Pianist, he’s gone on to do all manner of crazy stuff. As a psycho of psychos in High School to a modern day action hero battling Predators to having sex with genetically abnormal species and even portraying the voice of a field mouse.

It looks like he’s continuing this wave of new and interesting roles in this latest trailer for Wrecked. Here he’s playing an amnesiac who wakes up battered and bruised in a car wreck with two other persons; both dead. Sort of a mashup between The Edge, Castaway, The Fugitive and maybe The Hangover? At any rate, this fairly high concept movie could prove to be quite exciting, intense and mind bending… or it might be one big pile of shit. Though my gut feeling lies with Brody and his choices of generally pretty decent projects to be a part of.

I know this came out a few days ago, but it wasn’t really mentioned around here; plus I kind of like the poster above. So check out the trailer below if you haven’t already seen it. Much like The Town, I suspect a lot of whining will be made over the trailer seeming like it is giving too much away. And just as I said when The Town trailer premiered, I seriously doubt the studio is that inept and it looks like there’s a lot more going on here than what we simply get glimpses of in the trailer. You decide; take a look…

So how does one follow-up a film as grand and grotesque, praised and despised as Antichrist? If you are Lars Von Trier, you think bigger: world annihilation, and that’s just the prologue.

With his next project, Melancholia, Von Trier is taking a stab at hard sci-fi (if Antichrist was his ode to Tarkovsky, Melancholia may very well be his Solaris). Few details are known about the story aside from Von Trier’s announcement that there will be “no more happy endings!” Cheating the audience of any apocalyptic suspense to the proceedings, Melancholia reportedly starts with the destruction of the world only to work backwards and show characters on the eve of their inevitable demise. Said to be a cold war fears revision of the filmmakers’ own childhood anxieties, this bleak entry into the doomsday canon is sure to be as uncompromising as his previous film. Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg (seriously, how much agony can one woman endure?!) and Kirsten Dunst (huh?) as sisters, and Kiefer Sutherland, John Hurt, Alexander Skarsgard and Stellan Skarsgard as whomever else.

After Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and Todd Field’s Blood Meridian this is easily one of my most anticipated films in the coming years.

It doesn’t seem right that Olivier Assayas’ new film should be shown as one film rather than a three part miniseries as it was originally intended. The reason this doesn’t seem fair, or perhaps “right” is the better term, is the running time. Clocking in at over five hours (regardless of which cut you’ve seen) Carlos is a marathon session of film viewing but seeing it in one sitting (with one break) is perhaps the only way to truly appreciate the spectacular achievement of Assayas’ film.

Carlos the Jackal was an international terrorist, a product of his time who, like his Argentine counterpart, fought on the side of liberty and was willing to do whatever was necessary for his beliefs but Carlos took his fight internationally, aligning himself, to various degrees, with various groups and eventually, as the film tells it, buying into some of what he was fighting against.

Starting with Carlos’ first assignment, Assayas’ film outlines the rise and fall of a charismatic revolutionary, a man who wowed men and women with his speech and passion and who, for a number of years, was at the forefront of international terrorism. Bringing Carlos to life is Venezuelan actor Édgar Ramírez who, over the course of five hours, speaks countless languages and woos the audience with his appeal, bringing us into close quarters with a terrorist and presenting a likable persona we find ourselves liking despite our better judgment.

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The AFI Film Festival is hitting Los Angeles the first week of November, and I’m pretty stoked. It’s kind of a “best-of” festival in that it’s late in festival season and tends to pull a lot of the more well-received films from Sundance, Cannes, Venice, TIFF, etc. So there may not be a lot of big premieres (though red carpet galas at Grauman’s Chinese are nothing to scoff at, even if the films have played other fests), but for those of us who can’t always make it out of town it’s a great way to catch up with the buzz-worthy films. Thanks to sponsor Audi (the official name of the fest is AFI Fest 2010 Presented by Audi…I know, I know), the fest will be offering free tickets to all screenings, just ilke they did last year. So if you’re in LA, be sure to check out ticket availability because these are going to be some of the best films of the year, and you could see them FOR FREE. (Also, don’t be discouraged if you can’t get tickets immediately to something you wanted to see – last year they released more tickets for almost everything throughout the week, and even people who just went without pre-reserving tickets and just stood in the rush lines had a fair chance of getting in.) Festival passes are on sale now; individual tickets will be available on October 28th, following the release of the full schedule on October 25th. Not much time to plan!

So, what’s actually going to be playing? The gala screenings include Edward Zwick’s Love & Other Drugs with Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, TIFF Audience Award winner The King’s Speech with Colin Firth as King George VI, Barney’s Version with Paul Giamatti, Diego Luna’s directorial debut Abel, Casino Jack with Kevin Spacey, The Company Men with Ben Affleck, and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Special Screenings are John Sayles’ newest Amigo, John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole with Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, Made in Dagenham with Sally Hawkins, and Werner Herzog’s 3D foray Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

But it’s not only big prestige movies that AFI’s got on display – the Young Americans and New Auteurs sections feature indepedent filmmakers making their first or second films, including Xavier Dolan with Heartbeats (his first feature I Killed My Mother was my favorite from this fest last year) and a bunch of really moodily poetic-looking films that are going to be tough for me to choose between, even though I haven’t heard of most of them.

Then in World Cinema we get Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, Im Sang-soo’s The Housemaid (as well as a screening of the 1960 version), Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, Cannes winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber (which I cannot wait to check out), and Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (which I sort of want to see but am a bit afraid of by this point). A new Midnight section is appallingly small with only three films, but one of them is Guillermo Del Toro-produced Julia’s Eyes, so I’m happy about that.

Check out the full listing of screenings from the press releases after the jump. They may still add more, but this is likely the majority.

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Holy Hannah is this a beautiful looking trailer. It doesn’t really give us much to go on in terms of plot or characterization, but you can find all of that pretty easily by doing a little web work. I know this was a pretty big hit at TIFF last month and if this trailer coupled with Iñárritu’s past efforts are any indication, I think we’re in for a real treat in Biutiful.

The film follows Uxbal (Bardem), an underworld figure and devoted single dad, through his attempts to reconcile with a past love and secure a future for his children as his own death draws near. Biutiful represents something of a departure for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, even as it confirms the pervasive bleakness of his worldview. Less invested in themes of fate and convergence than his previous work, this gritty, slow-burning melodrama nonetheless offers a very long descent into a private purgatory, and its scant emotional rewards can’t shake off the sense of a prodigiously gifted filmmaker stuck in a grim rut.

 

 Biutiful trailer [2:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

The Wicker Man, playing on Thursday on IFC.

Fantastic week this week for repeats – seriously, tons of amazing films are playing this week, so check those out for any you may have missed. Especially note the Ealing Studios triple feature TCM has on Saturday night, and the early European vampire films they’re playing late Sunday night – hard to find a better double feature than Nosferatu and Vampyr. Among newly featured stuff, we’ve got a trio of them on TCM tonight, including Cameron Crowe’s rock nostalgia trip Almost Famous, which I think hit a couple of our Best of Decade lists last year. IFC has the original The Wicker Man on Thursday, a film I haven’t seen but probably should at some point, and the 2005 Dardenne film L’enfant on Sunday.

Monday, October 18th

4:00pm – TCM – The Heiress
Olivia de Havilland won her second Oscar for her role as the title character in this adaptation of Henry James’ Washington Square, a woman forbidden from love with a young suitor because her controlling father fears the suitor is only a fortune hunter.
1949 USA. Director: William Wyler. Starring: Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson, Miriam Hopkins.

8:00pm – TCM – Oliver!
One of the last of the big 1960s production-number-filled musicals, based on Dickens’ story of Oliver Twist. Like most of the big 1960s musicals, I tend to think it’s a bit overproduced, but it still has a lot of great moments and catchy songs making it a fun time (though a surprisingly brutal one in a couple of scenes).
1968 UK. Director: Carol Reed. Starring: Ron Moody, Mark Lester, Oliver Reed, Shani Wallis, Jack Wild.
Newly Featured!

10:45pm – TCM – The Black Stallion
I wouldn’t dare to guess how many times I saw this movie as a horse-crazy kid, but I would dare argue that its central section with its almost total lack of dialogue as Alec and The Black get to know each other while shipwrecked on a deserted island is still among my favorite sections in any family movie. The bombast of the beginning and ending always exhausted me in comparison.
1979 USA. Director: Kelly Reno, Mickey Rooney, Teri Garr, Hoyt Axton.
Newly Featured!

1:00am (19th) – TCM – Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe turns his semi-autobiographical lens on rock stars, groupies, and rock journalists in one of the greatest combinations of road movie, coming of age movie, and music film ever made. Tender and nostalgic, but not oversentimentalized, with an exhuberance that betrays Crowe’s own background with this music.
2000 USA. Director: Cameron Crowe. Starring: Patrick Fugit, Kate Hudson, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand.
Newly Featured!

3:15am (19th) – TCM – The Lady from Shanghai
Most of Welles’ films, no matter the genre, feel a little noirish in mood, but The Lady from Shanghai is the real thing, complete with fatalistic hero who gets dragged into a murder plot by a femme fatale (Rita Hayworth). And noir set-pieces don’t get much better than the chase sequence set in a bewildering hall of mirrors.
1948 USA. Director: Orson Welles. Starring: Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth.

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Looks like I’ll be selling my SD copy of Robinson Crusoe on Mars in the next few weeks in favor of a brand new Blu-ray transfer. Criterion has launched an all out assault on the senses with its January releases. With Hausu and Antichrist available later on this month, Criterion is already knocking down the doors of 2011 in a big way. We’re getting four titles reworked for Blu-ray and two of these will also be released again in SD with brand new transfers, new artwork and even more bonus features. Beyond that, Criterion is announcing two new titles to the collection with James L. Brooks’ Broadcast News (available on both SD and BD) and and a new Eclipse Set, 25: Basil Dearden’s London Underground which includes Sapphire, a dissection of a hate crime; The League of Gentlemen, a deft heist adventure suffused with postwar melancholy; Victim, a landmark gay character study, starring Dirk Bogarde; and All Night Long, a provocative transposition of “Othello” to the swinging London jazz scene.

You can check out an overview of each title underneath the seats…
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Ever see a film that is so sweet that it passes beyond your instrinsic gag reflex and makes you love it despite any misgivings from the brain? From sheer force of screen presence and chemistry Martin Landau and (positively radiant) Ellen Burstyn manage to hold the film on the rails and stabilize it amongst a young directors (first timer Nicholas Fackler) need to inject jittery gimmickry into the narrative. It is perhaps one of the first films about December-December romance that will possibly appeal to the younger se. That is if there were any way for a multiplex crowd to see it – its current release in Canada seems to be a single theatre, with no advertising support, and on top of it a Christmas movie released in mid October. Sheesh) With Lovely, Still it is as if Fackler decided to make his own Away From Her through the editing rhythms of Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. Where Sarah Polly had the prose of Alice Munroe as a starting point and captured her story in a straightforward manner, Fackler aims for M. Night Shyamalan, which slightly hurts and cheapens the film in the final act. This film could have been an honest contender for the type of annual Christmas ritual-viewing along the lines of It’s A Wonderful Life (which not-surprisingly is watched at one point in the film) or A Christmas Story until the rushed final moments. Nevertheless, it is still quite lovely.

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At one point in fabulously envisioned Stake Land, the loner-hero takes a brief snatch of down time from kicking up road dust and vampire killing to relax on an outdoor recliner chaise. It is the moment that you realize that the film has far more in common with a classic American Western than the current craze of Vampire movies. But this is only one of the revelatory delights that the film is stacked with chock-a-block to the point where you sit back and smile that genre films can be made so well. In a year where John Carpenter has a new film that is as unsatisfying and generic as oatmeal, it is nice to see that others have taken up the mantle to resurrect the no-nonsense, bad-ass, Snake Plissken type (here named simply Mister”) and drop him into an interesting and wide open space – a post-Apocalyptic america that has returned to its frontier roots in the wake of a Vampire epidemic. But these are not your Bram Stoker, Anne Rice or Stephanie Meyer Vampires. A stake through the heart will finish them off, assuredly, but there isn’t much going on upstairs beyond the extreme feeding instinct. They are sort of a hybrid of rage-zombies and rabid (foaming) nocturnal pack-animals, not far off the were-rat creatures featured in the director-writer-star combo’s (Jim Mickle and Nick Damici) first film Mulberry Street. Certainly, this peculiar (and quite gross) brand of vampire is something something you do not want to be caught surrounded with on a moon-less prairie night after being robbed and dumped by religious fanatics with a vindictive sense of road-justice. This is, more or less, taken in stride by Mister – one more speed-bump on the road out of a sadly compromised and brutally over-stretched America that has seen the final monster sized Katrina-disaster which has pushed it back to the 19th century.
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Congratulations to reader Jonathan Hardesty for winning the Magnet prize pack in celebration of Monsters (our review) being released on iTunes, VOD, XBOX 360, Playstation 3 and Amazon.com. Jonathan wins a Blu-ray copy for each of the following: The Host, The Signal and Let the Right One In. As well as a pretty cool looking t-shirt sporting the Monsters logo.

Jonathan, send us your shipping info and we’ll get these Blu-ray out to you asap; just in time for Halloween!

Thanks for everyone who entered the contest; we hope you stick with RowThree in the future more more film discussery and contests. But for now, be sure to check out Monsters on VOD right now or in wide release in theaters on October 29th. I’m sure there will be lots of talk on the subject by that time.

For additional information please visit: http://www.monstersfilm.com/
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