Film Festival

A postcard from the IndieLisboa Film Festival

'The Loneliest Planet' and '17 Girls' impress

A postcard from the IndieLisboa Film Festival

Hani Furstenberg and Gael Garcia Bernal in "The Loneliest Planet."

Credit: Sundance Selects
LISBON - There’s a reason, I think, why many of the world’s great film festivals take place in locations that wouldn’t rate an extended visit on their own merits. Cannes? Residual beachy glamour aside, a dingy little scab on a coastline with far better spots to offer. Toronto? Pleasant enough, but as unsexy as its festival’s all-business reputation. Venice is lovely, sure; the Lido – the wilted, quarantined resort island that actually hosts the festival – not so much. Most festival organizers, after all, want you in the cinema or at the adjacent parties, not independently tourist-traipsing around world heritage sites. If they could lure journalists to the New Jersey Turnpike, there’d probably be a festival there.
 
Which is why the IndieLisboa International Film Festival, which I’ve been exploring at a gentle pace since Monday (though it kicked off last week), poses the mother of all first-world problems to its guests: how do you make the most of what the festival has to offer when Lisbon, one of Europe’s most unassumingly gorgeous cities, is on your doorstep? The directors have cunningly tried to separate the two by situating the festival HQ in a dauntingly cavernous bank in the quieter, more plainly frosted northern reaches of the city, but the delights of the Portuguese capital, with its two-tone cobbled streets, nattily tiled terraces and overspill of custard-scented patisseries knit together by wonky vintage trams, are still mere minutes away.
 

Cannes Check: John Hillcoat's 'Lawless'

Continuing our preview series on the Cannes competition

Cannes Check: John Hillcoat's 'Lawless'

Tom Hardy in "Lawless."

Credit: The Weinstein Company

The director: John Hillcoat (Australian, 50 years old)

The talent: You want names? You got 'em. Hillcoat's latest brings together a handful of the industry's brightest young things, including Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Mia Wasikowska and newly minted Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain. Burnishing the lineup a bit are older hands like Guy Pearce (who worked with Hillcoat on "The Proposition") and Gary Oldman, also fresh off his first tip of the hat from the Academy. Meanwhile, between Pearce and Wasikowska, plus fellow Aussies Noah Taylor and Jason Clarke in support, Hollywood immigrant Hillcoat remains committed to keeping his home flag flying. 

Also making a very Australian affair of this all-American bootlegging tale is the fact that the screenplay is by rock icon Nick Cave -- his first since penning Hillcoat's 2005 breakout feature "The Proposition." Naturally, as has been the case with all Hillcoat's work, Cave (alongside regular collaborator Warren Ellis) is also responsible for the original score.

The Lists: Top 10 performances in comic book movies

With 'The Avengers' on the way, we look at the top portrayals of the subgenre

The Lists: Top 10 performances in comic book movies

Catwoman gets a face-lift in the upcoming "The Dark Knight Rises." Does Michelle Pfeiffer's 1992 portrayal merit consideration on our list?

Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Joss Whedon's "The Avengers" opens Friday, but it doesn't merely signal the beginning of the summer movie season. It signals the start of a summer highlighted by comic-based tent pole filmmaking. Still to come are Sony's reboot, "The Amazing Spider-Man," and the denouement of Christopher Nolan's Batman franchise, "The Dark Knight Rises" (the latter having dropped a new trailer last night).

So it makes sense to keep the lists going this week with something pegged to Marvel's big, inevitable event film. But who wants another "top 10 comic book movies" list, anyway? I couldn't go there. Narrow it down? Top 10 Marvel movies (stretching back to pre-Marvel Studios, of course)? I just don't like enough of them.

When I laid out my brief thoughts on "The Avengers" last week, I noted that, for me, what makes the film so special and work so well as a piece of entertainment is how organic the ensemble is. Everyone gels, major actors with major franchises coming together to make something greater. With that in mind, how about focusing on performances in comic book movies?

It's official: The Dolby Theatre is the Oscars' home for the next 20 years

Two new deals bring a venue name change and security to the annual show

It's official: The Dolby Theatre is the Oscars' home for the next 20 years

The new deal goes into effect this summer.

Credit: Dolby

After some back and forth with CIM Group, commercial real estate owner of the theare (formerly known as the Kodak) at the Hollywood & Highland complex that has been home to the Oscars for the last decade, a new deal has been struck to keep the annual show there for another 20 years.

According to a press release, another deal was also struck, with Dolby Laboratories, Inc., to name the venue The Dolby Theatre. So it's goodbye Kodak, hello Dolby. And as Roth so pointedly noted a few weeks ago when these rumblings first began, it's somehow poetic and sad to see one of the last bastions and earliest creators of celluloid take its exit here as the company that created a digital 3D projection system steps in.

Of course, Dolby's major imprint has always been trailblazing in the world of audio. Indeed, further into the release it is noted that during the term of the agreement "Dolby will continue to update the theatre with innovative, world-class technologies to ensure that the theatre remains state-of-the-art, beginning with the immediate installation of its recently released Dolby® Atmos™ sound technology."

Cannes Check: Michael Haneke's 'Amour'

Continuing our preview series on the Cannes competition

Cannes Check: Michael Haneke's 'Amour'

Michael Haneke, Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant on the set of "Amour."

Credit: Sony Pictures Classics

The director: Michael Haneke (German-Austrian, 70 years old)

The talent: After the low-profile ensemble of "The White Ribbon," Haneke returns here to the big names. Isabelle Huppert has a history with Haneke and Cannes: she won the festival's Best Actress award (her second) for "The Piano Teacher" in 2001, and headed the jury that handed him the Palme d'Or three years ago. This marks her third collaboration with him, and her first since 2003's "The Time of the Wolf," but she doesn't appear to be the primary focus this time: that'd be two veterans of the French New Wave, Emmanuelle Riva ("Hiroshima, Mon Amour,") and Jean-Louis Trintignant ("Three Colors: Red" and "Z," for which he won Best Actor at Cannes in 1969). (Fun fact: Riva played the lead in Georges Franju's original film of "Thérèse Desqueyroux," Claude Miller's new adaptation of which is closing the festival.) Also on board: British opera baritone William Shimell, who made an impressive film debut opposite Juliette Binoche in 2010's "Certified Copy."

Cannes Check: Matteo Garrone's 'Reality'

Continuing our series of Cannes competition previews

Cannes Check: Matteo Garrone's 'Reality'

Matteo Garrone on the set of 'Reality.'

Credit: Fandango

The director: Matteo Garrone (Italian, 43 years old)

The talent: You'd have to be pretty au fait with contemporary Italian cinema to recognize most of the cast members here: the biggest name on offer is Claudia Gerini, best known for supporting turns in Italian hits "Don't Move" and "The Other Woman," as well as minor appearances in "The Passion of the Christ" and "Under the Tuscan Sun." The young actor Ciro Petrone, who made an impression four years ago in Garrone's "Gomorrah" (if the image of a gangly youth in his underwear brandishing a gun comes to mind, you're there), reappears here -- as, on the evidence of some other cast members' CVs, does the director's partial affinity for inexperienced actors.  

Cannes Check: Andrew Dominik's 'Killing Them Softly'

Continuing our preview series on the Cannes competition

Cannes Check: Andrew Dominik's 'Killing Them Softly'

Brad Pitt in "Killing Them Softly."

Credit: The Weinstein Company

With apologies for yesterday's non-delivery.

The director: Andrew Dominik (Australian, 44 years old)

The talent: Ever heard of a guy called Brad Pitt? He's going places, I tell you. The star has, of course, worked with Dominik before. In 2007, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" won Pitt the Best Actor prize at Venice and effectively started a new, more studious chapter in his career: two leading Oscar nominations and the career peak of 2011 later, it'll be interesting to see what this reunion brings for him. (As he did on "Jesse James," Pitt also takes a producer credit here.) The supporting cast, meanwhile, could hardly be tastier, blending trustily weathered character actors like Sam Shepard, Richard Jenkins and James Gandolfini, more ragged, unpredictable talents like Ray Liotta, Garret Dillahunt, a bristly relative newcomer in Scoot McNairy ("Monsters") and, most excitingly of all, Dominik's compatriot Ben Mendelsohn, who recently killed in "Animal Kingdom." Not a lot of room for the ladies here, mind.

Interview: ‘Sound of My Voice’ co-writer and star Brit Marling on the seductive power of cults

The actress reflects on faith and metaphysics in Los Angeles

Interview: ‘Sound of My Voice’ co-writer and star Brit Marling on the seductive power of cults

Brit Marling in "Sound of My Voice"

Credit: Fox Searchlight

This weekend the science-fiction meditation on faith, time travel and the human desire to subjugate oneself to something “greater,” Zal Batmanglij's “Sound of My Voice,” opens in theaters. And the film is in part the result of actress Brit Marling’s (“Another Earth”) desire to create interesting roles for herself.

Marling found that the types of characters she wanted to play simply were not available to her, and so she and Batmanglij, a college friend and long-time creative collaborator, chose to invent one. The film follows a Los Angeles couple, Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) as they attempt to uncover the truth about a cult leader (Marling) who claims to be from the future.

Those are the broad strokes of the plot. But what the film is really looking at is faith, a culture in which a sense of community has become painfully fragmented and the seductive and potentially dangerous power of a person who purports to have the answers so many are seeking.

Cannes Check: Lee Daniels's 'The Paperboy'

Continuing our series of Cannes competition previews

Cannes Check: Lee Daniels's 'The Paperboy'

Nicole Kidman in "The Paperboy."

Credit: Millennium Films

The director: Lee Daniels (American, 52 years old)

The talent: Thought Robert Pattinson was the unlikeliest name you'd see leading a Competition title at Cannes? Try Zac Efron out for size. The "High School Musical" teen idol takes on his first fully adult dramatic lead in this thriller, with several more experienced star names to back him up: Matthew McConaughey (in the first of his two Competition film appearances this year), Nick Nolte, John Cusack, Scott Glenn and, generating the most pre-premiere chatter about her performance, Nicole Kidman.

Meanwhile, sandpaper-voiced soul singer Macy Gray narrates. If you enjoyed her performance in Daniels's debut feature "Shadowboxer" and often find yourself wondering how she'd have fared in Mo'Nique's role in "Precious" -- in other words, if you're me -- this is very good news indeed.

Sissy Spacek and William Friedkin to be feted by Seattle fest

Meanwhile, Friedkin is also set to screen 'Killer Joe'

Sissy Spacek and William Friedkin to be feted by Seattle fest

Sissy Spacek at the Country Music Awards in 2010.

Credit: AP Photo/Evan Agostini

The Seattle International Film Festival has announced that it will recognize Oscar-winning actress Sissy Spacek and director William Friedkin as 2012 tribute honorees. Sissy Spacek will receive the festival’s award for Outstanding Achievement in Acting on June 7 and William Friedkin will be presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award on June 9.

“Sissy Spacek and William Friedkin have captivated audiences repeatedly throughout their careers with critically acclaimed works that boast multigenerational appeal,” said SIFF Artistic Director Carl Spence via press release.

Spacek has a particularly special place in my heart. Her first firm step onto the world stage was in “Badlands,” the debut film of one of my favorite director’s, Terrence Malick. But it was her Academy Award-winning turn as country singer Loretta Lynn in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” that really left an indelible mark.

About This Blog

Spearheaded by editor Kristopher Tapley, In Contention represents a collective of awards obsessives who comment and reflect upon, muse about and attempt to decipher the Oscar season on a daily basis throughout the year, and especially during the Oscar crunch of the fall. Regular contributors include Guy Lodge, Roth Cornet and Gerard Kennedy.

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2011-2012 OSCAR NOMINATIONS

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Best Picture

Best Director

Best Actor

Best Actress

Best Supporting Actor

Best Supporting Actress

Best Adapted Screenplay

Best Original Screenplay

Best Art Direction

Best Cinematography

Best Costume Design

Best Film Editing

Best Makeup

Best Original Score

Best Original Song

Best Sound Editing

Best Sound Mixing

Best Visual Effects

Best Animated Feature Film

Best Documentary Feature

Best Foreign Language Film

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