All is Well won the Narrative Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival over the weekend. Directed by Pocas Pascoal the North American premiere follows to Angolan sisters feeling civil war and struggle to survive in Lisbon. Honorable mention in the category went to Thursday Till Sunday by Dominga Sotomayor. Best Documentary went to Drought by Everardo Gonzalez. The film is a poetic portrait of a cattle-ranching community in northeastern Mexico. In the Audience Award category, Best Narrative Feature went to Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild The film won Cannes and Sundance earlier this year. And Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives by sara Lamm and mary Wigmore won the Audience Award for Best Documentary.
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The promise of seeing Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, and their manscaped compatriots bare (almost) it all in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike has quickened the collective pulse of the film’s target audience in the weeks leading up to Friday’s release. But while ladies and many gents will get a titillating thrill from the scantily-clad dance numbers and cheesy-fantasy bumps ‘n’ grinds (and there are so, so many), what elevates the film beyond its “Showgirls-with-men” concept is the depth and naturalness in the story of 30-year-old star performer Mike (Tatum) and his pursuit of the American dream as one of the “Cock-rocking Kings of Tampa.”
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ML turns the spotlight on three filmmakers screening new work at the Los Angeles Film Festival this week. Directors with films in the festival's Narrative and Documentary competitions have offered up their observations on their latest and greatest. Monday's titles include three docs: Jeff Howlett's A Band Called Death, Mai Iskander's Words of Witness and Dominga Sotomayor's Thursday Till Sunday. And trailers are included (naturally).
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Any Day Now won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature over the weekend, while Kirby Dick's
The Invisible War won for Best Documentary at the Provincetown International Film Festival over the weekend. Starring Alan Cumming and directed by Travis Fine,
Day revolves around a handicapped teen who is taken in by a gay couple.
Invisible War, meanwhile, is a heart-wrenching look at rampant sexual assault in the U.S. military and the institution's blatant disregard in addressing the little-known crisis. Festival attendees speculated that the feature will receive an Oscar nomination come awards season.
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The Provincetown International Film Festival feted Roger Corman over the weekend with John Waters taking to the stage in a laugh-filled interview before a packed house in the eccentric enclave's town hall. The maverick producer/director/actor offered up highlights from his long career and offered up a litany of tales from his years the low budget B-movie throne. While distributors consistently have spats with the MPAA for getting a "harsh" rating, Roger Corman recalled a time when he went back to the MPAA to ask for a "harsher" rating. "Eight year-olds" don't want to see a G-rated film," John Waters observes…
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Some were skeptical that Woody Allen would make an appearance at the opening night of the LA Film Festival, even with his latest Euro-whimsy To Rome With Love premiering in the kick-off slot Thursday night. But show up Woody did, with five of his starlets in tow — including Alison Pill, Greta Gerwig, and a dazzling Penelope Cruz — to debut his 43rd feature film with a few charmingly self-deprecating zingers.
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With the world premiere of Woody Allen's latest under its belt, the Los Angeles Film Festival is now ready to get truly underway with its lineup of premieres, parties, panels and more celebrity guests. Movieline is doing its part to get audiences in the mood, giving sneaks on many of the titles appearing in the festival's Narrative and Documentary competitions with comments from the real stars at the ten day event - the filmmakers. Yesterday, ML published its first round of filmmaker interviews and trailers screening in the tests competition and several more are featured today.
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Bachelorette was dubbed the "indie Bridesmaids" at Sundance. OK, maybe there are some similarities. There are females and there's a pending wedding and the proverbial "shit hits the fan," but that's about it. Based on a play of the same name by Leslye Headland who directed the screen version, the story is quite frankly not going to be a hit with everyone. But for the segment of the population that gets a thrill off of bad ass humor, Bachelorette offers up a load of laughs. John Waters appeared to enjoy himself at the screening of the film, which opened up the Provincetown International Film Festival this week, so that is a stamp of some sort of approval, right?
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Movieline caught up with the charismatic William Friedkin last weekend at the Seattle Film Festival, where the Exorcist/French Connection director received a Lifetime Achievement award and screened his brutal Southern-fried potboiler Killer Joe. Before he held court keeping a packed audience rapt with tales from his nearly five-decade career in film (highlights below), Friedkin stopped to discuss two of the topics he’s wrestling with these days: His legal battle to win back the rights to his 1977 pic Sorcerer, and the absurdity of the MPAA, which anointed Killer Joe with an NC-17 rating.
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At the Seattle International Film Festival over the weekend to fete director and Lifetime Achievement honoree William Friedkin and present their NC-17 Southern-fried potboiler Killer Joe, actor Emile Hirsch spoke with Movieline about the “secret” movie he’d just shot with David Gordon Green (Prince Avalanche, also starring Paul Rudd) and the experience of being on a Friedkin set, where the pressure to deliver on a tight schedule was palpable. “If you messed up your lines or something, Billy would make you pay a little bit,” Hirsch said. “You really didn’t want to mess up at all.”
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Local filmmaker Lynn Shelton's latest, Your Sister's Sister starring Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt and Mark Duplass will open the Seattle International Film Festival, ushering in the 38th edition of the late spring event which will feature 273 features and 187 shorts from 75 countries. The lineup includes 24 world premieres along with 25 North American and 16 U.S. debuts. 180 of the total do not currently have U.S. distribution.
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Kim Nguyen's War Witch cast a spell at the Tribeca Film Festival Thursday evening, winning the event's $25K Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature, while Una Noche's Lucy Mulloy won $50K and the fest's Best New Narrative Director prize as well as other nods at a ceremony in Lower Manhattan. Also taking home prizes at the ceremony were The World Before Her by Canadian Nisha Pahuja, which took Best Documentary Feature while Dutch director Jeroen van Velzen's won Best New Documentary Director for Wavumba.
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Just when you think you might have had enough of James Franco, along comes Francophrenia to either whet your appetite for more of the actor-director's avant-garde pursuits — or officially turn you off to them forever.
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The Cannes jury is now complete. The Descendants director Alexander Payne and actor Ewan McGregor have joined the festival's competition jury, which will judge the 65th annual event's 22 films in competition. They join previously announced jury president Italian director Nanni Moretti (We Have a Pope) who will announce the Cannes winners on stage at the closing ceremonies on May 27th.
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The easiest way to start an interview is to ask someone, "Was there a cock sock or not?" Take Jason Ritter, who plays Wally, the sub-par musician friend of Jillian (Jess Weixler), in Free Samples — which premiered last weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival in the Spotlight program. "It was cock sock," Ritter said, marking the second time Ritter appeared pantsless in a Tribeca film costarring Jesse Eisenberg. "[Before] was The Education of Charlie Banks, but this one was the first time I've been bare-assed for an entire scene."
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