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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Long queues formed outside the Palais des Festivals this afternoon in Cannes as attendees mobbed the building waiting to pick up their credentials. Marilyn Monroe presided over the scene; the now familiar image of the legendary actress blowing out a candle is this year's official image/poster of the 65th Festival de Cannes, which kicks off tomorrow evening with the debut of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, the first of 12 nights of red carpet premieres.
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The Los Angeles Film Festival unveiled its lineup of nearly 200 features, shorts and more today. This year's event, which comprises work from 30 countries, will open with the North American premiere of Woody Allen's To Rome With Love (as previously announced), while the world premiere of Warner Bros.' Magic Mike by Steven Soderbergh will close out the festival, which runs June 14 - 24 at LA Live in downtown Los Angeles.
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The upcoming Cannes Film Festival added additional titles to its Official Selection Monday, including American title Gimme The Loot which screened last week at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Today's additions join the 22 other films in the official selection and 16 in the event's Un Certain Regard section as well as the previously announced Critics Week lineup. Additionally, the fest said the montage film Final Cut - Hölgyeim És Uraim by György Pálfi (Hungary), produced by Béla Tarr, which will close Cannes Classics on Saturday, May 25.
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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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Movieline spotlighted filmmakers and trailers from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival over the weekend and last week. The festival is still underway all this week, so it's certainly not too late to catch a little Tribeca action. If you're in New York and want to see some films at the festival (or if you are looking for a taste of Tribeca from afar), here is a sneak glimpse of more of this year's offerings from the festival's World Narrative Competition and World Documentary Competition.
Tuesday's spotlights include World Narrative Competition features Nancy, Please and War Witch as well as World Doc Competition contenders The Flat and The List. And in Tribeca's genre-centered Cinemania section is Rat King.
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Actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus debuted her new HBO series Veep over the weekend, and she — along with husband/director Brad Hall — appears eager to add independent filmmaking to her repertoire. The pair hit the Tribeca Film Festival with their new short Picture Paris, teasing the project at an Apple Store event and hinting that this will not be their last foray into the indie space.
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This past week, Movieline has spotlighted a number of Tribeca Film Festival filmmakers and trailers of their fest premieres. This weekend, we're sharing more. If you're in New York and want to see some films at the festival (or if you are looking for a taste of Tribeca from afar), here is a sneak glimpse of more of this year's offerings from the festival's World Narrative Competition and World Documentary Competition.
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With today's theatrical opening of the documentary Hit So Hard, Movieline is pleased to revisit its coverage from the film's New York festival premiere on March 28, 2011. — Ed.
Courtney Love shrugged. "We've been in lots of rooms together," she said to a packed theater of moviegoers at the Museum of Modern Art, where Hit So Hard, a documentary about her band Hole (and, more specifically, drummer/addict/survivor Patty Schemel) had its New York premiere Monday night. The crowd laughed, steeped in nostalgia and recognition -- not that Love was talking about this room or this crowd.
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SXSW 2012 marked the starring screen debut of model-turned-actress Dree Hemingway – daughter of Mariel, great-granddaughter of Ernest, and at 24, a veteran of the fashion world -- as an airy Los Angeleno named Jane who befriends a cranky senior citizen (85-year-old newcomer Besedka Johnson) in Sean Baker’s Starlet, a surprisingly sweet tale comprised of a series of moving, naturalistic episodes … and one infamous hardcore sex scene. But as much as Starlet is a fantastically observed introduction to Hemingway, who possesses Evan Rachel Wood’s preternatural poise and Daryl Hannah’s leggy looks, sitting down with her in Austin – and indulging in a post-interview round of karaoke together -- offered greater insights into one of the more talked-about but hard-to-talk-about films of the fest.
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There was no shortage of stars coming through SXSW 2012, debuting films and projects as diverse as Joss Whedon's Cabin in the Woods to Lena Dunham's HBO series GIRLS. Take a look and see who else dropped in on Austin, Texas for the annual film festival, including: Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, and their 21 Jump Street crew, Willem Dafoe, Al Gore, Johnny Knoxville, Melissa Leo, Matthew McConaughey, Jack Black, Aubrey Plaza, Gabrielle Union, Bobcat Goldthwait, new director (!) Matthew Lillard, two Broken Lizards, model-turned-actress Dree Hemingway, and more.
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This week at SXSW Movieline caught up with director Gareth Evans, whose Indonesian martial arts actioner The Raid: Redemption is set to knock your socks off later this month courtesy of Sony Classics. (Haven’t heard of the martial arts form silat? You will, come March 23.) With his film steadily collecting kudos left and right, Evans is already thinking ahead to his Raid sequel (working title: Berandal), and an insane, dangerous-sounding four-on-one car fight he plans on working into the mix.
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Tuesday night the 2012 SXSW Film Festival jury awards went to Adam Leon's NYC-set drama Gimme the Loot and the rock doc-biopic Beware of Mr. Baker, about Cream/Blind Faith drummer Ginger Baker. Meanwhile, Audience Awards honored Megan Griffiths' Eden, whose star Jamie Chung (Sucker Punch) earned a Special Jury Award for her central performance as a human trafficking victim, and to documentary Bay of All Saints, about three single mothers living in an impoverished Brazilian bayside town. Full list of winners after the jump.
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Despite nabbing an Academy Award last year with her self-financed and controversial “Consider” campaign, Melissa Leo says that neither life, nor the frequency of juicy Hollywood offers coming her way, is much different now that she's an Oscar-winner. “The projects you think have been offered to me have not, I guarantee you,” she told Movieline this week at SXSW in Austin, where she and directors Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy screened their minimalist character study Francine to critical applause. Still, Leo perseveres. And as the intimate acting showcase demonstrates, there’s plenty of reward to be had in smaller and more daring projects.
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