Apr 06, 2012
By Chris Tinkham
Web Exclusive
Writer/director Whit Stillman lets out a chuckle when he's asked how Violet Wister, the college student played by Greta Gerwig in his latest film, Damsels in Distress, arrived at the idea that the 1920s dance, the Charleston, was named after a man, not the South Carolina city. Violet, the ringleader of a small group of coeds who run a campus suicide prevention center, is an unreliable protagonist prone to authoritatively stating untruths as if they were facts. Her ambition is to start an international dance craze, but in the meantime, she finds reassurance in dating boys whom she thinks are inferior to her and attempts to help her fellow students combat depression with tap dance and a particular brand of soap. Like Stillman's other social satires—Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998)—Damsels in Distress revolves around young, well-spoken, upper-middle-class types who oftentimes are lovably ridiculous and might not be whom they appear to be.
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Mar 30, 2012
By Chris Tinkham
Web Exclusive
In The Kid With a Bike, the latest film from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, an 11-year-old boy, Cyril (Thomas Doret), doggedly refuses to believe, after a month living in a state-run youth home, that his father has abandoned him permanently. The film germinated from the Dardennes' initial premise a boy who is abandoned by his father and is saved by a woman. They have likened The Kid With a Bike to a fairy tale, but it wouldn't be a Dardenne film if it weren't grounded in socio-economic realities of today. More
Nov 18, 2011
By John Everhart
Web Exclusive
Assuming an audacious timbre few filmmakers since Stanley Kubrick have dared to explore, the recent works of Werner Herzog have jarringly stemmed from singular obsessions.
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Nov 11, 2011
By Chris Tinkham
Web Exclusive
In May, Kirsten Dunst won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her lead performance in director Lars von Trier's nightmarish end of the world drama, Melancholia. As this year's Hollywood award season gets into swing, Dunst has a laugh looking back at her first major award ceremony experience, at the Golden Globes in 1995, when she was 12 years old. More
Nov 05, 2011
By Chris Tinkham
Web Exclusive
With her feature-length directing debut, Green, Brooklyn-based filmmaker and actress Sophia Takal wanted to examine how friendships between women can be destroyed by jealousy, and how the urge to measure oneself against someone else is detrimental to such relationships. More
Oct 14, 2011
By Chris Tinkham
Web Exclusive
As Spanish actress Elena Anaya discusses her craft, she speaks with wonderment in her voice. She credits her passion for acting to her mother, who encouraged her as a child to play rather than subverting her daughter's curiosity with the word "no" or discouraging her from touching objects. Anaya unconsciously demonstrates this by picking up the digital recorder in front of her and banging it on the table, before realizing that she might be damaging it and apologizing. In director Pedro Almodóvar's latest film, The Skin I Live In, Anaya appears in a flesh-colored body suit that stretches from her neck to her feet and wraps around her fingers and toes like gloves. Her character, Vera, is both a prisoner and passion project of Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a plastic surgeon intent on creating a skin immune to cuts, insect bites and fire.
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Sep 02, 2011
By Chris Tinkham
Web Exclusive
U.S. audiences might know French actress Ludivine Sagnier best from her work with director François Ozon. Their three-film collaboration began with Water Drops on Burning Rocks, released in 2000, and culminated in 2003 with Swimming Pool, the half-English, half-French-language thriller that featured a bikini-clad Sagnier front and center on its advertising art. In a climate that's been increasingly difficult for foreign-language films to find distribution in the States, Sagnier, one of France's most well-known and respected actresses, has been a fixture in U.S. art houses over the last decade. Yet, she has resisted the lure of Hollywood; her occasional forays into English-language films have been for international directors. Sagnier's dynamic, multilayered performance in Alain Corneau's psychological thriller, Love Crime, will only amplify the overtures of American filmmakers. More
Apr 22, 2011
By John Everhart
Web Exclusive
Under the Radar caught up with comedian Ed Helms (The Office, The Hangover) to discuss his upcoming bluegrass festival, formative musical influences, and the karma he'll never earn back from some of his segments on The Daily Show. More
Mar 03, 2011
By Chris Tinkham
Web Exclusive
If you're an 18-year old nascent film actress, and your first speaking part is in a low-budget Australian indie directed by a 19-year-old who gathered the financing by knocking on neighborhood doors, you wouldn't expect the gig to take you to Cannes a year later or lead to Hollywood auditions. With no delusions of grandeur, Adelaide native Teresa Palmer couldn't have dreamed of such an outcome for her film debut. But that's what happened. More
