Interview: Director Martin Zandvliet on the Timeliness of His Oscar Nominated 'Land of Mine'

By Jose Solís.

In Land of Mine we see the aftermath of WWII through a previously unexplored lens, that of young German POWs in Denmark, who are sent out to the Danish coast to remove the over two million landmines Germans had left in place believing D-Day would begin on that coast. The German boys work under the supervision of Danish Sergeant Carl Leopold Rasmussen (Roland Møller) who begins seeing them as utterly contemptible beings, but then find himself sympathizing with their pleas. In the film, director Martin Zandvliet asks if we can find the humanity within each other, when we’ve been taught only to see how different we are. The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and it opens in theaters on February 10. I sat down with Zandvliet to talk about the themes in the film, actresses and how his first Oscar season is treating him.

Read the interview after the jump. 

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"It Comes At Night" is Coming to Scare You

Chris here. While yesterday’s trailer for Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled certainly rattled us, here’s another first look to give you the more terrified kind of chills: Trey Edward Shults’ Krisha follow-up, It Comes At Night.

Shults’ first film was a decidedly homegrown effort, but this looks to be a spooky step up in scale and ambition if no less psychologically taxing. The director has also assembled an intriguing cast with Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough, and Christopher Abbott. The trailer keeps the specifics of this post-apocalyptic vision under wraps, but hints at some kind of malevolent force at play while Shults continues to mine tense family dynamics. From the opening shot of the trailer alone, we can probably bet this will be one of the year's most formiddable horror films.

Krisha was one of last year’s many promising directorial debuts (even if it had been kicking around for a while). Considering it played the Critics’ Week sidebar at Cannes, might Night be heading to the Croisette in some form as well? It Comes At Night opens on August 25.

Yes No Maybe So: "The Beguiled"

#vengefulbitches forever

The teaser for Sofia Coppola's remake of The Beguiled (2017) is upon us and it is glorious if surprisingly faithful. In fact, if you watched the original 1971 movie with us during the last season of Hit Me With Your Best Shot you'll be hard pressed to spot many immediate differences beyond of course the new cast. Nicole Kidman takes the Geraldine Page role (we worship Kidman but good luck topping one of Page's juiciest star turns), Colin Farrell gets the Clint Eastwood wounded womanizing soldier part, Kiki steps in for Elizabeth Hartman, and Oona Laurence (who was so good opposite Gyllenhaal in Southpaw) plays the Pamela Ferdin role. 

If you haven't yet seen the trailer or would like to watch it again (I'm on round 5) it's after the jump along with a short "Yes No Maybe So"...

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Laura Dern Week: "Jurassic Park" (1993)

by Chris Feil

How could we celebrate Laura Dern Week without giving a nod to her biggest box office hit Jurassic Park! While Dern may more quickly come to her fans’ minds for her daring auteur-driven or darkly comedic work, her performance in Jurassic Park is the actress at her peak powers of relaxed charisma. Wouldn’t it be wonderful for some of our other favorite actresses to not only emerge from their big budget forays unscathed, but with a performance so slyly delightful?

The film doesn’t function to serve character, but naturally Dern’s Ellie Sattler is its most vivid, all incisive smarts and genuine heart that never fade into the background. She’s just so damn cool.

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