Laura Dern Week: INLAND EMPIRE.

We're celebrating the great Laura Dern all week in honour of her 50th birthday. Here's David on the film that sent her down a rabbit hole...

It would be easy for an actor to be a puppet in a David Lynch film, lost as they are in a labyrinthine maze of the mind. The chronology is distorted and the characters’ consciousness is constantly splitting and merging in a kaleidoscope fashion. Laura Dern, though, knows the director better than most, and their most recent collaboration, 2006’s INLAND EMPIRE., places at her at the centre of an intricate puzzle of which she is all of the pieces...

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Elizabeth Debicki Joins Viola Davis in Steve McQueen's Heist Thriller

Thus far in her career, actress Elizabeth Debicki has stolen so many scenes – spectacularly – from such a small handful of projects that we should go ahead and award her the Crown Jewels before she sneaks in and takes them herself. Either way, her electric turns in The Great Gatsby, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and especially her surreptitiously sharp performance at the heart of The Night Manager have already earned Elizabeth the status of a young queen on the silver and small screens - and the announcement of her most recent project promises she'll keep on stealing. Per Variety, she’s to lend her elemental femme fatale flair to Steve McQueen’s newest film Widows and join a verifiable dream team behind and in front of the camera. Before reading onward I must implore you to beware at your own pleasure.

Four years have passed since his formalist masterpiece 12 Years a Slave won the Academy Award for Best Picture, marking Widows as McQueen’s eagerly awaited return to motion pictures; HBO pulled the plug on his would-be television series Codes of Conduct in the interim before making it to air. Debicki will star in the heist thriller alongside the incomparable Viola Davis as two of four eponymous widows who set out to finish the job that their deceased husbands began in vain. As if the thought of these two icons cracking safes or donning disguises wasn’t enough to take your breath away, two of 2016’s most revelatory, swoon-inducing actors round out the cast list thus far: Moonlight’s Andre Holland and Tony Award winner Cynthia Erivo of The Color Purple. McQueen and Gone Girl maestro Gillian Flynn will co-pen the film’s screenplay, to add onto the glut of top tier talent.

Widows won’t hit theaters until 2018 so this tease can’t help but feel a bit excruciating. How do you plan to best appreciate Elizabeth Debicki in the meantime? 

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.