Friday, April 24, 2015 at 9:19AM Manuel here encouraging you to gawk at Jake Gyllenhaal in the new poster for his boxing film Southpaw (which got the YES/NO/MAYBE SO treatment a couple of weeks ago when we first saw how ripped our darling Jakey had gotten for this Antoine Fuqua film).
It’s a stunning poster.
I’m literally left with no words; I have nothing else to add. Do you?
Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 8:31PM 
Tim here. It's been a good few weeks for animated short films about the fluctuating nature of memories and the complex relationship we have with the past: the warm glow has hardly faded from the online premiere of World of Tomorrow, and this week has seen the premiere on Vimeo of The Alchemist's Letter, written and directed by Carlos Andre Stevens, a Student Academy Award nominee for his 2008 debut, Toumai.
It's transparently a calling card for Stevens, an employee of commercial animation studio HouseSpecial -- that's a former division of Laika, some of whose designers and effects animators have hopped over to help guide the uncommonly lush and appropriately fussy look of the short -- but what a calling card! It's a brilliant little jeweled egg of a short, evocatively sketching out a whole human life in less than five and a half minutes, and doing it through some utterly beautiful design and animation.
Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 6:30PM 
Dancin' Dan here to continue TFE's Artificial Intelligence Week with a little something on my favorite dancing robots.
If there’s a common thread in stories of artificial intelligence, it’s that we can think that we, the programmers/creators, can control it all we like, but if we’re truly successful - if we succeed in creating actual artificial intelligence - we can’t do a damn thing to control it. It will grow and learn and eventually decide things for itself.
In Pixar’s masterpiece WALL•E, we don’t know exactly how our hero gained what for lack of a better word we have to call a “personality,” but we can imagine. Human ingenuity can do a lot of things, but one thing it is notoriously terrible at, on the whole, is predicting the future correctly. Which, coincidentally, is one of the ideas at the heart of Pixar’s masterpiece. [More...]
Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 5:14PM 
Lin-Manuel Miranda as "Hamilton"The Drama Desk Nominations for the 2014/2015 theater season have been announced and the Tony Awards follow suit in a week's tim (theater seasons run summer to spring). The chief difference, besides the level of fame, is that the Drama Desk categories have more nominees but also more eligible contenders since Off Broadway productions (and there are lots more of those) are also considered for the top prizes. Hamilton, the new hip-hop Off Broadway musical about the founding fathers from Lin-Manuel Miranda of "The Heights" fame dominated with 13 nominations but it's not eligible for the Tonys.
It's also impossible to get tickets to and popular with celebrities (Madonna famously was barred from going backstage after using her cel phone -ugh - but everyone's been to it including Michelle Pfeiffer). In the reverse situation, "Fun Home," which is an absolute must see and could lead the Tony nominations, is not eligible for the Drama Desk nominations since it was already eligible in its Off Broadway run last season. "Hamilton" is moving to Broadway in the summer which means it'll be eligible for the 2016 Tony Awards.
The full nominee list, which also included a lot of nominations for screen-to-stage transfer "Let the Right One In" is after the jump...
Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 3:00PM Further reporting from the festival in Tribeca, here's Jason on a pair of disparate flicks about Sad-Eyed Men Doing Bad Things.
Good Kill -- If you've seen Andrew Niccol's modern sci-fi classic Gattaca (and I hope you have; do you think it will make the second half of TFE's sci-fi countdown?) then you can no doubt summon up that indelible image of Ethan & Uma wandering amid a field of shimmering solar panels at sunrise, a mirrored oasis in the desert. There's nothing that beautiful in Niccol's new film Good Kill, nor should there be - it's about the dirty science reality of the here and now, not a gleaming future vision - but it nonetheless occupies the same kind of space; removed, floating off the sand like morning evaporation.
But the light is different now; harder - consider us then a vulture mid-flight, or more practically that of a military drone, lasering in on its target. Hawke (whose real-world surname reads as ironic now that I write it out in this context) is a pilot not allowed to fly anymore; whose military career's found itself confined to a metal crate in the Las Vegas desert marked "You Are Now Leaving The United States" where he plays life and death WarGames half a world away, incinerating "enemy combatants" (a term the movie purposefully broadens beyond any meaning) with the flick of his trigger finger.
The hardness that's settled around Ethan Hawke's eyes in the eighteen years since Gattaca comes in handy in this respect too - repetition and weariness are our subject now; the sunlight itself is diffused by death and destruction, the only thing raining down. A globe covered in sand, with one small sad patch of grass (a repeated shot of Hawke's backyard from above - one square in a patchwork of otherwise dusty browns) feeling more like a blight, an aberration, than either home or comfort.
Backtrack -- When I wrote up my take-down of the killer-bee move Stung yesterday I talked a bit about where Horror Movies stand these days; how a certain school of low-budget film-making (that Stung does not belong to) has found a nifty off-kilter vibe of dread to riff upon. Well Backtrack doesn't belong to that school either, but for other reasons - Backtrack, whatever it cost, feels costly, bloated, crammed with screaming CG ghosties that pop out at the screen screaming when the director needs to goose us.
It also feels immediately dated - the specter of The Sixth Sense (the leather of psychiatry couches ripe spaces for afterlife confessionals) looms large, but it also feels like it was made ten years ago amid the J-Horror remake boom. It fits nicely right in alongside Jennifer Connelly's immediately forgettable Dark Water, for example. Needless to say what all that adds up to is a bunch of exposition endlessly reaching backwards for back-story under back-story under back-story, only intermittently remembering to throw some wild-eyed spook our way as it strains for purpose and/or substance.
And what a shame that this is how we're using the terrific Robin McLeavy! If you've never seen 2009's deeply darkly twisted Aussie romance The Loved Ones do yourself a favor; she's a real spark-plug. Robin shows up about halfway into Backtrack with her big dark eyes and the movie doesn't have anything for her to do - it actually goes out of its way to neuter her - and that's its scariest accomplishment of all.
Adrien Brody, Ethan Hawke, Horror, Tribeca Film 