Sundance: 'Mars One' is a Brazilian gem!

by Cláudio Alves

Looking over the city she calls home, Tércia lingers and, in turn, the camera lingers on her. It's a beautiful, if humble, image, her silhouette against a celestial painting. The twilight sun makes watercolors out of the skyline, yellow bleeding into blue, gray buildings falling into the cold penumbra. The contemplative frame can contain many meanings, and director Gabriel Martins doesn't force the audience's hand. We're free to surmise what we want from the picture. Speaking from a personal place, I couldn't help but feel a melancholic kinship. Maybe it's projection, but I recognized myself in Tércia, looking at a seemingly peaceful world I thought I knew until it proved me wrong...

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Michael Douglas is the Guest of Honor for the 2022 Meihodo Film Festival

by Nathaniel R

Last year, you may recall, the Meihodo Film Festival honored Juliette Binoche. This year another iconic star, Michael Douglas will be doing double-duty as their Guest of Honor / Advisor. The Meihodo Film Festival, now in its fourth year, is an all streaming international short film festival focused on young visual artists...

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ADG Nominations - Good news and bad news for presumed Oscar Contenders

by Nathaniel R

Adam Stockhausen scored a double nomination at the ADG (French Dispatch and West Side Story)

The Art Directors Guild of America has released its nominations for the 2021 film (and television) year offering some surprise omissions (no Power of the Dog in period) and some delightful inclusions (In the Heights and The Green Knight for contemporary and fantasy respectively). The nominations for guild awards (any kind of guild awards) generally suggest as much about what the industry is watching as they do about whatever craft the awards are for. This is particularly true in "contemporary" categories, where we see year in and year out that the films are usually the ones with buzz in Best Picture, whereas in the Period of Fantasy category that's less important presumably because the work is so much more noticeable.

Their nominations plus punditry notes after the jump... 

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Sundance: Lena Dunham Returns with ‘Sharp Stick’

By Abe Friedtanzer

Director Lena Dunham attends the Q&A at the virtual premiere of Sharp Stick, an official selection of the Premieres section at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. © 2022 Sundance Institute.

It’s been twelve years since Lena Dunham broke through with her second feature film, Tiny Furniture, and just under five years since her Emmy-winning HBO series Girls came to an end. While she’s had a few small film roles since (including Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood) and worked behind the scenes on a trio of series (Genera+ion, Industry, and Camping) she has mostly been out of the media spotlight. Her latest feature, Sharp Stick, absolutely puts her back there. It's an interesting experience, to say the least…

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Sundance: 'Cha Cha Real Smooth' is Frustrating, But Lands On Its Feet

by Eurocheese

Cooper Raiff wrote and directed Cha Cha Real Smooth, in which he stars as Andrew, a conflicted often frustrating man. The first scenes show Andrew in romantic situations at different ages (preteen and just after college), letting the audience know two things about him: he speaks without a filter when it comes to his emotions, and he falls head over heels when he is drawn to someone. When he isn’t romantically entangled, he stays with his loving mother (Leslie Mann) and her boyfriend (Brad Garrett), who he taunts at every opportunity. (At one point, Andrew asks the boyfriend if his purpose on earth is to make things weird… which someone should have been asking him instead!) 

Andrew’s outspoken nature is an excuse to be casually cruel at times though people find him charming. The script relies too heavily on this “charm,” including when he attends a bar mitzvah with his brother and meets Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt). It’s clear he feels a spark with Domino right off the bat. The feeling is mutual though he makes remarks that would have most people running away from him... 

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