- Plenty of coverage has come out of the Sundance Film Festival, which wrapped up last week and among our highlights is Wesley Morris's 5-part Sundance Diary for Grantland (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
- Another Sundance favorite is Manohla Dargis's festival report for The New York Times:
"Every January at the Sundance Film Festival, a movie or two will pop, exciting a cinematic congregation that descends on this resort town praying for the next big thing and at times finding it. Last year the festival got the party started with “Whiplash,” one of its opening selections, and then sent attendees into raptures with “Boyhood.” No single title has dominated this year’s event, yet after a slow start that had some writing off the event before it really got going, good and great movies — from coming-of-age tales like The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl to documentaries like Prophet’s Prey and Welcome to Leith — affirmed that, once again, this was the place to be."
- The best Sundance coverage of all, though? The Twitter feed of filmmaker/critic Blake Williams. Some of our fave Tweets: 1, 2, 3, 4 — but head over to his account and scroll down to read 'em all.
- For Interview Magazine, founding member of Animal Collective Dave Portner talks to John Carpenter about horror and his new album:
"PORTNER: But that's a question that's in line with your new record—how do you capture the horror and the unknown? There's something scary about the unknown. And maybe the scariest movies couldn't ever be made because they are too deep in somebody's head, too unknown to get out.
CARPENTER: That's the idea. This album is for the movies that are going on in your head. Anybody who has grown up in our culture and has seen movies has a movie going on in our head. So the best way to listen to my album is to go into the dark, turn the lights down, put on the album, and start imagining your movie. That's the movie I want to score."
- Head over to Vice to watch Harmony Korine's The Big Cambo, produced for their "Profiles" series.
- Max Nelson writes on Nils Malmros (whose films are playing the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of a Film Comment Selects series):
"Indeed, one of the most attractive—and, ultimately, deceptive—aspects of Malmros’s films is their apparent neutrality, their surgical steadiness of hand. Watching them can feel like recalling a particularly turbulent passage in your life from the lucid and serene remove of a later, mellower stage. By Malmros’s fifth feature Beauty and the Beast (83), however, a second, half-hidden voice was starting to speak up from under that paternal tone. This voice, more anxious and less assured than the one under which it’s been hiding, seethes quietly through Malmros’s films about adolescence. Cool-tempered, exquisite reminiscences of youth and its discontents, these movies are also, you start to feel, unsettlingly pained dispatches from middle age."
- Above: a photo from the set of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker via Film History in Pics.
- Every year, the Locarno Film Festival assembles an incredible, epic and comprehensive retrospective and this year the spotlight is on Sam Peckinpah (and the retro will make its way to New York later in the year).
- For Movie Morlocks, R. Emmet Sweeney writes on Allan Dwan's High Tension:
"I don’t know if Allan Dwan ever read the Futurist Manifesto, but High Tension is an exemplar of the what Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was celebrating in his incendiary 1909 statement in praise of the industrial age: “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.” And boy does Dwan like to go fast in High Tension (1936), which packs a screwball comedy and an deep sea adventure into its 63 minutes."
- Lastly, a Sundance throwback, via our Tumblr, feat. Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson in 1993:
