#coen-brothers-influence

#coen-brothers-influence

When Jeff Nichols set out to make 2016's Midnight Special, his intention was to create a film about parenthood, the feelings of powerlessness that come with it, and the faith required to let your child be their own person in the world. When his son had a seizure at 8 months old, Nichols realized that he 'had no real control over the health and well-being of [his] child.'

The project was prompted by a new practice requiring all journalists or outlets who received any non-Russian funding to self-identify as "foreign agents." At first, the reactions of TV Rain on-air host Anna Nemzer and her colleagues, forced to read an absurd disclaimer at the beginning of every story, is one of typically Russian dark humor.

George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest - it was "beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree". When the teenager woke in hospital two weeks later, his heart having nearly stopped, he had a new philosophy: "Maybe there's a reason I survived this accident that nobody should have survived."

10 Cloverfield Lane Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr are locked in an underground bunker for the majority of this left-field sequel to Cloverfield, with thrilling results. In the film's final throes, Winstead's character exits the bunker, and finds that her captor was telling the truth about an alien invasion above - a twist that completely and ruinously dissipates the hard-earned tension that came before.

The value of imagination - the real, human stuff AI could never hope to touch - has been put to the test with Gore Verbinski's Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. It's ideologically flawed, structurally jumbled, and a little too enamoured of its dystopian predecessors (shades of Terminator and Edge of Tomorrow here). But it's also sort of wonderfully personal, cranky and spiked - like an affronted hedgehog trying repeatedly to ram your shin.

It's been 40 years since Richard Linklater founded the Austin Film Society, beginning his crusade to make scrappy, personal, romantic and boisterous cinema. It's fitting for a director who first broke out in the 1990s "Indiewood" boom that his latest film, Nouvelle Vague, is an origin story of cinema's enfant terrible par excellence, Jean-Luc Godard, mounting his iconic debut film Breathless. As Linklater's first non-English film, Nouvelle Vague feels like a film fanatic has staged and animated decades' worth of behind-the-scenes anecdotes - genuine and apocryphal alike - to show a turning point for cinema as the Texan director imagines it: lively and collaborative, tetchy and confounding, an amusing slew of rules broken and manifesto points declared.

"The film was shot in Ultra Panavision 70 with lenses that yielded an aspect ratio of 2.76 to 1, and it was breathtaking," Scorsese said. "But it wasn't just the size of the image, it was the imprint of the man behind the camera who knew how to fill that frame, how to compose it. And composer seems like the right word to describe George Stevens and the extraordinary level of artistry he reached at that point in his life and career."

I was a struggling filmmaker. I was trying to find myself and it wasn't happening. I was ready to give up on filmmaking as I was about to turn 30. I didn't feel like I could do this to myself, my family and friends any longer. I was living in South Austin making the minimum amount of money, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and making bad art. But then Sundance gave me my career with this $3 short film that we submitted to the festival on a lark.

Sam Raimi is one of Hollywood's finest purveyors of junk. I say this with love and reverence, and with full acknowledgment that he's the man behind such masterpieces as Evil Dead II and A Simple Plan. But the director has spent decades digging for gold amid pulpier genres, turning out oddball horror, thriller, and comic-book movies. As his career went on, Raimi graduated to making blockbuster versions of junk, including the first Spider-Man trilogy and, most recently, a Doctor Strange sequel for Marvel.

English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star an elegant, dapper presence and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko. The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear.

A quarter-century later, it's safe to say that those days have come to an end. Not only does the streaming-only Netflix of the twenty-twenties no longer transmit movies on DVD through the mail (a service its younger users have trouble even imagining), it ranks approximately nowhere as a preferred cinephile destination. That has to do with a selection much diminished since the DVD days