Search results for: Michael Winterbottom

What I like most about a filmmaker like Michael Winterbottom is his continual drive to create and not “categorize” himself in terms of subject matter, genre or filmmaking formula. He certainly would make for an interesting auteur theory study.

"An issue arises when the distinction between what we are supposed to take as real and what we know is staged becomes muddy, though we still accept it because the suspension of disbelief makes it that much more entertaining. In Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip, this model is adopted and the result is fair to middling."

As a result of a bizarre 2009 production year, TIFF is the happy recipient of some premium titles which include the world premieres to some of my most anticipated films this year in: Mike Mill's Beginners, John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole, Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go, Andrucha Waddington's Lope and Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock. Then we have titles that are coming from this year's Sundance, Cannes or both (Blue Valentine picks up the trifecta honor) and then we have titles that come to us from out of nowhere with Michael Winterbottom's The Trip and Richard Ayoade's debut film, Submarine.

Arthouse Films, the documentary film specialist have picked up an award-winning documentary film from both the Sundance & Berlin Film Festivals in Lucy Walker’s Waste Land. Along with Michael Winterbottom, she was one of the rare filmmakers to present not one, but a pair of films in Park City this year. Walker went from landfills to the end of the world question with Countdown to Zero.

Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' The Shock Doctrine (which was presented as an unfinished cut at Berlin) will be the lead off film and the keeping with the idea of films that "spur debate", I don't think that the other films to participate in Sundance Film Festival U.S.A initiative will be heavyweight fiction titles, but we can expect to see a good number of doc features that need the attention.