Search results for: Amy Berg

Debra Granik's "Winter's Bone" tops the Indie Spirit Awards noms list with 7 (Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Female Lead, Best Supporting Female Lead, Best Supporting Male Lead and Best Cinematography), Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids Are All Right" places second with five nominations (Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Female Lead, Best Supporting Male Lead).

An ode to last year's big winner Kathryn Bigelow, the 20th Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards were announced this afternoon and Debra Granik’s backwoods drama “Winter’s Bone” leads all the nominations with a total of three, while Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture) and Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right) each end up with a pair of noms reminding us that there is some definite indiegrrrl power rising to the occasion this year.

Over 295 films - this includes shorts, fiction and documentary, animation, retrospectives, tributes, professional panels, outdoor interactive installations, the festival which takes place between the 13th to the 24th of October, furiously promotes not only world talent, but local French Canadian filmmakers. Among the notable titles, we have Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro volte, Olivier Assayas' Carlos and Alex de la Iglesia's The Last Circus and Wang Bing is doing a Master Class for Venice-winning The Ditch. His epic 9 hour film Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks will also be shown as part of a retrospective.

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.

I think the Best Supporting categories are the toughest nuts to crack, often a fine performance counts as a rare sympathy vote for a film that isn't nominated in any other category. This year's real wild card are the actresses involved in Woody Allen's latest which employs a trio of supporting ladies in Freida Pinto, Anna Friel and Lucy Punch - but at this point its anyone's guess on how pivotal they become to the assigned male characters.