Search results for: Julian Schnabel

Despite an unusually slow weekend for all U.S. indie releases not from Fox Searchlight, imports like Potiche from director Francois Ozon saw great success. The film starring Gerard Depardieu (and a Catherine Deneuve who hit the late night talk show circuit) made a promising $12,143 average in 7 locations. Distributor Music Box Films will likely continue to bank on Depardieu/Deneuve’s star power as it slowly expands into other markets around the country.

Knowing Quentin Tarantino's appreciation for films that are "out there": if I had to do some really early predictions here, I'd say that the Gold and Silver Lion front-runners are in Alex De La Iglesia's bizarro fantasy film A Sad Trumpet Ballad, Pablo Larrain's Post Mortem or Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg (a filmmaker we recently profiled in our American New Wave 25 series - she spent more than a decade in Austin's film scene). I'd also add put Abdellatif Kechiche's Black Venus high up on any awards list, especially the Lido - it's a film I've been pegging for Venice since the film went into production.

Now that all bets are off on Terrence Malick showing up on the Lido, and Wong Kar-wai's The Grand Master appears to be on the same no-show list (the fest have announced that Andrew Lau's The Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen has their second opening night flick celebrating the anniversary of Bruce Lee’s 70th birthday).

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 don't think the title of head programmer for any festival is an easy job, but I'd argue that Marco Müller has it "easy" this year. With so many of the world's best auteurs having not been ready to deliver at the Cannes deadline, the 67th edition of the Venice Film Festival (which will run 1st to 11th September 2010) is going to be loaded in premium titles. With many items having already been mentioned and speculated on before, here is an updated predictions list with a good helping of new names.