Search results for: Steve James

It was Cristian Mungiu who first introduced us to the clinic cold Vlad Ivanov in 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days -- perhaps the role that convinced other filmmakers to cast the Romanian actor in his expanded repertoire of other films (The Concert, Police, Adjective and The Whistleblower). The two paired together in Mungiu's Tales From the Golden Age - oddly, I'm not entirely sure if Mungiu actually directed the actor - as the portmanteau film doesn't specify who directed what or who directed The Legend of the Chicken Driver.

One look at the filmmaker names below, and it appears as if the Sundance alumni have come out in droves. We find a known variety of filmmakers such as Spike Jonze (Being John Malcovich), Ira Sachs (Married Life), Nicholas Jasenovec (Paper Hearts), James Franco and the Zellner bros. who have dabbled this year in the short form while working in between their feature film projects.

The film which received no love at the Gothams tied for 1st in total amount of noms with Telluride's The Last Station (Michael Hoffman). Lee Daniel's Precious received noms in the Best Feature, Director, First Screenplay, Best Femle Lead and the most logical nomination and most deserving of them all: Best Supporting Female.

We have year end favorite film lists, we have decade lists, but my favorite list of all is the Black List. Now in year 5, the annual list of the most popular unproduced screenplays voted by script readers who 9 times out of 10 are forced to read utter crap, will soon be unveiled - I suggest you check out the twitter feed for updates. As the votes are being tallied up, I thought we'd go back one year and see where we were at with the top 15 projects of the list.

While I've yet to see the doc myself (I reference Claire Denis' White Material when I think of what the film might hold narratively), when the Cinema Eye Honor Noms were released I was surprised to see that, despite the positive buzz, Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson's Mugabe and the White African only manage to grab one nomination. Clearly the film is a favorite for the 2009 edition of the IDA Awards - it picked up three nominations in the Feature Documentary, ABCNews VideoSource Award an the Pare Lorentz Award categories.