Jurgen & Marcy's Independent Film Blog October 2007 Archive

Out this week on DVD, Kasi Lemmons' exuberant Talk To Me ranks as the most overlooked film of the year. We can only hope that Don Cheadle will receive an ... Read More

An independent film about a pregnant American teen keeps piling up international prizes, adding top honors from the second annual RomeFilmFest this Saturday. Ellen Page stars in the title role ... Read More

From Eraserhead to Mulholland Dr. and INLAND EMPIRE, shifting identities and deepening mysteries have always been hallmarks of David Lynch's films. So perhaps nobody should have been surprised that the ... Read More

Veteran director Sidney Lumet sends Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke to Westchester for a botched robbery in this grim family crime drama scripted by playwright Kelly Masterson. "It's a ... Read More

We're content watching films, but some people like to read them. In the quest for Oscar gold, Paramount Vantage has taken the bold step of uploading the screenplays of  five prestige movies ... Read More

German filmmaker Fatih Akin (Head On) won the the Lux Prize, the European Parliament's inaugural film award, for The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite). Hanna Schygulla, star of the film, accepted the award, a trophy ... Read More

It's a great week to take a look back at three essential classics with the Criterion Collection's release of Jean-Luc Godard's nouvelle vague masterpiece Breathless, Terrence Malick's sumptuous tragedy Days ... Read More

The Gotham Awards nominations have been announced. In the running for Best Feature are Craig Zobel's Great World of Sound, Todd Haynes's Bob Dylan picture I'm Not There, Sean Penn's debut as director Into the Wild, Noah Baumbach's Margot at the ... Read More

The very premise of Goran Dukic's indie film Wristcutters: A Love Story, adapted from a novella by Israeli author Etgar Keret, leaves me cold. Imagine you've killed yourself to ... Read More

Only five films will get a nomination, but 63 countries have submitted entries for consideration for Best Foreign Language Film category for the 80th Academy Awards. None of the films can currently be ... Read More

Vulture has seen Dave Eggers's and Spike Jonez's script for Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and "it's really, really good:" "the screenplay for this live-action film simply becomes a ... Read More

I still have the occasional disturbing dream about last year's INLAND EMPIRE marathons and related New York appearances by David Lynch, who was seemingly everywhere promoting the film and his ... Read More

Persepolis closed the New York Film Festival to a packed audience on Sunday night. Directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, the gorgeous adaption of Satrapi’s ... Read More

Good news: the 191 minute flop that was Grindhouse has been broken into two. Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof split the critics and bored us to tears, but Robert Rodriguez's zombie ... Read More

Shekhar Kapurs sweeping spectacle forgoes all musty pretensions of middle-brow edutainment, and if you expected a history lesson youll emerge from the theater deaf and dumb. Elizabeth: The Golden Age ... Read More

Quality independent films are finding new life on DVD this week: check out Ramin Bahrani's eye opening drama Man Push Cart, Gus van Sant's debut film Mala Noche, Oren Rudavsky's ... Read More

   (Photo: Jürgen Fauth) The opening scenes of Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding are so sharp and funny and good that it's upsetting to report that the film cannot maintain its ... Read More

Brian De Palma's Redacted, the devastating reconstruction of the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by American soldiers, has been one of the most divisive films at the New York Film Festival and ... Read More

Asia Argento stars as the passionate La Vellini in Catherine Breillat's most conventional film yet, an eighteenth century costume drama. Fu'ad Ait Attou makes his film debut as Ryno De ... Read More

Sarah Polley proved herself as a director with her fine debut film Away From Her, but she's been seducing us with sorrow for years now, most recently, The Secret Life of Words and My Life Without Me. Adrien ... Read More

With I'm Not There, his hotly anticipated follow-up to Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes attempts to find the key to Bob Dylan's life and art by unfolding the larger-than-life personality ... Read More

Skateboarding is a crime after all in Gus van Sant's adaptation of Paranoid Park, Blake Nelson's coming-of-age novel about a teenager who is involved in an accidental death. Fresh-faced kids ... Read More

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr is back with a slow-moving black-and-white work of art that will dazzle the faithful and bore the stuffing out of everyone else. Like Tarr's earlier films ... Read More

"Secret Sunshine" is the Chinese meaning of "Milyang," the name of the town where Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon) and her seven-year-old son are moving to start a new life. Shin-ae's husband ... Read More

From Spain comes an incredibly spooky ghost story by first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona. The Orphanage, produced by Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) was just selected as the country's entry ... Read More

Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon is a charming homage to the 1956 French classic by Albert Lamorisse and an intimate portrait of a unique Paris family. A blond ... Read More

With Go Go Tales, Abel Ferrara has made his first "intentional comedy," telling stories of a bygone New York. Willem Dafoe plays Ray Ruby, the hapless manager of a cash-strapped ... Read More

The winner of this year's Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Cristian Mungiu's devastating drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days tells the story of a young woman ... Read More

A few months after Hurricane Katrina, documentarians Ed Pincus and Lucia Small went on a road trip though the South to trace the stories of Americans who had lost not ... Read More

Told entirely through "found" footage, Brian De Palma's incendiary polemic reconstructs the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers in Samarra in 2006. Redacted feels ... Read More