coen brothers

The Chilliest Films of All Time

By Alison Nastasi on Dec 10, 2012 6:00pm

The dark days of winter are upon us, providing the perfect excuse to curl up with a good movie at home. If you still want to channel the crisp outdoor temperatures and get into the spirit of the season, we’ve selected some of the chilliest movies you can watch while warm and from the comfort of your own home. These wintry films feature snowy, icy settings that are integral to the powerful atmosphere of each story, existing as more than just a pretty backdrop. White blankets of winter weather reveal a dichotomy that filmmakers love to toy with, symbolizing the emotional mindsets of their characters, isolation and tragic circumstances, or the fragile beauty of a new love. Here are ten of our favorites that use snow as a filmic mirror and canvas. Share some of your picks, below. … Read More

Web

The Cinematography of 10 Great Filmmakers Captured in Cinemagraphs

By Matthew Bower on Nov 16, 2012 3:00pm

In recent years, graphic interchange format, once a throwback to the awkward early years of web design, has come into its own as an art form. Leading the way is the ever-popular cinemagraph, an enhancement on photography that typically adds subtle moving elements to the scene — wisps of blowing hair, blinking eyes, rising smoke, etc. Although cinemagraphs first gained popularity for their use in advertising, it seems only natural that the meme has taken hold of cinema as well, capturing memorable movie stills in infinite loops of movement. If We Don’t, Remember Me has been busy amassing quite the collection of these cinematic cinemagraphs, adding a new dimension to the way in which images can convey the aesthetic of a certain directorial style. From the creepy to the minimalistic, we’ve gathered a list of cinemagraphs that capture the distinctive mise-en-scène of 10 of our favorite filmmakers. … Read More

Film

10 Famous Directors on Making Their First Feature Films

By Alison Nastasi on Jun 27, 2012 7:30pm

It’s been five long years since we’ve been treated to a new Paul Thomas Anderson film. The 2007 Daniel Day-Lewis drama There Will Be Blood left an indelible impression on audiences, but fans of the Boogie Nights director are ready to see his 1950s-set, Scientology-inspired tale The Master about a cult leader (Philip Seymore Hoffman) who rises to prominence, with a drifter as his right-hand man (Joaquin Phoenix).

Although Anderson quickly established himself as a wunderkind, the road to the filmmaker’s first feature wasn’t an easy one — as website This Must Be the Place pointed out. See what the talented director had to say about making his first movie Hard Eight past the break. Then, click through for more words of wisdom, anxious confessions, memories, and the early hopes and fears of other famous directors, reflecting on their first feature films. … Read More

Film

10 Wedding Films That Are Actually Good

By Tom Hawking on Apr 30, 2011 1:00pm

Wedding films are largely like Hallmark cards transferred to celluloid – saccharine piffle based around an institution that’s been progressively losing its relevance for centuries. But still, despite the existence of innumerable dire films like The Wedding Planner and My Best Friend’s Wedding, not every film involving marriage should be consigned a priori to the celluoid scrapheap – occasionally one comes along that manages to be both non-sentimental and amusing. And so, in our sole concession to the ongoing media hypefest that is the Royal Wedding, here’s a selection of our favorite nuptial films – the ones that don’t suck like a brand new turbo-charged Dyson. … Read More

Film

Required Viewing: When Great Directors Make Westerns

By Judy Berman on Apr 27, 2011 12:00pm

We tend to associate our favorite auteurs with “serious cinema” — high-minded dramas that don’t delve too far into goofy genres like sci-fi, horror, or westerns. But recently, watching Kelly Reichardt’s fantastic new western Meek’s Cutoff, we got to thinking about how many important mainstream and independent filmmakers have tried their hand at the genre. Our list of must-watch westerns by great directors (excluding those who are known primarily for their westerns, like John Ford and Sam Peckinpah) is after the jump.

Film

10 Authors and the Directors Who Were Born to Adapt Them

By Judy Berman on Dec 2, 2010 4:00pm

We usually cringe when we hear about film adaptations of great, difficult literary authors’ books. But we were actually intrigued to learn that There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson is thinking about bringing Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, to the big screen. Somehow, Anderson and Pynchon just seem right together. Hell, this just might work! And that got us thinking about other directors who seem born to adapt the work of certain writers. See who we paired up after the jump, and suggest your own matches in the comments. … Read More

News

The Morning's Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on Sep 28, 2010 10:06am

1. Emmy award-winning screenwriter David Simon, creator of The Wire, and fiction writer Yiyun Li are among this year’s recipients of the MacArthur Foundation’s $500,000 genius grants. [via WSJ]
2. This would either be amazing or a complete disaster: Darren Aronofsky wants to direct the Superman reboot that Christopher Nolan is producing.… Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: A Serious Man

By Leah Taylor on Oct 2, 2009 11:48am

The latest entry from the Coen brothers is a little Lebowski, a bit of Barton Fink, and a lot of No Country.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a hapless Midwestern physics prof, trying to find reason, rhyme, and wisdom in the unraveling of his life, his religion no longer holding the comfort it once did. The Coens mine typical Jewish tropes of searching for (and complaining about) both answers and problems, to great effect. The blackest of comedies, A Serious Man also ultimately succeeds as a quiet message of faith.… Read More