by Cole Abaius.

Stanley Kubrick has appeared in the credits for at least 17 films since his death in 1999. How is that possible? There’s a ton of people thanking him and making movies about him. His influence stretches even beyond his impressive body of work. The infamous control freak has taken us to the Overlook Hotel, to a War Room where there’s no fighting, on an odyssey in space and beyond.

He’s an indelible part of the film conversation who had a rare gift for challenging conventions while embracing components of traditional commercial filmmaking. Last Friday’s Short Film of the Day was a hint at which director this column would take on next, so here it is: a free bit of film school (for fans and filmmakers alike) from a chaotic mind with a gorgeous eye.

Or, as Kirk Douglas put it, “a talented shit.”

Read the rest of this article from Film School Rejects.

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by Cole Abaius.

Perfectionist. Demanding. Hard to work with. David Fincher is a man who hates his own brand but is secure in his own reputation. Of course, it’s a little bit easy when that reputation includes stunning movies and a mind that can operate at an auteur speed in the high-occupancy Hollywood studio lane.

He’s a (mostly) accessibly genius, which is rare and which means that we as fans and filmmakers can learn a lot from him. Fortunately, he’s as free with his advice as he is with his nightmarish visions.

Here’s a bit of free film school from a living legend.

Read the rest of this article from Film School Rejects.

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by Marco R. della Cava.

At his sprawling ranch north of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, producer George Lucas explores a range of film topics with USA TODAY.

Why Red Tails took 23 years to make:

“I wrote the script many years ago, and it turned out just like Star Wars in that it was way too big for one movie. There was the story of how they got trained at Tuskegee (Institute in Alabama), and how Eleanor Roosevelt became their champion. Then there was the battle movie that had piqued my interest initially. And finally the amazing saga of the start of the civil rights movement after the war. So this literally went on for 20 years, trying to get it all into one script, which meant leaving out many things we loved and going mainly with the war story and hinting at the rest.”

Why he financed the film himself:

“Everything I do is defensive. I got into a position (to finance projects) right after The Empire Strikes Back (1980). I didn’t need to have studios telling me what to do, picking movies for me to make, having me change them and recut them. My first two films (THX 1138 and American Graffiti) were recut, and I said I just don’t want that. If I’m going to live or die by my movie, I want to be able to say, ‘Yeah, that was a terrible movie, I made a mistake, sorry.’ I don’t want to have to say I made a great movie but you guys destroyed it.”

Read the rest of this article from USA Today.

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by Scott Mendelson.

Many of the reviews, especially the negative ones, for Steven Spielberg’s War Horse have emphasized the melodramatic ‘boy and his horse’ narrative, accusing the film of wallowing in sentimentality. Moreover, they basically accuse the picture of being ‘conventional Spielberg’, again citing the classic meme that Steven Spielberg isn’t capable of truly playing in on the dark side. For as long as I can remember (early-80s, natch), Steven Spielberg has had a reputation as the “Mr. Mass Audience”, the guy who, film-making chops aside, was looked down upon because of his reputation as a purveyor of mainstream feel-good sentiment.

He was the guy who made general audiences tear-up on cue, but still walk out feeling good. But looking over his filmography, not only are his ‘dark and adult’ pictures more frequent than you might realize, his entire reputation as a softy basically stems from one single incredibly popular (and critically-acclaimed) film that he made in 1982. On a film-by-film basis, Spielberg is far more likely to scare you or deeply disturb you than leave you with a nasty case of the warm-and-fuzzies.

It bears repeating that Spielberg’s reputation as an unchallenging filmmaker for the masses has been around for thirty years or so. Looking back on his first decade of mainstream film making (let’s say 1974-1984), it is ET: The Extra Terrestrial that stood out then, and arguably still today as the quintessential Spielberg film.

While it certainly stood then and now as one of his most personal films, it’s astonishing success (highest-grossing film of all time for 15 years) basically branded Spielberg as a director whose every film contained the kind of small-town nostalgia and overtly tear-jerking emotionalism that made ET such a smash hit. It’s a meme that has followed Spielberg for the last thirty years. And going through his filmography it’s apparent that it’s not entirely a fair assessment of his career. From 1974 until 2011, Spielberg has shown viewers the darkness at least as much, if not more so, than he has shown them the light.

Read the rest of this article from Hollywood News.

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by Katey Rich.

David Cronenberg‘s new movie might not be what you expect from the famously provocative director behind The Fly and Scanners, or even more recently the guy who put Viggo Mortensen through the wringer (and into an unforgettable shower scene) in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. A Dangerous Method, the Cronenberg film that opens Wednesday, deals with psychoanalysis and hysteria and sexual violence, but almost always in words instead of action.

It’s the story of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, their friendship and how it was tested by a woman named Sabina Spielrein, who started out as Jung’s half-mad patient and soon became a prominent psychoanalyst herself. Instead of letting the camera dive into Sabina’s hysterical mind or linger on the S&M sex sessions between her and Jung, the movie– adapted from a play by Christopher Hampton– is steady and talky, allowing these brilliant minds to communicate in words rather than action.

Read the rest of this article from Cinema Blend.

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by The Hindu.

Bertrand Tavernier, French film-maker best known for his new-age cinema, said that emerging world cinema has brought cultures together.

The veteran filmmaker, who received the Lifetime Achievement award at the opening ceremony of the 42nd International Film Festival of India (IFFI) on Wednesday, was interacting with presspersons here on Thursday on the emergence of world cinema.

“The cinema of the world is going through a revolution and this has brought in sweeping changes into filmmaking today. While we see an emergence of new talents across the world, it is newer experimentation in storytelling and genres of technicalities that has taken the world cinema to newer heights,” he said.

Interacting with the audiences about the nuances of French cinema, BAFTA award-winner for Life and Nothing But shared his experiences on being in India and acknowledged that India had produced some great cinematic talents and given filmmakers who had changed the way the world looked at cinema.

Read the rest of this article from The Hindu.

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from The Irish Times.

IF YOU PRESS your nose to the window and listen carefully, you will, this week, catch a few interesting snippets about the inner workings of the film industry. Yesterday the latest movie from Jim Sheridan – this country’s most celebrated film-maker, along with Neil Jordan – made its way relatively quietly into Irish cinemas.

Dream House is a spooky thriller starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. Until recently the only scandal associated with the picture concerned a romantic liaison between its stars. Weisz has since parted from her then husband, the film director Darren Aronofsky, and settled down with the current James Bond.

Shortly after Dream House was first seen in US cinemas in September, the Los Angeles Times reported that, unhappy with the finished film, Sheridan had considered attempting to have his name removed from the project. Such things do happen. Before 2000, when the procedure was discontinued, directors, when disturbed by studio tinkering, could replace their names with the infamous pseudonym Alan Smithee. Movies released in that fashion include Hellraiser: Bloodline, The Shrimp on the Barbie and a television edit of Michael Mann’s Heat .

Read the rest of this article from The Irish Times.

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by The Press Association.

Veteran director Terence Davies has lamented the quality of contemporary film-making, dismissing it as “fast food”.

The 66-year-old director and writer, whose latest film The Deep Blue Sea has just been released, admitted he is fed up with today’s movies because of the constant violence and noisy soundtrack.

“When I see films today, what is depressing is that it’s like fast food – there’s no long-lasting nutrition in it. It’s absorbed and then forgotten,” he said.

Read the rest of this article from The Press Association.

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by Kristopher Tapley.

“Every year at the Academy Awards they give out a lifetime achievement award,” actor Bruce Dern says in the new documentary “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.” “How they can not have gotten to Roger Corman by now is disgusting. And I don’t know that they ever will because they say, ‘Well, what are the great movies that he made?’”

That, of course, was an interview from a few years ago. Since then, the Academy has indeed toasted the life and times of Roger Corman, tapping him in 2009 for an Honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards, a designation many in the industry would agree was a long time coming.

Corman has produced nearly 400 films since 1954. Indeed, they might not register on the objective scale of “great movies,” as Dern notes, but his legacy is undeniable. Corman has had a definitive hand in shaping the modern Hollywood landscape. He gave breaks to Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard among countless others. He broke the greats of today into the business, and yet he has remained on the fringe, borderline obscure.

Read the rest of this article from Hit Fix.

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by Edward Douglas.

Filmmaker Alexander Payne has been out of the limelight for over six years when his previous movie Sideways was nominated for numerous Oscars, winning for Payne’s screenplay with regular collaborator Jim Taylor.

Now, Payne has teamed with George Clooney for The Descendants, an adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings’ novel about Hawaii-based real estate lawyer Matt King, whose wife ends up in a coma after a boating accident, which leads to him discovering she had been having an affair behind his back. With only days for his wife to live, Matt decides to find the man she was sleeping with to let him know about her condition.

Coming along for the journey that takes him to other points on the islands are his two daughters, 17-year-old Alex (Shailene Woodley from “The Secret Life of the American Teenager”) and 10-year-old Scottie (newcomer Amara Miller), as well as Alex’s dim but well-meaning boyfriend (Nick Krause).

Read the rest of this article from Coming Soon.