Director Stephen Walker Celebrates Being Young@Heart by Brad Balfour Of the many surprises at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, one of the most charming was a little doc called Young@Heart. Filmed over a several months’ rehearsal period leading up to a concert tour, veteran British director Stephen Walker and his wife, producer Sally George, tell the … Continue reading
ALEX GIBNEY RIDES THE TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE by Brad Balfour Having previously made The Trials of Henry Kissinger and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, documentary director Alex Gibney has become an expert on people corrupted by and abusing their power. A prize–winner at last spring’s Tribeca Film Festival, few films resonate like Taxi to the … Continue reading
Michael Moore Heats up the Debate with SiCKO by Brad Balfour What can be said about the 53-year-old Michael Moore that hasn’t been said before? He’s probably one of the first documentary directors – if not the first – to become a household word in his own right, almost a celebrity who commands gossip-porn coverage … Continue reading
Stefan Ruzowitzky and Karl Markovics A Director and an Actor Make an Authentic Holocaust Film out of The Counterfeiters by Brad Balfour Just when you think everything that happened during the Holocaust has been chronicled, another film appears based on a true story that offers another look at that horrible experience in a way which … Continue reading
George A. Romero Relives His Zombies Through the Diary of the Dead by Brad Balfour For independent filmmakers, George A. Romero is one of the great culture heroes. Back in the 1960s, this Pittsburgh resident (he went from NYC to Carnegie Mellon U.) reared himself up and decided he was going to make movies with … Continue reading
Martin McDonagh Going Back to Bruges by Jay S. Jacobs Irish playwright Martin McDonagh has never played by the rules in the theater, so it should be of no surprise that his feature film debut as a screenwriter and director would be a quirky, fascinating affair. In Bruges tells the slightly surreal, definitely funny and often … Continue reading
Julian Schnabel Continues to Dive Into Filmmaking with The Diving Bell and The Butterfly by Brad Balfour Director Julian Schnabel comes to filmmaking under odd circumstances. Long before he made his first film, he was a world-class fine artist – the self-proclaimed lion of the New York art world – whose paintings and other works … Continue reading
Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Thomas Anderson, Paul Dano and Ciaran Hinds There Will Be Accolades For There Will Be Blood by Brad Balfour Originally posted on December 26, 2007. Though Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, There Will Be Blood, is based on a book published in 1927 which dealt with the emerging oil business in Southern … Continue reading
Stephen King and Frank Darabont Step Out of The Mist by Brad Balfour What can one say about author Stephen King – one of the most successful writers of all time? King is the perfect name for the man, for he has conquered the world of weird fiction, horror and science fiction. And thanks to … Continue reading
Michael Apted How Sweet the Sound by Jay S. Jacobs In 1963, when a twenty-two-year-old researcher for Granada Television in England was sent out to find a representative sampling of British children for a special program on how seven-year olds saw the world, he never realized that assignment would completely change his life. Forty-four years … Continue reading
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