Author: Madison

For years, independent filmmakers have faced an increasingly strange contradiction: audiences still say they want original films, adult dramas, documentaries, foreign-language work, thrillers, and distinctive stories that do not arrive pre-packaged as intellectual property — yet getting those films into theatres has become brutally difficult. AMC Entertainment’s launch of Leawood Films is therefore more than a corporate expansion. It is a potentially meaningful intervention in one of independent cinema’s most persistent bottlenecks: the distance between a completed, financed film and a credible theatrical release. The new distribution company will focus primarily on small- and medium-sized films that may otherwise struggle…

For more than a century, cinema has understood something that the beauty industry occasionally seems determined to forget: a face is most compelling when something is happening to it. The close-up was never invented merely to magnify beauty. It was invented to magnify thought, hesitation, desire, suspicion, terror, grief and all those fleeting emotional betrayals that occur before language has time to intervene. A camera placed close enough to an actor can detect the almost invisible tightening around the mouth when a character hears something she does not want to believe, the minute change around the eyes when affection becomes…

Na Hong-jin’s Hope has arrived in North America with the kind of release that would have seemed almost unthinkable for a Korean-language creature thriller only a few years ago. Distributed by Neon, the ambitious sci-fi horror epic opened September 9 in 1,560 US and Canadian theaters—the widest North American release for a Korean film since Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite—and has now reached $7.29 million domestically. Its worldwide total stands at approximately $44.34 million, with more than $37 million coming from international territories outside North America. Box Office Mojo Those figures require a little perspective. Against the commercial expectations attached to a…

Paul Greengrass’s historical epic succeeds because its leading man never allows us to see the performance beneath the pain. There are performances we admire for their technique, their eloquence or their visible transformation. Then there are performances that make us forget an actor is present at all. In Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising, Andrew Garfield achieves the latter. He does not seem to be demonstrating grief, desperation or moral awakening. He appears to be living through them, carrying each loss in his posture, his breathing and the increasingly haunted intensity of his gaze. Set during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the…