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Leto! Gunpowder & Sky has debuted an official Us trailer for the indie Russian film Leto, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year to some rave reviews. This also went on to play at lots of other festivals throughout last year, from Karlovy Vary to Vienna and more. Leto, directed by filmmaker & theater director Kirill Serebrennikov who was under house arrest for the last year, is based on the true story of Viktor Tsoy and his band called Kino. The title translates to Summer, and the film is shot in black & white, evoking an old school feeling taking us back to the 70s & 80s. It's an awesome, groovy rock film with some incredible musical sequences that you just have to see on the big screen. Teo Yoo stars as Viktor Tsoy, and the main cast features Irina Starshenbaum, Roman Bilyk, Anton Adasinsky, Yuliya Aug, & Filipp Avdeev. This was one...

It may have been largely shut out of the Academy Awards, but the Coen Brothers' "Inside Llewyn Davis" got at least one more Best Picture honor to round out its awards season, as the International Cinephile Society today named it the best of 2013. The group of over 80 film journalists, academics and industry professionals -- of which yours truly is a member -- also handed the film wins for Best Original Screenplay, Best Ensemble and Best Actor for Oscar Isaac, who tied with "The Wolf of Wall Street" star Leonardo DiCaprio. Also taking a quartet of awards was "Blue is the Warmest Color," which won for Best Foreign Language Film, Actress, Supporting Actress and Adapted Screenplay, and finished second to "Davis" in the Best Picture vote. Interestingly, Alfonso Cuaron took yet another Best Director win (alongside ones for cinematography and editing), though "Gravity" only placed seventh in the Best Picture vote.

The International Cinephile Society has announced the nominees for the 11th Ics Awards. Abdellatif Kechiche's "Blue is the Warmest Color," the Coen Brothers' "Inside Llewyn Davis," Spike Jonze's "Her," and Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave" dominated the nominations with 7 nods each.

Winners of the 11th Ics Awards will be announced on February 23, 2014.

Here's the complete list of nominees:

Picture

. 12 Years a Slave

. Before Midnight

. Blue is the Warmest Color

. Frances Ha

. Gravity

. The Great Beauty

. Her

. Inside Llewyn Davis

. Laurence Anyways

. Spring Breakers

. The Wolf of Wall Street

Director

. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen - Inside Llewyn Davis

. Alfonso Cuarón - Gravity

. Xavier Dolan - Laurence Anyways

. Spike Jonze - Her

. Abdellatif Kechiche - Blue is the Warmest Color

. Paolo Sorrentino - The Great Beauty

Film Not In The English Language

. Beyond the Hills

. Blancanieves

. Blue is the Warmest Color

. Faust

. The Great Beauty

. The Hunt

. In the...

The International Cinephile Society -- a group of film academics, journalist and critics from around the world -- announced the nominees for their 11th annual awards, and they definitely went their own way.  While critics group darlings "Inside Llewyn Davis," "Her" and "12 Years a Slave" each received 7 nominations, so did "Blue is the Warmest Color." And the four films were nominated for best picture alongside "Before Midnight," "Frances Ha," "Gravity," "Spring Breakers," "The Wolf of Wall Street," "The Great Beauty" and "Laurence Anyways," with no "American Hustle" or "Captain Phillips"anywhere to be found (the former actually did receive a solo nod for best ensemble). The acting races were equally surprising. Melvil Poupaud and Suzanne Clément were nominated for "Laurence Anyways," as was Anton Adasinsky for "Faust" and Juliette Binoche  for "Camille Claudel 1915." These nods came over Oscar sure things like Robert Redford, Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Oprah...

Aleksandr Sokurov's tetralogy of power, previously dedicated to real biographical subjects (Lenin, Hitler, Hirohito), unexpectedly concludes with a legendary fictitious man: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust. The Russian director has loosely—one might even say wildly, fervently—adapted Goethe's play with a barely contained gleeful passion.

The mise en scène breaks out of the fetid, murmuring stasis so evocative of Molokh (1999), Taurus (2001) and The Sun (2005) and is freed to wander in a malleable, Ruizian manner around a sumptuously dirty and worn old German town of stone and earth. After beginning with a Forrest Gump-like descent of the camera from mirrored heavens, flying down to the grimy, sprawling town, the second shot after this luxurious, fantastical opening introduces Faust (Johannes Zeiler) via the decomposing ash-purple penis of a corpse he is dissecting in poverty and philosophical inquiry. With no money for food (let alone gravediggers), the doctor first approaches and then is chased,...

Alexandr Sokurov's interpretation of Faust is one extraordinary, hallucinatory trip. It starts with Dr. Faust (Johannes Zeiler) dissecting a corpse, looking for/failing to locate the exact location of the soul. Living in extreme poverty, he tries to pawn his ring to a dark eyed, deformed, devilish pawnbroker (Anton Adasinsky). Instead, the pawnbroker convinces Faust to sign away his soul in blood (ink is expensive!) in exchange for one night with virginal Magarete (Isolda Dychauk), whose brother he just killed during a fit of rage in a bar brawl. Shot by renowned French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (Amelie, Harry Potter and a Half-Blood Prince, Inside Llewyn Davis), Faust is an amazing looking film. Even though it is not shot all in one take like Sokurov's festival favorite, Russian...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

New Release

Sunlight Jr.

Not Rated, 1 Hr., 35 Mins.

So relentlessly bleak that you’d have to be a masochist to make it to the end credits, Sunlight Jr. stars Naomi Watts and Matt Dillon as doomed Florida lovers who can’t catch a break. He’s a drunk drowning in self-pity in a wheelchair while she busts her hump working the graveyard shift at a convenience store. Here’s one snapshot of the Sunshine State that no one wants a postcard of. (Also available on iTunes and VOD) C- —Chris Nashawaty

New Release

12-12-12

R, 1 Hr., 45 Mins.

After Superstorm...

Sokurov's version of Goethe's tragedy is part bad dream, part music-less opera, with hallucinatory flashes of fear

Aleksandr Sokurov's Faust is a version of Goethe's tragedy that won the Golden Lion at last year's Venice film festival; it is being presented as the last part of a "cinematic tetralogy" with three earlier films, Moloch (1999) about Hitler, Taurus (2001) about Lenin and The Sun (2005) about Hirohito. Generally, when directors claim this, it is a transparent ploy to shift the back-catalogue DVDs, but this surely can't be true of such a distinguished film-maker, and there is some dramatic interest in linking fictional Faust with three historical figures, each pondering power, destiny, heaven and hell.

The Austrian actor Johannes Zeiler is Faust, dissecting grisly corpses in a vaguely delineated central Europe in what looks like the 16th century of Marlowe's Faustus. He is brooding over the location of the soul (perhaps...

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Aleksandr Sokurov’s four-part meditation on the interplay between power and evil comes to a close with Faust, a challenging, dense take on Goethe’s famed text. With the previous three parts focusing on the travails of historical figures – Moloch on Hitler, Taurus on Lenin and The Sun on Hirohito – Faust might seem like a peculiar post-script, especially when it unfolds like a spiritual prequel, revealing just a little about what might have driven these men to unthinkable behaviours.

Sokurov’s film – which won the Golden Lion at least year’s Venice Film Festival – keenly plays fast and loose with the source material, changing plot structure, character machinations and location, rendering the project, for better and for worse, very much his own. The core premise of course remains the same; the well-meaning if frustrated Doctor Faust (Johannes Zeiler) visits a cantankerous moneylender (Anton Adasinsky), and after signing in his own blood,...

Aleksandr Sokurov loosely—one might even say wildly, fervently–adapts Goethe’s Faust with barely contained, gleeful passion to conclude his tetralogy of power (previously, all real biographical subjects: Lenin, Hitler, Hirohito).

The mise-en-scène breaks out of the fetid, murmuring stasis so evocative of those three films and is freed to wander in a malleable, Ruiz-like manner around a sumptuously dirty and worn old German town of stone and earth. After opening first with a Forest Gump-like descent of the camera from mirrored heavens flying down to the grimy, sprawling town, the second shot after this luxurious, fantastical shot introduces Faust (Johannes Zeiler) via the decomposing ash-purple penis of a corpse he is dissecting in poverty and philosophical inquiry. With no money for food let alone gravediggers, the man first approaches and then is chased, accompanied and pursued by (and later pursues himself) the town’s money-lender (Anton Adasinsky)—the film's devil.

By Mike Collett-White

Venice, Italy (Reuters) - Acclaimed Russian director Alexander Sokurov returns to the theme of corrupting power in his new film "Faust," the fourth and final part of a series on the topic but the first to depict a fictional character.

The first three movies in the tetralogy were "Moloch" (1999) about Adolf Hitler, "Taurus" (2000) about Vladimir Lenin and "The Sun" (2005) about Emperor Hirohito.

Faust, which has its world premiere at the Venice film festival on Thursday, is loosely based on German writer Goethe's take on the myth about a man who sells his soul to the devil.

It is one of 23 movies in the main competition lineup, and eligible for prizes including the coveted Golden Lion for best film at the closing ceremony on Saturday.

In Sokurov's Faust, the Mephistopheles character is convincingly portrayed by Anton Adasinsky as a creepy, old, grotesque moneylender who struggles to maintain his grip on Faust.