Noticias

Hitting theaters today is John Hillcoat‘s latest feature, Lawless, a film that makes no large moral tales or political statements. Instead, this is a straightforward story about family and sticking together with flourishes both violent and visual. Taking place during the Appalachia moonshine era, the film boasts an incredible cast with Shia Labeouf, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, Mia Wasikowska, and Jason Clarke.

Screenwriter Nick Cave adapted Matt Bondurant‘s novel, The Wettest County In The World, with impressive attention to a story that has its basis in real life. Bondurant would know, as the film and his novel revolve around the real-life Bondurant brothers, which included his grandfather and great uncles. Earlier this month I had the opportunity to sit down with Matt Bondurant to talk about his unique perspective on the film, teaching locally, whether he likes moonshine, and why he didn’t take a first-pass on the screenplay.

The gorgeous rural Irish scenery that suffuses Matt Bondurant’s third novel, The Night Swimmer, often takes precedence over the marriage imploding in front of it, but the background provides more than adequate cover for the novel’s cynical take on a vacation gone bad. At first, American couple Fred and Elly are all too ready to ditch hard decisions about their future and the demands of Fred’s troubled, erratic father after they win an Irish pub in a beer-company contest. While the coastal town of Baltimore in western County Cork proves more remote than they expected, the move ...