From an undermanned relay team searching desperately for a final runner, to a soft-core porn director taking on an ambitious new project, the story trajectories of the short films by the Los Angeles based Varava Brothers (director Jared and writer Justin) are nothing if not unpredictable. Their latest short, entitled Tumbleweed!, is certainly no exception.

A nature mockumentary about the least vegetative form of vegetation and one such weed who [...]

A seven minute mockumentary short that looks as good as any feature length Western, Jared Varava’s Tumbleweed!, written by older brother Justin Varava, recounts the fictional history of the titular tumbleweed with perfect deadpan intelligence and timing. Droll voiceover narration sets the scene in the small town of Alacrity, North Texas, where in 1807 prospector J. Herbert Tumble was first entranced by the sight of dry plant-matter rolling [...]

Even the combined charisma of Denzel Washington (The Taking of Pelham 123) and Ryan Reynolds (Green Lantern) can’t make Safe House seem like anything other than the derivative and unengaging nonsense that it is. After being captured in Cape Town, traitorous CIA agent Tobin Frost (Washington) is transported to a local safe house operated by low-level agent Matt Weston (Reynolds), a man frustrated with the lack of career [...]

On the night of November 9, 1989, the ground-breaking gay film Coming Out was set to premiere to an East German repressed, homosexual audience, but fatefully, another ground-breaking event occurred that night: the Berlin Wall came down. As co-director Ringo Rösener narrates in his and Markus Stein’s Panorama documentary Unter Männern — Schwul in der Ddr (Among Men — Gay In East Germany), the gay GDR community was robbed that [...]

The Mike Leigh method of filmmaking is a bit like the bible: collaboratively constructed, religiously studied and often woefully, disastrously misconstrued. Thankfully, however, Leigh still walks among us, and at this year‘s Berlinale Talent Campus, the British director imparted his candid wisdom to a packed audience of filmmaking apostles eager to learn about his distinctive approach to creating cinematic worlds.

“The distinction between writing and directing doesn’t exist,” began Leigh in [...]

If you’re a regular reader, you probably know that from January 25^th until February 5^th, I had the great pleasure of attending the 41^st annual International Film Festival of Rotterdam. Over the twelve days of the festival, amidst the frequently sub-zero temperatures of a European winter, I watched twenty-three feature films from five continents, hobnobbed with members of the international press, and attended the prestigious Tiger Awards ceremony, designed to [...]