Friday, May 20, 2005

Film Trailer Sites + Cannes

ChowSince it's unlikely I'm getting to Cannes anytime soon and since I usually manage to catch at most only 1-2 of the new films showing at the New Festival or Chicago International Film Festival (I'm no longer in the NYC area during the runs of the Mix Festival, or the NY or Tribeca or African Diasporic Film Festivals), I usually scout Internet Movie Database (IMDb) to find out what's new, who's starring in what, when films are completed, as much filmographic information as I can, and so on, so that I'll be able to keep an eye on when they appear onscreen, on DVD, or, like Steven Chow's Kung Fu Hustle (a wild, hilarious, cartoonishly violent film, by the way, pictured at right), I can alert friends who might have other means of accessing them.

For many of the newest films IMDb posts trailer links, but when they don't I go directly to:

Movielist
The Movie Box
Play.dk (a Danish site)
1000 Films (a French site)
Moviemaze (a German site)

There are even more trailer sites, but between these five I've been able to find most of the films I'm looking for.

The Cannes Film Festival site itself also features some trailers. David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Carlos Reygadas' Batalla en Cielo (Battle in Heaven), Hiner Saleem's Kilometre Zero, the Dardennes' L'Enfant (Le Fils [The Son] is a great piece), Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers (I really liked some of the episodes in Coffee and Cigarettes, particularly the tea session involving Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan), and Dominik Moll's Lemming are among the films in competition there this year I definitely want to see. But the one I anticipate the most perhaps is Michael Haneke's Caché, which has no trailer showing yet; Haneke's imagination is operating on a completely different and troubling frequency. Another film that looks fascinating and promises to be disturbing is Lars von Trier's Manderlay, starring Danny Glover, Isaach de Bankolé, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Willem Dafoe. Manderlay is the second work in his (anti-)American trilogy that began with the stunning, conceptual retribution fantasy Dogville, and has drawn lukewarm or outright negative reviews from some of the American critics there.

If anyone knows of trailer sites that post lots of underground films, please forward the information!

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