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Film Independent
Movie Trailers
independent Film
History Film Independent
Film Independent is a non-profit organization dedicated to independent film and independent filmmakers. We help filmmakers get movies made and seen by audiences. Additionally, we work to increase diversity in the industry by helping filmmakers from underrepresented communities tell their stories.
Our 6,300 members have access to discounted equipment, editing suites, casting rooms, a valuable resource library, over 120 free screenings, and 150 educational events every year.
Film Independent also produces the Los Angeles Film Festival, celebrating the best of American and international film, and the Independent Spirit Awards, the premier awards event of the independent film community. Our members attend nominee screenings for the Spirit Awards, view nominated films through Netflix, and vote for the winners.
Join our community of independent filmmakers, film lovers, and industry leaders. Click here for information on joining and supporting Film Independent, or call 310.432.1200.
Name Change
In May 2005, Film Independent became the new name for the organization formerly known as IFP/Los Angeles. Film Independent continues to offer the same great member benefits, and we still produce our signature programs, the Independent Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival. We changed our name to create a unique identity for our Los Angeles-based organization and so that we can respond to our filmmaking community more efficiently and effectively. The West Coast independent film community has grown tremendously in the last 25 years, and so has our organization: from six members in 1980 to over 6,000 in 2005. We thank you for your support of independent film, and welcome your suggestions about how we can best serve you and the independent film community.
Our 6,300 members have access to discounted equipment, editing suites, casting rooms, a valuable resource library, over 120 free screenings, and 150 educational events every year.
Film Independent also produces the Los Angeles Film Festival, celebrating the best of American and international film, and the Independent Spirit Awards, the premier awards event of the independent film community. Our members attend nominee screenings for the Spirit Awards, view nominated films through Netflix, and vote for the winners.
Join our community of independent filmmakers, film lovers, and industry leaders. Click here for information on joining and supporting Film Independent, or call 310.432.1200.
Name Change
In May 2005, Film Independent became the new name for the organization formerly known as IFP/Los Angeles. Film Independent continues to offer the same great member benefits, and we still produce our signature programs, the Independent Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival. We changed our name to create a unique identity for our Los Angeles-based organization and so that we can respond to our filmmaking community more efficiently and effectively. The West Coast independent film community has grown tremendously in the last 25 years, and so has our organization: from six members in 1980 to over 6,000 in 2005. We thank you for your support of independent film, and welcome your suggestions about how we can best serve you and the independent film community.
News
Kalender Event
The key to our success:
People who are passionate about independent film.
Click here for our Board of Directors.
Dawn Hudson, executive director
Sean McManus, senior director
María Raquel Bozzi, director of film education
Richard Raddon, director of The Los Angeles Film Festival
Rachel Rosen, director of programming
Pamela Tom, director of diversity
Josh Welsh, filmmaker labs manager
Diana Zahn-Storey, producer, Spirit Awards and The Los Angeles Film Festival
People who are passionate about independent film.
Click here for our Board of Directors.
Dawn Hudson, executive director
Sean McManus, senior director
María Raquel Bozzi, director of film education
Richard Raddon, director of The Los Angeles Film Festival
Rachel Rosen, director of programming
Pamela Tom, director of diversity
Josh Welsh, filmmaker labs manager
Diana Zahn-Storey, producer, Spirit Awards and The Los Angeles Film Festival
Starting Out In The Evening
Lauren Ambrose is Luminious is this Lugubrious Film
Guide Rating - rating
The women in Andrew Wagner's second film Starting Out in the Evening, based on the novel by Brian Morton, tend to beam and glow an awful lot.
Lauren Ambrose plays Heather Wolfe, a graduate student doing her thesis on aging writer Lionel Schiller (Frank Langella). Heather has more than an intellectual interest in her subject; Schiller's early novels had an enormous impact on her life and her enthusiasm borders on worship. In their first scene together at a local diner, Ambrose manges to casually order a BLT while all the while beaming at the man, her face framed by shining red hair. She is a transfixing sight.
As Schiller's daughter Ariel, Lili Taylor merely glows. In fact, her boyfriend Casey (Adrien Lester) observes on more than one occasion that "Ariel is all glowy," and it's true. Taylor radiates happiness. Her expression, indeed, is almost unseemingly bright -- when she's not arguing with her father, which she does, unfortunately, an awful lot.
The early scenes of Starting Out in the Evening are electric with sexual tension, smart dialogue, and terrific performances - especially Ambrose's. The young actress has graduated from petulant Claire on Six Feet Under into adulthood; actually, she's more on the verge - round cheeks, sexy black boots, sleek hair, and an irrepressible intensity that seems to belong only to the young.
Despite his initial wariness, Schiller can't resist the younger woman, nor does her try particularly hard. But Ambrose is also a convincing intellect; her Heather gets past Lionel's guard through to his mind as much as to his body. When complications set in, however, my initial engagement with the story began to wane. It is bad enough to watch Schiller accept the day to day indignities of his stalled career; later emotional scenes set in the hospital erase all of the film's early glow. My perhaps shallow commitment to the film mirrors that of Heather Wolfe's to her subject: good time over, red headed girl moves on. But the movie isn't.
Langella gives such a convincingly gruff performance as Schiller a cantankerous old man, that I never did warm up to him. Starting Out In The Evening is intended to be Schiller's story, an intimate portrait of a writer; instead, I was interested in his women, beaming and glowing and also talking their way into fully realized, flawed, fascinating characters. Ambrose and Taylor's time on screen rarely intersects; that would have been a different movie, but one I would have preferred.
Guide Rating - rating
The women in Andrew Wagner's second film Starting Out in the Evening, based on the novel by Brian Morton, tend to beam and glow an awful lot.
Lauren Ambrose plays Heather Wolfe, a graduate student doing her thesis on aging writer Lionel Schiller (Frank Langella). Heather has more than an intellectual interest in her subject; Schiller's early novels had an enormous impact on her life and her enthusiasm borders on worship. In their first scene together at a local diner, Ambrose manges to casually order a BLT while all the while beaming at the man, her face framed by shining red hair. She is a transfixing sight.
As Schiller's daughter Ariel, Lili Taylor merely glows. In fact, her boyfriend Casey (Adrien Lester) observes on more than one occasion that "Ariel is all glowy," and it's true. Taylor radiates happiness. Her expression, indeed, is almost unseemingly bright -- when she's not arguing with her father, which she does, unfortunately, an awful lot.
The early scenes of Starting Out in the Evening are electric with sexual tension, smart dialogue, and terrific performances - especially Ambrose's. The young actress has graduated from petulant Claire on Six Feet Under into adulthood; actually, she's more on the verge - round cheeks, sexy black boots, sleek hair, and an irrepressible intensity that seems to belong only to the young.
Despite his initial wariness, Schiller can't resist the younger woman, nor does her try particularly hard. But Ambrose is also a convincing intellect; her Heather gets past Lionel's guard through to his mind as much as to his body. When complications set in, however, my initial engagement with the story began to wane. It is bad enough to watch Schiller accept the day to day indignities of his stalled career; later emotional scenes set in the hospital erase all of the film's early glow. My perhaps shallow commitment to the film mirrors that of Heather Wolfe's to her subject: good time over, red headed girl moves on. But the movie isn't.
Langella gives such a convincingly gruff performance as Schiller a cantankerous old man, that I never did warm up to him. Starting Out In The Evening is intended to be Schiller's story, an intimate portrait of a writer; instead, I was interested in his women, beaming and glowing and also talking their way into fully realized, flawed, fascinating characters. Ambrose and Taylor's time on screen rarely intersects; that would have been a different movie, but one I would have preferred.
Southland Tales
Doppelgangers, Porn Stars, and Zeppelins Bring About Half-Baked Apocalypse
Guide Rating - rating
You may already have heard a thing or two about Richard Kelly's long-awaited follow-up to the cult hit Donnie Darko (2001). Southland Tales was savaged by critics after its Cannes premiere, and Kelly has since shortened the film by 19 minutes and added special effects shots to the ambitious apocalyptic romp with the odd ensemble cast that includes Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake and Seann William Scott.
In the incarnation I saw, Southland Tales is much better than the complete disaster the Cannes reviews were announcing. The film is a wild ride to the end of the world packed with absurdist characters, technological wonders, stoned terrorists, and science-fiction conspiracies. Set over the days leading up to a final Fourth of July, this cartoonish, satirical, convoluted and America-centric Armageddon is introduced with a quick primer that's meant to bring us up to speed. The film's end-day present is kind of like 2007, only more so: after terrorist attacks in Texas, the Bush Administration launches World War 3 in the Middle-East and clamps down on civil rights at home. Resources are running out, checkpoints are erected at state lines, and dissenting "Neo-Marxists" are rounded up. The nightly news comes with Hustler ads.
In a move borrowed from George Lucas, Kelly picks up the action with chapter IV--the prequels numbered I through III are available in comic book form. The plot concerns BoxerSantaros (Dwayne Johnson), an actor and screenwriter with amnesia, his girlfriend, porn star and talk show host Krysta Now (Sarah MichelleGellar), and Roland Tavener (Seann William Scott), a police officer with a mysterious doppelganger. There are kidnappings, showdowns on the beach, and Wallace Shawn plays an inventor who tongue-kisses Bai Ling and discovers the secret to an alternative energy source that powers his gleaming airships.
After only a single viewing, it's almost impossible to make sense out of Southland Tales' postmodern grab bag of disparate elements: self-fulfilling screenplays, cut-off fingers, Christopher Lambert as a weapons salesman cruising Venice Beach in an ice cream van, quotes from Revelations and Robert Frost, imagery lifted from Alan Moore's Watchmen and the entire catalog of movies set in Los Angeles from Day of the Locust to 1941, home-made roller blades, a rift in space-time near Lake Mead, bizarro slapstick by Amy Poehler and Jon Lovitz, and a Justin Timberlake production number set in an arcade.
"The 4th dimension will collapse on itself, you stupid bitch!"
Southland Tales is overstuffed with ideas, but few of the seem to lead anywhere or connect in a meaningful way. You can see Kelly straining to create, as he did in Donnie Darko, a hermetic cosmology that is simultaneously prophecy and its own fulfillment, but I was left wondering if this kitchen-sink apocalypse had anything urgent to communicate beyond its own self-assured wackiness. The result is fitfully engaging but leaves too much unexplored to appear as anything other than half-baked.
Sure, if you squint hard enough and engage your imagination, you may be able to construct a Southland Tales of the mind that's a lot more coherent than what's on screen, but it's not my job to review the movie that might have been. As it stands, you'll probably leave the theater with a few new catch phrases about pimps, teen horniness, and the New York Times, a couple of belly laughs, and a nagging sense of disappointment.
That doesn't mean Southland Tales won't find its champions, and I wouldn't be surprised if Kelly took another page out of George Lucas's book and kept tinkering with Southland Tales. Instead of a cataclysmic doomsday, I foresee a never-ending series of "improved director's cut ultimate DVD editions," eagerly gobbled up by Internet forums debating the finer points of Fluid Karma and the average whoremonger's proclivity for self-annihilation. From what I've seen, we're not going out with a bang but with a whimper.
Guide Rating - rating
You may already have heard a thing or two about Richard Kelly's long-awaited follow-up to the cult hit Donnie Darko (2001). Southland Tales was savaged by critics after its Cannes premiere, and Kelly has since shortened the film by 19 minutes and added special effects shots to the ambitious apocalyptic romp with the odd ensemble cast that includes Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake and Seann William Scott.
In the incarnation I saw, Southland Tales is much better than the complete disaster the Cannes reviews were announcing. The film is a wild ride to the end of the world packed with absurdist characters, technological wonders, stoned terrorists, and science-fiction conspiracies. Set over the days leading up to a final Fourth of July, this cartoonish, satirical, convoluted and America-centric Armageddon is introduced with a quick primer that's meant to bring us up to speed. The film's end-day present is kind of like 2007, only more so: after terrorist attacks in Texas, the Bush Administration launches World War 3 in the Middle-East and clamps down on civil rights at home. Resources are running out, checkpoints are erected at state lines, and dissenting "Neo-Marxists" are rounded up. The nightly news comes with Hustler ads.
In a move borrowed from George Lucas, Kelly picks up the action with chapter IV--the prequels numbered I through III are available in comic book form. The plot concerns BoxerSantaros (Dwayne Johnson), an actor and screenwriter with amnesia, his girlfriend, porn star and talk show host Krysta Now (Sarah MichelleGellar), and Roland Tavener (Seann William Scott), a police officer with a mysterious doppelganger. There are kidnappings, showdowns on the beach, and Wallace Shawn plays an inventor who tongue-kisses Bai Ling and discovers the secret to an alternative energy source that powers his gleaming airships.
After only a single viewing, it's almost impossible to make sense out of Southland Tales' postmodern grab bag of disparate elements: self-fulfilling screenplays, cut-off fingers, Christopher Lambert as a weapons salesman cruising Venice Beach in an ice cream van, quotes from Revelations and Robert Frost, imagery lifted from Alan Moore's Watchmen and the entire catalog of movies set in Los Angeles from Day of the Locust to 1941, home-made roller blades, a rift in space-time near Lake Mead, bizarro slapstick by Amy Poehler and Jon Lovitz, and a Justin Timberlake production number set in an arcade.
"The 4th dimension will collapse on itself, you stupid bitch!"
Southland Tales is overstuffed with ideas, but few of the seem to lead anywhere or connect in a meaningful way. You can see Kelly straining to create, as he did in Donnie Darko, a hermetic cosmology that is simultaneously prophecy and its own fulfillment, but I was left wondering if this kitchen-sink apocalypse had anything urgent to communicate beyond its own self-assured wackiness. The result is fitfully engaging but leaves too much unexplored to appear as anything other than half-baked.
Sure, if you squint hard enough and engage your imagination, you may be able to construct a Southland Tales of the mind that's a lot more coherent than what's on screen, but it's not my job to review the movie that might have been. As it stands, you'll probably leave the theater with a few new catch phrases about pimps, teen horniness, and the New York Times, a couple of belly laughs, and a nagging sense of disappointment.
That doesn't mean Southland Tales won't find its champions, and I wouldn't be surprised if Kelly took another page out of George Lucas's book and kept tinkering with Southland Tales. Instead of a cataclysmic doomsday, I foresee a never-ending series of "improved director's cut ultimate DVD editions," eagerly gobbled up by Internet forums debating the finer points of Fluid Karma and the average whoremonger's proclivity for self-annihilation. From what I've seen, we're not going out with a bang but with a whimper.
