Every week, I get several press releases, screening invitations and other notifications from a handful of studio contacts. While I won’t be sharing any information regarding my screening invites, some of the press releases might be of interest to my readers, so I thought I’d start sharing them in toto with all of you. These could include new image galleries for various films or important updates to upcoming releases from various smaller studios and art house production companies.

• Image Gallery: Admission
• Image Gallery: The Place Beyond the Pines
• Image Gallery: Don Jon
• Press Release: Brigade Spring Preview

Image Gallery: Admission

See the Gallery Here

Image Gallery: The Place Beyond the Pines

See the Gallery Here

Image Gallery: Don Jon

Press Release: Brigade Spring Preview

THE BRASS TEAPOT

Directed by: Ramaa Mosley
Written by: Tim Macy
Starring: Juno Temple, Michael Angarano, Alexis Bledel, Alia Shawkat, Billy Magnussen
Studio: Magnolia Pictures
Release Date: April 5, 2013
Genre: Comedy, Magical Realism
Festivals: Toronto 2012

A modern fable about the meaning of the American dream, and based on the comic book of the same name, THE BRASS TEAPOST centers on a young married couple: John (Michael Angarano) and Alice (Juno Temple). In their 20’s and very much in love and broke, John and Alice live in a small town in middle America. Once voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” Alice struggles to make ends meet while her friends enjoy the good life. Her husband John, neurotic and riddled with phobias, just wants to get the bills paid. But an accident leads them to a roadside antique shop where Alice is spontaneously drawn to a mysterious brass teapot. It isn’t long before they realize that this is no ordinary teapot and that perhaps they have found the answer to all of their financial woes. A magical realist comedy, THE BRASS TEAPOST reminds us to be careful what we wish for.

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ANTIVIRAL

Directed by: Brandon Cronenberg
Written by: Brandon Cronenberg
Starring: Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon, Malcolm McDowell
Studio: IFC Midnight
Release Date: April 12, 2013
Genre: Thriller
Festivals: Cannes 2012, Toronto 2012, Fantastic Fest 2012, AFI 2012

Brandon Cronenberg’s striking body-horror debut is a prescient and chilling vision of our cultural obsession with celebrity. In a dystopian future world, Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works at the Lucas Clinic, which has an unusual and highly profitable line of business: deliberately infecting paying customers with diseases harvested from top celebrities, thus providing a “biological communion” between stars and fans.

Though his work environment is tightly monitored, Syd manages to sneak viruses out of the office and retool them on his personal console for his lucrative sideline supplying the black-market disease trade. When Syd is tasked by his employer to collect a virus from starlet Hannah Geist (breakout actress Sarah Gadon), he is unable to resist the temptation to get closer to one of his own personal celebrity obsessions. Injecting the virus into his own bloodstream, Syd is launched down a dangerous path — and the stakes are raised even higher when he learns that Hannah’s illness is potentially fatal.

Coolly stylized and laced with dark comedy, Antiviral immerses us in the contrasting textures of its vividly realized future, from the blindingly white, clinical spaces of the laboratory and Syd’s apartment, to the baroque decadence of Hannah’s luxurious world, to the grimy and sinister underworld of the black market. Cronenberg lets his imagination run riot as he takes his sardonic vision to its logically extreme end. In this literally sick, fame-fixated world, everything from celebrity infections to celebrity steaks (prime cuts of human beef grown from the cells of stars) are on the market. 

Cronenberg has found ideal specimens for this baleful experiment in his two leads: Jones, steadily deteriorating throughout the film as the disease eats its way through Syd’s frail body, gives a vividly physical performance, while the porcelain-skinned Gadon is the quintessential Hitchcockian icy blond as Hannah, who takes the term “object of desire” to its commodified extreme. Gruesomely absurd and incisive, Antiviral is a visceral satire on our contemporary society of the spectacle.

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GENERATION UM

Directed by: Mark Mann
Written by: Mark Mann
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Bojana Novakovic and Adelaide Clemens
Studio: Phase 4
Release Date: May 3, 2013

The world is downtown New York City, present day – from the point of view of a driver for an escort service. John, a quietly sexy withdrawn guy, is finally ageing out of his young, trendy neighborhood, dealing with the beginnings of the next chapter of his life.

John’s friends are the Party Girls he works for – Violet, an unstoppable entertainer whose weathered beauty and self-proclaimed wisdom are matched only by her lack of audience; and Mia, the new girl with the dark past, whose traffic-stopping sensuality has brought her nothing but victimization. Both survive on their ability to manipulate men, and don’t know how to live any other way. But John, they trust. And through their relationship, all three find a comforting and humorous refuge from the downward spiral of their self-destructive but entertaining lifestyles.

The end of another night out for this odd family of circumstance sets the stage for an all too familiar day spent coming to terms with and reveling in the lives they have unintentionally created for themselves.

When John impulsively steals a camcorder, he decides to capture the sights, sounds, and senses of New York – or rather, his sights, sounds, and senses. He records nature, people, himself. Today. John’s experiment takes a new turn when he pans the camera’s attention to his Party Girls. Violet is gung-ho, ready at a moment’s notice to become the center of attention before the focus fades away. Mia is less enthused, but finds herself opening up to the promise of a spectator.

John’s camcorder unravels the Party Girls’ lives, as both Violet and Mia find themselves attempting to outdo one another’s secrets and opinions.

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SIGHTSEERS

Directed by: Ben Wheatley
Written by: Alice Lowe, Steve Oram and Amy Jump
Starring: Alice Lowe & Steve Oram
Studio: IFC Films
Release Date: May 10, 2013
Genre: Comedy Thriller
Festivals: Cannes 2012, Toronto 2012, Sundance 2012

Chris (Steve Oram) wants to show Tina (Alice Lowe) his world and he wants to do it his way – on a journey through the British Isles in his beloved Abbey Oxford Caravan. Tina’s led a sheltered life and there are things that Chris needs her to see – the Crich Tramway Museum, the Ribblehead Viaduct, the Keswick Pencil Museum and the rolling countryside that separates these wonders in his life. But it doesn’t take long for the dream to fade. Litterbugs, noisy teenagers and pre-booked caravan sites, not to mention Tina’s meddling mother, soon conspire to shatter Chris’s dreams and send him, and anyone who rubs him the wrong way, over a very jagged edge.

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BLACK ROCK

Directed by: Katie Aselton
Written by: Mark Duplass
Starring: Kate Bosworth, Lake Bell, Katie Aselton
Studio: LD Entertainment
Release Date: May 17, 2013
Genre: Thriller
Festivals: Sundance 2012

Three young women – Sarah (Kate Bosworth), Abby (Katie Aselton) and Lou (Lake Bell) – get together for a private campout at one of the iconic settings of their childhood, an empty island off the coast of Maine, to renew their bond of sisterhood. They quickly learn, though, that the island is anything but empty, when they encounter three recently-returned servicemen, who have come to the island to hunt. A misunderstanding quickly turns to tragedy, and the three women soon find themselves the targets of the hunt. What started as a simple getaway to recall old times is now a race for survival as three ordinary woman must find extraordinary strength in order to beat the odds against violence and the elements.

Also directed by Aselton and written by her husband Mark Duplass, BLACK ROCK, was filmed on location off the coast of Maine, where beautiful imagery is interplayed with a host of horrors as the three friends try to make it out alive.

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DEAD MAN’S BURDEN

Directed by: Jared Moshé
Written by: Jared Moshé
Starring: Claren Bown, David Call, Barlow Jacobs
Studio: Cinedigm
Release Date: Spring 2013
Genre: Western
Festivals: LAFF 2012

The year is 1870, and a fragmented America still strains to pick up the pieces from a savage Civil War. Martha (Clare Bowen, ABC’s “Nashville”) and her husband Heck (David Call, TINY FURNITURE) are living on a homestead Martha’s father purchased on the rural New Mexico frontier and struggle to make ends meet. When a mining company expresses interest in buying their land, Martha and Heck see their ticket to a better life.

Their hopeful plans are soon complicated when Martha’s oldest brother Wade (Barlow Jacobs, SHOTGUN STORIES)—whom she had thought killed during the war —returns to the family homestead after learning of their father’s death. A defector to the Union Army, Wade soon discovers that Martha is hiding secrets of her own. As the two siblings become reacquainted, torn between a desire to reconcile with the only family they have left and their clashing convictions, tension and suspicion continue to mount. Filmed on location in the rugged high desert of northern New Mexico, DEAD MAN’S BURDEN, shot in the style of a classic western, marks Jared Moshé’s directorial debut.

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SUN DON’T SHINE

Directed by: Amy Seimetz
Written by: Amy Seimetz
Starring: Kate Lyn Sheil, Kentucker Audley
Studio: Factory 25
Release Date: Spring 2013
Genre: Thriller
Festival: SXSW 2012

Written and directed by acclaimed actress/filmmaker Amy Seimetz (THE OFF HOURS, TINY FURNITURE), SUN DON’T SHINE follows Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and her boyfriend Leo (Kentucker Audley) on a tense and mysterious road trip through the desolate yet hauntingly beautiful landscape of central Florida. From the outset, the purpose of their journey is unclear, and the motivations behind their heated altercations and shady errands are hazy, but sporadic moments of tenderness illuminate the loving bond between the two that exists underneath their overt tensions. As the couple travels up the Gulf Coast past an endless panorama of mangrove fields, trailer parks, and cookie-cutter housing developments, the disturbing details of their excursion gradually begin to emerge, revealing Crystal’s sinister past and the couple’s troubling future. Filmed on location in the environs of Seimetz’s hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida, SUN DON’T SHINE is a subtly cryptic story driven by the powerful performances of its lead actors and its eerily poetic setting.

SUN DON’T SHINE received a 2012 Gotham Award nomination.

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THÉRÈSE DESQUEYROUX

Directed by: Claude Miller
Written by: Claude Miller & Natalie Carter, based on the novel by François Mauriac
Starring: Audrey Tautou
Studio: MPI Pictures
Release Date: Spring 2013
Genre: Drama
Festivals: Cannes 2012

François Mauriac’s legendary 1927 novel of French provincial life has been gloriously brought to the screen by the inestimable Claude Miller in his final film. Sumptuously photographed to capture the full beauty of the pine-forested Landes area in southwest France, THÉRÈSE DESQUEYROUX is a beautifully conceived drama of exquisite taste. Marvelously played by the luminous Audrey Tautou, Thérèse is a heroine hewn from the same stock as Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, suffocated by her provincial marriage.

Thérèse has married less for love than for convenience, but it is not long before the casual disinterestedness shown her by her arrogant husband, Bernard (Gilles Lellouche), sets her mind in motion. Life is easy at first, as Bernard’s pinewood estates keep them both in the lap of luxury. But when Thérèse’s best friend Anne (Anaïs Demoustier), who also happens to be Bernard’s younger sister, falls madly in love with a handsome young Portuguese man, Thérèse begins to see what she has been missing in her life. Corralled by Bernard’s family into persuading Anne to forego her planned nuptials, she begins to see first-hand the awesome power of passionate love, as Anne will go to any length to keep her lover by her side. Soon, Thérèse begins her own fight against the oppressive Desqueyroux family.

Miller makes the novel fully his own, floating his camera through the refined and cushioned rooms of the family’s estate and the magnificent outdoor vistas of the Landes countryside, capturing all the nuances of this battle of wills. But, finally, the film belongs to Tautou, who conveys all the inflections of hurt and pain, love and sorrow, demanded of her. After AMÉLIE, Tautou has found a role that does full justice to her talents.