It’s hard to believe but summer is nearly over and not only that, the fall festival season kicks off in earnest in just a couple short weeks when the movie world will descend upon Venice. Every picture will be jostling for attention and in the lead up to the festivities posters for two festival players have arrived, along with a one sheet for a short film that has already started on the circuit.
Kicking things off, David Cronenberg‘s highly anticipated “A Dangerous Method” gets a less-than-exciting poster seemingly cobbled together to get it out in time for its Venice Film Festival premiere. It’s a pretty crude piece of work, slapping the big heads of the leads — Viggo Mortensen, Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender — onto a bland background. Thankfully, the film itself is much more promising, as it centers on the relationship between Carl Jung (Fassbender) and Russian-Jewish patient Sabina Spielrein (Knightley) that turns sexual, ultimately causing a rift between Jung and his mentor Sigmund Freud (Mortensen), but also catalyzes strong findings in regards to Jungian psychoanalysis. So yeah, this is going to be a lot of psych-speak and spankings, at least if the trailer is anything to go by. The film hits Venice, TIFF and then a theater near you later this year.
It was five years between “Palindromes” and last year’s “Life During Wartime,” but Todd Solondz is back and seems to be working at a faster clip than ever, with his next effort “Dark Horse” wrapped up and ready to be shown off to the world. The very…pink…teaser poster has hit, offering a curious if not completely enigmatic peek at the film. Though led by big names Christopher Walken, Mia Farrow and Selma Blair, the story is actually put into motion by Jordan Gelber, a relatively-unknown character actor, who plays a thirtysomething man still living with his parents (Walken and Farrow), who seeks out a relationship with a woman in a similar state of arrested development (Blair) in an attempt to shed his label as the dark horse of the family. Justin Bartha, Zachary Booth, Aasif Mandvi and Donna Murphy round out the cast. No distributor has picked up the film just yet, but IFC will likely be sniffing around once again if word is positive. It hits TIFF next month.
Finally, Terry Gilliam‘s latest, a short film for a pasta company entitled “The Wholly Family,” has a very Gilliam-esque (and kind of terribly Photoshopped) poster. The pic has already unspooled internationally, playing the Umbria and Ischia film festivals, but it is expected to crop up on the fall circuit on this side of the ocean, though there’s been no word just yet. Anyway, the project stars a bunch of people you never heard of — Cristiana Capotondi, Douglas Dean, Nicolas Connolly and Sergio Solli — in a whimsical, Fellini-esque tale (of course) about an American family’s adventure in the streets of Naples. No word yet on how it might roll out here, but we’d guess unless you catch it at a festival, you will probably wind up watching it online or on DVD. [RecentMoviePosters]
