News

Sullivan Stapleton.s performance as a vicious thug in Cut Snake has been lauded after the world premiere of Tony Ayres. crime thriller at the Melbourne International Film Festival last Saturday.

In the 1970s-set film scripted by Blake Ayshford Stapleton.s character Pommie is an ex-crim who tracks down his former cellmate Sparra (Alex Russell).

While Sparra tries to go straight with his soon-to-be-wife Paula (Jessica de Gouw), who knows nothing of his shady past, Pommie sets out to lure him on a dangerous path.

.Cut Snake is reasonably engrossing thanks to its eye-candy cast of rising stars, notably a ferocious but emotionally exposed performance from Sullivan Stapleton,. declared The Hollywood Reporter.s David Rooney .

..For an emerging actor doing muscle movies like 300: Rise of an Empire, Stapleton, who first turned heads as a different kind of thug in Animal Kingdom, doesn't shrink from displays of the torn heart...

Here outside Zoom following Bmi’s annual seat-switching dinner are elusive rock icon Rodriguez and Malik Bendjelloul, the director of his doc, Searching for Sugar Man. At the dinner, I asked Bendjellaul whether he was a fan of Rodrgiuez’s before the film. No, he said. He was looking for a story and hear about the Rodriguez saga from a private detective. The film was acquired at Sundance by Sony Pictures Classics.

Left behind after the Sundance premiere of Exit to the Gift Shop was this Banksy artwork, nicely framed by the good folks in Park City. Caught checking out the artwork are writer/director James Ponsoldt (Smashed) and Rev. Megan Holloway, whose “Vocation of the Storyteller” appeared in our Fall issue.

Writer/director David Lowery, one of our 2011 “25 New Faces,” was at Sundance following the January Screewriter’s Lab. Here he is at the Producer’s Brunch.

The Film...

Five years after finishing his wonderfully wacked-out debut, The Guataealan Handshake, Todd Rohal, frustrated by the time it was taking to set up a new movie, jumpstarted a micro-budget comedy about a priest. Called The Catechism Cataclysm, the movie was made for $50,000, and it got into Sundance, playing in last year’s midnight section. IFC bought the film for its Midnight label, releasing it to a scant $897 on a single screen. Rohal didn’t sweat it; the movie did what it needed to do for him (read Megan Holloway’s consideration here), and he went on to his next film. And despite the tiny box office numbers, the movie got out there, influencing the right people. One of those people was Craig Zobel, whose own debut, Great World of Sound, premiered at Sundance in 2006. Like Rohal, he spent years chasing a bigger-budget film. When he saw The Catechism Cataclysm, as...