Beyond the Hills – Trailer
BEYOND THE HILLS is the multi award-winning new film from Palme d’Or recipient, director Cristian Mungiu. Inspired by a case of alleged demonic possession that occurred in Romania’s Moldova region in 2005.
An interesting looking film, on very limited release at Cinema Nova & Dendy Cinemas Newtown from this Thursday.
Nastassja Kinski
Nastassja Kinski (born 24 January 1961) is an actress who has appeared in more than 60 films, in both her native Europe and the United States. Kinksi’s starring roles include her Golden Globe Award-winning portrayal of the title character in Tess and multi-award winner Paris, Texas, one of a number of films made with German director Wim Wenders. She has also starred in a remake of erotic horror classic Cat People.
Born in Berlin as Nastassja Aglaia Nakszynski, Kinski is the daughter of the German actor Klaus Kinski from his marriage to actress Ruth Brigitte Tocki. Her parents divorced in 1968. Kinski rarely saw her father after the age of 10, and she and her mother struggled financially. They eventually lived in a commune in Munich.
Her career began in Germany as a model, during which the German New Wave actress Lisa Kreuzer helped get her the role of the dumb Mignon in Wim Wenders film The Wrong Move. In 1976, while still a teenager, she had her first two major roles: firstly in the Wolfgang Petersen directed feature-length episode Reifezeuanis of German TV crime series Tatort; then in British Hammer Film Productions horror film To the Devil… a Daughter (1976). Directed by Peter Sykes and produced by Terra-Filmkunst, it is based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Wheatley, and stars Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Honor Blackman and Denholm Elliott.
She has stated that, as a child, she felt exploited by the industry, telling a journalist from W Magazine, “If I had had somebody to protect me or if I had felt more secure about myself, I would not have accepted certain things. Nudity things. And inside it was just tearing me apart.”
In 1978 Kinski starred in Italian romance Stay As You Are (Cosi come sei), which New Line Cinema released in the United States in December 1979, helping Kinski to get more recognition there. Time magazine wrote that she was “simply ravishing, genuinely sexy and high-spirited without being painfully aggressive about it.” Director Roman Polanski urged Kinski to study acting with Lee Strasberg in the United States and cast her in his film, Tess (1979).
In 1981 Richard Avedon photographed Kinski with a Burmese python coiled around her naked body.
In 1982 she starred in romantic musical One from the Heart and erotic horror movie Cat People (1982), a remake of the 1942 film of the same name which starred Simone Simon. Directed by Paul Schrader, it starred Kinski and Malcolm McDowall.
The Dudley Moore comedy Unfaithfully Yours and an adaptation of John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire followed in 1984. Then, Paris, Texas, her most acclaimed film to date, won the top award at the Cannes. The film focuses on an amnesiac (Harry Dean Stanton) who, after mysteriously wandering out of the desert, attempts to revive his life with his brother (Dean Stockwell) and seven-year-old son, and to track down his former wife (Kinski). At the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, the film unanimously won the Palme d’Or.
During this period Kinski split her time between Europe and the United States, making big-budget bomb Moon in the Gutter (1983), Harem (1985), Torrents of Spring (1989), Exposed (1983), Maria’s Lovers (1984) and Revolution (1985).
In One from the Heart, director Francis Ford Coppola brought Kinski to the U.S. to act as a “Felliniesque circus performer to represent the twinkling evanescence of Eros”, apparently… The film failed at the box office and was a major loss for Coppola’s new studio, Zoetrope Studios.
Other appearances include Terminal Velocity, One Night Stand, Somebody is Waiting Your Friends & Neighbors, John Landis’ Susan’s Plan, The Lost Son, and Inland Empire for David Lynch.
Terrence Malick
Terrence Frederick Malick (born November 30, 1943) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. In a career spanning over four decades, Malick has received consistent regard for his work, having to date directed only six feature films: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), The Tree of Life (2011), and the forthcoming To the Wonder (2012).
Malick was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director for The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life and Best Adapted Screenplay for The Thin Red Line, as well as winning the Golden Bear at the 49th Berlin International Film Festival for The Thin Red Lineand the Palme d’Or at the 64th Cannes Film Festival for The Tree of Life.
Notoriously private, details about Malick are difficult to come by, his birthplace could be either Ottawa, Illinois or Waco, Texas, depending on which information you choose to believe. He is the son of Irene and Emil A. Malick, a geologist. Malick had two younger brothers: Chris and Larry. Larry Malick was a guitarist who went to study in Spain with the legendary Segovia in the late 1960’s. In 1968, it is alleged that Larry intentionally broke his own hands due to pressure over his musical studies. Emil went to Spain to help Larry, but Larry died shortly after, apparently committing suicide. Themes revisited by Malick in 2011.
Malick studied philosophy at Harvard University, graduating in 1965. He went on to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar but left without earning a doctorate. Upon returning to the United States, Malick taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while freelancing as a journalist for Life, Newsweek and The New Yorker.
Malick’s start in film began after earning an Master of Fine Arts from the AFI Conservatory in 1969, writing and directing the short film Lanton Mills. At the AFI, he established contacts with longtime collaborator Jack Fisk, and agent Mike Medavoy, who procured for Malick freelance work revising scripts.
After one of his screenplays, Deadhead Miles, was made into what Paramount Pictures felt to be an unreleasable film, Malick decided to direct his own scripts. His first directorial work was the superlative Badlands (1973), an independent film starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as a young couple on a crime spree in the 1950’s. After a troubled production, Badlands drew raves at its premiere at the New York Film Festival, leading to Warner Bros. Pictures buying distribution rights for three times its budget.
Paramount Pictures produced Malick’s second film, Days of Heaven (1978), about a love triangle that develops in the farm country of the Texas Panhandle in the early 20th century. The film spent two years in post-production, during which Malick and his crew experimented with unconventional editing and voice-over techniques. Days of Heaven went on to win the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, as well as the prize for Best Director at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.
Following the release of Days of Heaven, Malick began developing a project for Paramount, titled Q, that explored the origins of life on earth. During pre-production, he suddenly moved to Paris and disappeared from public view. During this time, he wrote a number of screenplays, including The English Speaker; adaptations of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and Larry McMurtry’s The Desert Rose; a script about Jerry Lee Lewis; and continued work on the Q script. Malick’s work on Q eventually became the basis for his 2011 film The Tree of Life.
Twenty years after Days of Heaven, Malick returned to film directing in 1998 with The Thin Red Line (1998), a loose adaptation of the James Jones World War II novel of the same name, for which he gathered a large ensemble of famous stars. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and received critical acclaim.
After learning of Malick’s work on an article about Che Guevara during the 1960’s, Steven Soderbergh offered Malick the chance to write and direct a film about Guevara that he had been developing with Benicio del Toro. Malick accepted and produced a screenplay focused on Guevara’s failed revolution in Bolivia. After a year and a half, the financing had not come together entirely, and Malick was given the opportunity to direct The New World, another script he had begun developing in the 1970’s. Consequently, he left the Guevara project and Soderbergh went on to direct Che Parts 1 and 2.
The New World, which featured a romantic interpretation of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, was released in 2005. Over one million feet of film was shot for the film, and three different cuts of varying length were released. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, but received generally mixed reviews during its theatrical run, though it has since been hailed as one of the best films of the decade.
Malick’s fifth feature, The Tree of Life, was filmed in Smithville, Texas, and elsewhere during 2008. Starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, it is a family drama spanning multiple time periods and focuses on an individual’s reconciling love, mercy and beauty with the existence of sickness, suffering and death. It premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival where it won the coveted Palme d’Or.
Malick’s sixth feature, titled To the Wonder, premiered at the 2012 Venice Film Festival where it garnered mixed reviews.
Malick’s next two projects are Lawless and Knight of Cups. Lawless stars Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. Knight of Cups will star Bale, and will also feature Blanchett. The films are being shot back-to-back. In early 2012, the title “Lawless” was given to The Weinstein Company’s The Wettest County, leaving Malick’s Lawless untitled.
Malcolm McDowell
Malcolm McDowell (born 13 June 1943) is an English actor, whose career spans more than four decades. McDowell is known for his early roles in the controversial films if…, O Lucky Man!, A Clockwork Orange, and less favourably, Caligula. Since then, his versatility as an actor has led to varied roles in films and television series of different genres, including Tank Girl, Star Trek Generations, Gangster # 1, the TV serials Our Friends in the North, Entourage, and Heroes, and the 2007 remake of Halloween and its sequel.
McDowell was born Malcolm John Taylor in Horsforth, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, now a part of the City of Leeds, the son of Edna (née McDowell), and Charles Taylor. His family later moved to Bridlington, since his father was in the Royal Air Force. McDowell trained as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).
McDowell made his screen debut as school rebel Mick Travis in if… (1968) by British director Lindsay Anderson. If… satirises, and is famous for its depiction of a savage insurrection at an English public school, the film is associated with the 1960’s counter-culture movement because it was filmed by a long-standing counter-culture director at the time of the student uprisings in Paris in May 1968. It includes controversial statements, such as: “There’s no such thing as a wrong war. Violence and revolution are the only pure acts”. It features surrealist sequences throughout the film. Upon release in the UK, it received an X certificate. The film stars McDowell in his first appearance as Anderson’s “everyman” character Mick Travis.
The Mick Travis films are three films directed by British film director Lindsay Anderson and written by David Sherwin, featuring McDowell as Mick Travis, in which Travis features not so much as a single character with a character arc, but as an everyman character whose role changes according to the needs of the storyteller.
In if…, his first appearance (and McDowell’s film debut), Travis first appears as a disaffected public school boy boy whose anti-establishment attitude and experiences lead to armed insurrection at a public school. In O Lucky Man!, co-written by Sherwin and McDowell, Travis becomes a picaresque character, often compared to Voltaire’s ingénu character Candide, in a satirical drama that starts with Travis’s first job as a mobile coffee salesman and, after many adventures involving arms-sale scandals, experiments in human-animal genetics by the mad scientist Doctor Millar (played with relish by Graham Crowden), and a sojourn with the musician Alan Price, ends in his rebirth as a film star, thanks to a slap by a film director played in a cameo by Anderson.
In Britannia Hospital, Travis is a reporter attempting to make an investigative documentary about a hospital where Doctor Millar, the mad geneticist from O Lucky Man! is continuing his unspeakable experiments. if…. won the Palme d’Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. McDowell also made the incredible documentary Never Apologize (2007), a film of a one-man-show in which Malcolm McDowell talks about Lindsey Anderson.
His performance in if…. caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick, who cast McDowell as the lead in A Clockwork Orange, adapted from the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess. He won great acclaim (nominated for a Golden Globe in the category of Best Actor) as Alex, a young hoodlum brainwashed by a dystopian British government of the near future.
He made his Hollywood debut as H. G. Wells in Time After Time (1979). He often portrayed antagonists in the late 1970s and 1980s, including the title character in Caligula (1979). He later remarked upon his career playing film villains: “I suppose I’m primarily known for that but in fact, that would only be half of my career if I was to tot it all up.”
McDowell appeared in the 1982 remake of Cat People. He is also known in Star Trek circles as “the man who killed Captain Kirk” in the 1994 film Star Trek Generations, in which he played the mad scientist Dr. Tolian Soran.
In 1992, he played himself in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), in which he chastises protagonist Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) for badmouthing him behind his back. He co-starred with actress and artist Lori Petty in the action/science fiction/comedy film Tank Girl (1995).
He gave strong performances in Gangster No. 1 (2000), and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, (2003) in which he played a straight married man who rapes a young drug dealer to “teach him a lesson”. McDowell appeared as Dr. Sam Loomis in Rob Zombie’s remakes of Halloween and Halloween II (in 2007 and 2009, respectively).
McDowell is set to appear in the upcoming film Silent Hill: Revelation 3D as Leonard Wolf, an insane cult leader. In between all that, he has featured in countless TV series and B-Movies. However, looking at that list you can forget McDowell’s claim that villains only make up half of his career, it may be so, but those villain roles are unforgettable.
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