Billy Kent’s HAIRBRAINED kicks off the 2013 Brooklyn Film Festival
Windmill Studios NYC, 287 Kent Ave.
indieScreen, 289 Kent Ave.
May 31 – June 9, full festival pass $100, four pack pass $30, individual screenings $12
www.brooklynfilmfestival.org
The Brooklyn Film Festival gets under way tonight, kicking off nine days of screenings and special events at Windmill Studios NYC and indieScreen in Williamsburg. The opening-night selection is the world premiere of Billy Kent’s Harebrained, a twisted college tale starring Alex Wolff, Julia Garner, Brendan Fraser, and Parker Posey. The festival comprises thirteen feature films and nearly one hundred shorts, including animation, experimental, and documentary works from twenty-two countries. The ninth annual KidsFilmFest will take place on June 1, while the BFF Exchange meet-and-greet is set for June 8, followed by the Brooklyn Meets Spain program, with a free 5:30 screening of Manuel H. Martín’s 30 Años de Oscuridad. Among the other feature films are Justin Reichman’s thriller A Wife Alone, with Genevieve Hudson-Price and Sean Patrick Reilly; Nathan Silver’s New York City–set Soft in the Head; Katarzyna Klimkiewicz’s post-9/11 love story, Flying Blind; and Arne Toonen’s crime tale, Black Out. Q&As with members of the cast and/or crew will follow many of the screenings; the free awards ceremony is scheduled for closing night at 10:00.
Set during the waning days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer is a taut, tense, if sometimes plodding thriller about loyalty and family. In 1973, young Collette McVeigh (Maria Laird) sends her baby brother, Sean (Ben Smyth), to do an errand she was asked to take care of, and she is filled with guilt when the boy is caught in the crossfire of an IRA shootout and killed. Twenty years later, Collette (Andrea Riseborough) is an IRA operative in the midst of placing a bomb in a train station. But after abandoning the plan, she is taken into custody, with MI5 agent Mac (Clive Owen) offering her a nearly impossible choice: spy on her IRA compatriots, including her two brothers, Gerry (Aidan Gillen) and Connor (Domhnall Gleeson), and get a new life with her son, Mark (Cathal Maguire), or face twenty-five years in prison. As IRA leader Kevin Mulville (David Wilmot) keeps a close watch on Collette, suspicious of her every action, her mother (Bríd Brennan) tries to keep the family together. Adapted by Tom Bradby from his novel, Shadow Dancer is highlighted by a strong central performance by Riseborough (W.E., Oblivion), who plays the trapped Collette with a mysterious intensity as she rarely does the obvious thing. Owen never really lets go as Mac, keeping the character too single-minded and direct, while a blond Gillian Anderson doesn’t have all that much to do as his boss, Kate Fletcher. But the film overcomes these minor flaws, as Marsh combines his history as both a fiction filmmaker (
