A risky experiment with a striking payoff, “Ted K” is an impressionistic attempt to personalize the most unrelatable experience imaginable: life as a killer.
Prolific serial killers are often introduced with media-minded nicknames, making it easier for us simultaneously to separate from them and to connect with them. We look upon them as Other, but remain interested, reading and worrying and wondering until — and well after — they’re caught.
The Unabomber is among the most notable examples, with 26 victims spanning nearly two decades. His incomprehensible violence spurred the largest manhunt in FBI history, and as it went on, we all kept reading, and worrying, and wondering.
Director Tony Stone (“Peter and the Farm”) and his cowriters, John Rosenthal and Gaddy Davis, strip most of the rest away in an attempt to address the incomprehensibility. Certainly, the film’s generically ordinary title is no coincidence. Stone wants us to see Ted...
Prolific serial killers are often introduced with media-minded nicknames, making it easier for us simultaneously to separate from them and to connect with them. We look upon them as Other, but remain interested, reading and worrying and wondering until — and well after — they’re caught.
The Unabomber is among the most notable examples, with 26 victims spanning nearly two decades. His incomprehensible violence spurred the largest manhunt in FBI history, and as it went on, we all kept reading, and worrying, and wondering.
Director Tony Stone (“Peter and the Farm”) and his cowriters, John Rosenthal and Gaddy Davis, strip most of the rest away in an attempt to address the incomprehensibility. Certainly, the film’s generically ordinary title is no coincidence. Stone wants us to see Ted...
- 2/16/2022
- by Elizabeth Weitzman
- The Wrap
For a criminal who revealed his agenda in exhaustively detailed black-and-white — via his famous essay “Industrial Society and the Future,” published in The Washington Post months ahead of his 1996 capture — Ted Kaczynski remains a somewhat unreadable figure. The domestic terrorist better known as the Unabomber killed three people and injured two dozen more in a national bombing campaign aimed at protesting man’s environmental destruction and technological dependence. Yet his manifesto shed little light on who he actually was, or how a mild-mannered math professor from Chicago grew into an eccentric, isolated survivalist and, eventually, FBI most-wanted material. That makes him a subject both fascinating and oddly resistant to dramatization, though that hasn’t stopped writers and filmmakers from trying over the years.
The latest such effort, Tony Stone’s growlingly moody “Ted K,” is a biopic that effectively honors its subject with its opaque severity. There’s little attempt...
The latest such effort, Tony Stone’s growlingly moody “Ted K,” is a biopic that effectively honors its subject with its opaque severity. There’s little attempt...
- 3/6/2021
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
Many movies endeavor to get inside the mind of a maniac, but “Ted K” goes straight to the source. draws on some 25,000 words of rambling diary entries from the lonely cabin-dweller, who raged against society from his secluded Montana cabin until his 1996 arrest. With a harrowing, disheveled Sharlto Copley at its center, the haunting, ambling narrative spends its entire unnerving runtime trapped inside Kaczynski’s head, where his disdain for technological progress and environmental destruction builds from small-scale sabotage to some of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.
Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski’s homemade bombs resulted in an assortment of horrible injuries and three deaths, with his targets ranging from an airline executive to a lobbyist. There’s no excuse for this behavior, and though the movie doesn’t try to make one, it gets close to his mindset. Like “Joker” without the exuberant blockbuster sheen, “Ted...
Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski’s homemade bombs resulted in an assortment of horrible injuries and three deaths, with his targets ranging from an airline executive to a lobbyist. There’s no excuse for this behavior, and though the movie doesn’t try to make one, it gets close to his mindset. Like “Joker” without the exuberant blockbuster sheen, “Ted...
- 3/2/2021
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
‘Ted K’: HanWay & Cinetic Board Berlin Film Festival Drama About Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, First Look
HanWay Films and Cinetic have boarded Berlin Film Festival entry Ted K for international and North American sales, respectively. The companies have also released a first look image.
Writer-director Tony Stone’s true crime drama, starring Sharlto Copley (District 9) as the ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski, will play in the Panorama section of this year’s largely digital Berlinale.
The film tracks a period in the life of Kaczynski, more widely known as the Unabomber, and draws from his personal diaries and accounts from those who knew him during his life in hiding in a simple wooden cabin in the mountains of Montana.
According to the producers, a number of the film’s supporting cast are non-professional locals, some of whom knew Kaczynski, and the production worked closely with his former neighbors and employers to corroborate research and paint an authentic picture of the man.
Stone built a recreation of Kaczynski...
Writer-director Tony Stone’s true crime drama, starring Sharlto Copley (District 9) as the ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski, will play in the Panorama section of this year’s largely digital Berlinale.
The film tracks a period in the life of Kaczynski, more widely known as the Unabomber, and draws from his personal diaries and accounts from those who knew him during his life in hiding in a simple wooden cabin in the mountains of Montana.
According to the producers, a number of the film’s supporting cast are non-professional locals, some of whom knew Kaczynski, and the production worked closely with his former neighbors and employers to corroborate research and paint an authentic picture of the man.
Stone built a recreation of Kaczynski...
- 2/23/2021
- by Andreas Wiseman
- Deadline Film + TV
“I’m told I was a violent child,” Douglas Armstrong, better known as “Arm,” says in the opening voiceover of “The Shadow of Violence.” Played by Cosmo Jarvis, he’s a visibly haunted former boxer with a tragic backstory that’s led him to a new life of crime. “Don’t go thinking all violence is the way of hateful men. Sometimes it’s just the way a fellow makes sense of this world,” he says. But inside Arm there’s an ooey-gooey center of sweetness that is slowly unraveled over the course of this lean, mean, and brutal Irish crime fable from director Nick Rowland, a first-time feature filmmaker making his elegant debut after a career in TV and short films.
. Not to mention a powerful vehicle for its two leads, Jarvis and Barry Keoghan.
“The Shadow of Violence” was previously titled “Calm with Horses,” in reference to Arm’s equine-whispering abilities,...
. Not to mention a powerful vehicle for its two leads, Jarvis and Barry Keoghan.
“The Shadow of Violence” was previously titled “Calm with Horses,” in reference to Arm’s equine-whispering abilities,...
- 7/31/2020
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
Films set in West Ireland often have a tourist board-certified feel, selling the scenery and quaintness in ways designed to make you ring up your travel agent (if those still existed). But no one will be booking their next vacay on the basis of “Calm With Horses,” which sports some pleasant landscapes but populates them with characters you’d wisely cross the entire island to avoid.
Nick Rowland’s first feature is . While perhaps not distinctive thematically or stylistically enough to score much theatrical export interest, this is an engrossing tale that should do reasonably well in home-format placements, and give a definite leg up to the director and his principal collaborators.
Drawn from a novella by Colin Barrett (published in the collection “Young Skins”), Joe Murtagh’s screenplay begins with thick-necked, hulking Arm (Cosmo Jarvis of “Lady Macbeth”) being dispatched to pummel senseless a codger who’s gotten on...
Nick Rowland’s first feature is . While perhaps not distinctive thematically or stylistically enough to score much theatrical export interest, this is an engrossing tale that should do reasonably well in home-format placements, and give a definite leg up to the director and his principal collaborators.
Drawn from a novella by Colin Barrett (published in the collection “Young Skins”), Joe Murtagh’s screenplay begins with thick-necked, hulking Arm (Cosmo Jarvis of “Lady Macbeth”) being dispatched to pummel senseless a codger who’s gotten on...
- 9/11/2019
- by Dennis Harvey
- Variety Film + TV
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