Alternative Film Guide

Quote of the Day: "In the US, a Christian audience is making a documentary about penguins the biggest factual cinema release since Fahrenheit 9/11. Churches are block-booking seats for March of the Penguins, which is apparently a ‘condemnation of gay marriage’ and puts forward the case for ‘intelligent design,’ i.e., Creationism. To be honest, this [...]

This year’s Hollywood Film Festival will honor Charlize Theron with the "Hollywood Actress of the Year Award" for her performance in North Country and Joaquin Phoenix with the "Hollywood Actor of the Year Award" for his portrayal of singer Johnny Cash in Walk the Line.
Matthew Broderick and Susan Sarandon will receive the supporting awards [...]

Don Adams, the maladroit secret agent Maxwell Smart in the popular 1960s sitcom Get Smart, died on Sunday, September 25, at a Los Angeles hospital.
Although basically a television star, Adams also made a handful of (poorly received) feature films during his four-decade career, most notoriously The Nude Bomb opposite Sylvia Kristel in 1980.
Don [...]

To die young is a near-requirement for the legend-making machine. James Dean’s cult status was surely not hurt by the fact that he died at the age of 24 in a road accident in 1955.
Except for a handful of bit parts in the early 1950s, Dean cinematic legacy consists of a mere three films, [...]

53rd San Sebastian International Film Festival Awards - 2005
The 53rd San Sebastian International Film Festival was held between Sept. 15-24, 2005.
The winners at the 53rd San Sebastian International Film Festival were announced on Sept. 24, 2005.
 

 
Official Selection:
GOLDEN SHELL FOR BEST FILM to
STESTI (SOMETHING LIKE HAPPINESS) by Bohdan Sláma (Czech Republic-Germany)
SPECIAL JURY PRIZE to
ILUMINADOS POR [...]

Steve McQueen (1930–1980) was one of the top film stars of the 1960s and early 1970s. Though best remembered as a leading man of big and loud action movies such as The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), The Getaway (1972), and the hellish bore The Towering Inferno (1974), McQueen was at his best [...]

The Local reports that the Swedish Film Institute is celebrating Greta Garbo’s centenary with a retrospective of her films, including rare shorts in which the elusive star appeared long before her days in Hollywood.
(Note: the article erroneously states that the series encompasses all of Garbo’s work; that is not so, though the SFI will [...]

Toronto International Film Festival Awards - 2005
The 2005 Toronto International Film Festival was held between Sept. 8-17, 2005.
The winners at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival will be announced on Sept. 17, 2005.
 

People’s Choice Award: Tsotsi, by Gavin Hood

Discovery Award: Look Both Ways, by Sarah Watt

Best Canadian Feature Film: C.R.A.Z.Y., by [...]

Army Archerd reports in Daily Variety that actress Shirley Temple, 77, the star of myriad sugary films such as Now and Forever (1935) and The Little Princess (1939), will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild at the Guild’s 12th telecast on January 12, 2006.
Temple, still distressed over the August [...]

"We are defending our identity and our being in this place," screenwriter Yousef Ibrahim told Reuters after excerpts of his film, Hilm (A Dream), the first feature made in the United Arab Emirates, was shown to the media.
In Hilm, which is supposed to work as a metaphor for the current Emirati soul-searching, a group [...]

Long unavailable due to rights disputes, the 1954 airplane adventure drama The High and the Mighty has finally come out on DVD. A two-disc Collector’s Edition of The High and the Mighty was released on August 2 by Paramount Home Video.
Adapted by Ernest K. Gann from his own novel, The High and the Mighty [...]

Reza Mir-Karimi’s Khilli dors khilli nazdek / So Close, So Far, a tale of two Irans — one modern and secular, the other ancient and religious — has been chosen best Iranian film at the 9th Iran Cinema Celebration Awards.
Mir-Karimi also won the best director award, and the film’s star, Masud Rayegan, took best [...]

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, the story of two male sheepherders who fall madly in love, was the winner of the Golden Lion at the 62nd Venice Film Festival.
The competition’s early favorite, George Clooney’s politically-minded Good Night, and Good Luck, won two of the festival’s top awards: the Volpi Cup for Best Actor David Strathairn, [...]

At a Toronto International Film Festival press conference, Canadian director David Cronenberg explained that his latest film, A History of Violence, is not merely a critique of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
"You’re really talking about the human condition," Cronenberg asserted, "because there’s no country on Earth that wasn’t founded on violence done to somebody."*
In [...]

62nd Venice Film Festival Awards - 2005 Golden Lion
The 2005 Venice Film Festival will be held between Aug. 31-Sept. 10, 2005.
The 2005 Venice Film Festival winners were announced on Sept. 10, 2005.
Venice Film Festival 2005 Winners - Article
 

 
Golden Lion for Best Film: Brokeback Mountain by Ang Lee
Silver Lion for Best Director: Les Amants réguliers by [...]

The European Film Academy announced yesterday that Scottish actor Sean Connery will receive its Lifetime Achievement Award at this year`s European Film Awards in Berlin.
Previous EFA Lifetime Achievement Award winners include Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, French actress Jeanne Moreau, French director Claude Chabrol, Spanish director Carlos Saura, Irish actor Richard [...]

Can you feel that inner void that simply refuses to go away? Do you believe that life has no meaning or purpose? Are your relationships all falling apart? Do you find life an angst-ridden, insufferable bore? Ennui fans — the Los Angeles County Museum of Art awaits you . . .
LACMA is presenting "Modernist Master: [...]

Off Screen, a Dutch-Belgian production directed by Pieter Kuijpers has won the top prize at the 2005 Montreal World Film Festival.
Based on a real-life event in which an anti-widescreen-TV crusader took 18 hostages at an Amsterdam skyscraper in 2002, Off Screen stars Jeroen Krabbé and Montreal’s Best Actor winner Jan Decleir (the detached father [...]

"I knew that each year there are sharpshooters lying in wait. Those who come here in order to shoot down a certain type of cinema, especially Italian. But they are a minority, so let them talk nonsense for what interests me is that the film please the public. And I’m convinced that it will be [...]

Via AlertNet: A Reuters article by Mary Milliken discusses the new Argentinian film Iluminados por el fuego / Blessed by Fire, which depicts Argentina’s disastrous military campaign to take over the Falkland Islands (known in Argentina as Las Malvinas) from Britain in the early 1980s.
Directed and co-written by Tristán Bauer, and starring the excellent Gastón [...]

29th Montreal World Film Festival Awards - 2005 Grand Prix of the Americas
The 29th Montreal World Film Festival (Montreal Festival des Films du Monde) was held between Aug. 25-Sept. 5, 2005.
The winners at the 29th Montreal World Film Festival (Montreal Festival des Films du Monde) were announced on Sept. 5, 2005.
Montreal World Film Festival [...]

The film series "Malditos Filmes Brasileiros!" (Damned Brazilian Movies!) continues in September at the Casa França-Brasil in downtown Rio de Janeiro. The theme of the month is the Brazilian "nordestern," also known as the feijoada Western: shoot-em-up flicks shot (no pun intended) in the arid and lawless Brazilian Northeast, where men were born to kill [...]

While the Biennale is going at full (or at least semi-full) throttle in security-tight Venice, Los Angeles is currently offering its own lesser-known but surely no less fascinating — and considerably more relaxed — film festival. As per the description found on its website, Cinecon is a film convention-cum-festival where "cinephiles from across the nation [...]