The 19th Tokyo International Film Festival came to a close this past Sunday, Oct. 29.
The winner of the festival’s top prize, the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix (worth US$100,000) was Michel Hazanavicius’s French box-office hit and Seattle Film Festival winner OSS 117 Le Caire nid d’espions / OSS 117, Cairo Nest of Spies, a comedy-cum-spy-thriller [...]
I’ve added the list of winners at this year’s Pusan International Film Festival, perhaps the world’s most important showcase for East Asian cinema.
The festival’s top winners were Heng Yang’s Betelut (China) and Chui Mui Tan’s Love Conquers All (Malaysia, see above photo), which tied for the New Currents Award for Best New Asian Film. Chui’s [...]
2006 Tokyo Film Festival Awards
2006 Tokyo Film Festival: October 21–29, 2006
2006 Tokyo Film Festival Winners - Article
Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix:
OSS 117 Le Caire nid d’espions / OSS 117, Cairo Nest of Spies by Michel Hazanavicius
Special Jury Prize:
Thirteen Princess Trees by Lu Yue
Award for Best Director:
Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris for Little Miss [...]
"Filming sex is fun and bringing joy and levity to other people is the biggest thing we can do in this life."
That’s Aaron Strickler, 36, one of the seven finalists at San Francisco’s Amateur Erotic Film Competition, which took place at the Castro Theatre last Thursday and at the Parkway Theater in Oakland on Friday [...]
I’ve finally added the list of winners at the 2006 edition of the Festival do Rio, the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival.
Curiously, the festival may be "international" when it comes to the screened films but it’s definitely "national" when giving out awards. With the exception of a FIPRESCI (International Film Critics) Prize for [...]
King and Queen rule the 2006 British Independent Film Awards nominations, which were announced on Wednesday, Oct. 25.
I couldn’t resist the pun, even though it’s not only bad but also inaccurate. In actuality, Shane Meadows’s This Is England, winner of the Special Jury Prize at this year’s RomeFilmFest, garnered 7 nods — one more than [...]
News on the 50th bfi/London Film Festival, via The [London] Independent:
"Tony Blair described Africa as being a stain on the conscience of the world’s wealthy nations. Chatting the next day over a coffee, [The Last King of Scotland director Kevin] Macdonald agreed that, "for whatever reason, Africa is more and more in people’s minds, because [...]
The Independent Feature Project’s 2006 Gotham Film Award nominees were announced this past Monday, Oct. 23. Among the films found in the Best Feature shortlist are three major surprises, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, (distributed by Warner Bros.), Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (distributed by Sony Pictures), and Todd Field’s Little Children (distributed by New Line [...]
The Departed, a generally well-made if overlong and laughably absurd police thriller, comes with a respected pedigree: It was directed by Martin Scorsese, and it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, and Los Angeles Film Critics Best Actress winner Vera Farmiga. And then there is multiple-award winner Jack Nicholson, the man who [...]
I tend to ignore top 100 film lists because they are usually made by people who know little about movies beyond Hollywood stuff made in the last 15 or 20 years. But the list of "100 scariest movies" compiled by the members of the Chicago Film Critics Association does include several oldies and even, gasp, [...]
Reeling: The Chicago Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival, the second-oldest gay-themed film festival in the United States, will be celebrating its 25th anniversary in November.
Reeling will open with what one publication has labeled "another significant milestone" in gay film history. That’s Phillip J. Bartell’s Eating Out Two: Sloppy Seconds, supposed to be the [...]
The 2006 Festival of Jewish Cinema, consisting of "contemporary films on Jewish themes from around the world," opens on Nov. 1 in Melbourne.
Among the festival’s entries are Brice Cauvin’s De particulier à particulier / Hotel Harabati, about a French couple (Laurent Lucas and Hélène Fillières) who find themselves involved in a possible Muslim terrorist plot [...]
9th British Independent Film Awards - 2006
The 9th British Independent Film Award nominees were announced on Oct. 25, 2006.
The 9th British Independent Film Award winners were announced at the Hammersmith Palais in West London, on Nov. 29, 2006.
British Independent Film Awards 2006 Nominations - Article
British Independent Film Awards 2006 Winners - Article
("*" denotes [...]
16th Gotham Awards - 2006
The 16th Gotham Award nominees were announced on Oct. 23, 2006.
The 16th Gotham Award winners were announced at Pier Sixty at Chelsea Piers, New York City, on Nov. 29, 2006.
Gotham Awards 2006 Nominations - Article
Gotham Awards 2006 Winners - Article
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
Ryan Gosling plays an [...]
Kirill Serebrennikov’s Izobrajaya Zhertvy / Playing the Victim, a modernized and darkly humorous adaptation of Hamlet starring Yuri Chursin and Anna Mikhalkova (Nikita Mikhalkov’s daughter and Andrei Konchalovsky’s niece), won the Best Film Award at the 1st edition of the RomeFilmFest this past Saturday, Oct. 21. "This film is a film for Russia and for [...]
Actress Jane Wyatt, best known for her idealized suburban mother in the 1950s television series Father Knows Best, died Friday, Oct. 20, at her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Bel Air. Wyatt was either 95 or 96, depending on the source. Several years ago, she had suffered — and recovered from — a [...]
In Cinematical, Jessica Barnes inquires, "So will boyscouts [sic] and DVD-sniffing dogs finally stamp out piracy?"
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the organization that represents the interests of the big Hollywood studios, has joined forces with the Boy Scouts of America to fight film piracy. As per Barnes’ article (which cites a Yahoo! Movies [...]
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica
Luchino Visconti’s 1957 film, Le Notti Bianche / White Nights, winner of the Silver Lion Award at that year’s Venice Film Festival, and adapted from a Fyodor Dostoevsky story of the same name, is not quite a great film — it lacks both great and new ideas. Even so, it is [...]
1st Rome Film Festival Awards - 2006
The 1st Rome Film Festival ran from Oct. 13-21, 2006.
The 1st Rome Film Festival awards were announced on Oct. 21, 2006.
RomeFilmFest 2006 Winners - Brief Article
Popular Jury Awards:
Best Film Award: Izobrajaya Zhertvy / Playing the Victim by Kirill Serebrennikov
Special Jury Prize: This Is England by Shane Meadows
Best [...]
Capsule Review: Running with Scissors
Problems abound in Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’s auto-biographical novel — from the cartoonish humor to an unappealing lead character overflowing with self-pity. A generally solid cast, however, prevents this comedy-drama from becoming a complete failure. Annette Bening, in particular, is outstanding as the poetess too immature and self-absorbed to [...]
Frank Sinatra will do anything to escape from Eleanor Parker’s over-the-top histrionics
Though hardly one of Otto Preminger’s better films, The Man with the Golden Arm is worth a look for two reasons: It’s quite likely the first major Hollywood motion picture — since the implementation of the moralistic Production Code in the mid-1930s — to [...]
Posted in Film, Film Awards on October 19th, 2006 4 Comments »
Fifty years after the creation of the Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award category, a record 61 countries have submitted films for consideration for the 79th Academy Awards. As per the Academy’s press release, Kazakhstan appears to be the sole newcomer. (Addendum: It isn’t. Kazakhstan submitted Ardak Amirkulov’s Gibel Otrara / The Fall of Otrar back [...]
Recommended Reading:
At Alternet, Sarah Posner offers a revealing look behind the making of the Biblical epic One Night with the King, released by the 20th Century-Fox subsidiary FoxFaith:
“Although the movie, a lavish production filmed on location in India and starring such well-known Hollywood entities as Omar Sharif and Peter O’Toole, may seem on the surface [...]
42nd Chicago International Film Festival Awards - Gold Hugo 2006
The 42nd Chicago International Film Festival ran from Oct. 5-19, 2006.
INTERNATIONAL FILM COMPETITION
The Gold Hugo – Best Film:
Fireworks Wednesday (Iran), by Asghar Farhadi
The Silver Hugo – Special Jury Prize:
Days of Glory (France/Algeria), directed by Rachid Bouchareb
The Silver Hugo:
Taxidermia (Hungary), by György Pálfi [...]
Through a black hole in the cosmic fabric, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jason Robards, Jack Warden, and Martin Balsam are able to watch primetime TV news from the year 2006. They can’t believe that the U.S. political scene could be even more dire in the early 21st century than it was in the early 1970s.
Some [...]
