Alternative Film Guide

When not making movies, Indian film personalities seem to spend a lot of their time fighting one another in court.
Following the long soap opera revolving around allegations of bias and corruption at the National Film Awards, the Mumbai High Court has found the Film Federation of India’s (FFI) pick to represent the Indian film [...]

In the Toronto Globe and Mail, Marsha Lederman discusses Nick Wilson’s documentary The Prince of Pot: The US vs. Marc Emery.
Wilson’s documentary focuses on the U.S. government’s never-ending multibillion-dollar War on Drugs (the older sister of the equally ineffectual and wasteful War on Terror) and one of its targets, Canadian citizen Marc Emery, head of [...]

In addition to paying an homage to iconoclastic film director Samuel Fuller, Wim Wenders (who directed Fuller in four films) also plays with English-language semantics. Via The Guardian:
"Rereading [Fuller's novel] The Dark Page, I hear Sam’s voice, very clearly, as if he was talking to me, intense, excited, passionate, honest. I never met anybody else [...]

Actress Lois Maxwell, the devoted and perennially infatuated secretary Miss Moneypenny in a string of James Bond movies, died of cancer at the Fremantle Hospital in Perth, Western Australia, on Saturday, Sept. 29. She was 80.
Maxwell began playing Miss Moneypenny in 1962, in Sean Connery’s first James Bond movie, Dr. No. (She had been [...]

Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the Golden Shell for Best Film at this year’s edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Written by Yiyun Li from her own short story, Wang’s film depicts the difficult relationship between a Beijing widower and his recently divorced daughter living in the US. As the [...]

In Wired Magazine, Ted Greenwald interviews director Ridley Scott, who discusses his much cut and recut 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner. The film’s definitive, forever-and-ever director’s cut — appropriately renamed Blade Runner: The Final Cut — will be screened at the upcoming New York Film Festival:
"It’s been ongoing so long, it never went away. So [...]

The festival will be held in Abu Dhabi between Oct. 14-19, 2007. Synopses/info from the Middle East Film Festival press release.
 
Documentaries

HEAR AND NOW (USA) directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky. With Paul Taylor, Sally Taylor.
A documentary memoir following a filmmaker’s deaf parents as they receive a complex surgical implant that allows them to experience sound [...]

The Middle East International Film Festival, to be held in Abu Dhabi between Oct. 14-19, has announced its Official Competition line-up for the Black Pearl awards. Most of the films in competition were directed by new talent.
The film synopses/info below are from the MEIFF press release.
 
Fiction Competition:

BEN X (Belgium) directed by Nic Balthazar. [...]

Robert Benton talks about Robert Altman, who produced his 1977 detective comedy The Late Show, while being interviewed by Chuck Wilson for the LA Weekly. Benton’s Feast of Love opens today in the U.S.
"He was repped by [agent] Sam Cohn and I was too. I was asked to go to a screening of Nashville [...]

Director, screenwriter, and producer Costa-Gavras, 74, never one to shy away from inflammatory themes, will be honored with the second-ever Eisenstein Award handed out by the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
The Sept. 28 ceremony will launch a two-day Costa-Gavras mini-festival, with screenings of four of the director’s films: the Academy Award-winning [...]

Oh, shoot! Sissy Spacek tries to sneak into her high-school’s prom party disguised as Max Schreck in Nosferatu when she realizes she’s forgotten her fangs in the fridge.
 
Director Brian De Palma, whose Iraq war drama Redacted earned him the best director award at the 2007 Venice Film Festival, will be the special guest at the [...]

Golam Rabbany Biplob’s Swapnodanay / On the Wings of Dreams (above, top photo), which debuted at the Rotterdam Film Festival, has been chosen as Bangladesh’s submission in the foreign-language film category for the 80th Academy Awards.
The Bengali-language On the Wings of Dreams tells the story of a struggling medicine salesman (Mahmuduzzaman Babu) whose luck seems [...]

The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) has announced that Charles Durning, 84, will receive guild’s Life Achievement Award at the 14th SAG Awards, to be held on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008.
Durning, hardly a household name, is a somewhat curious choice, for the SAG Life Achievement Award — especially in the last few years — has usually [...]

Monday, October 1, 2007, is the deadline to submit entries in the Live Action Short Film, Animated Short Film, and Foreign Language Film categories for the 80th Academy Awards. Complete entries must arrive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by 5 p.m. that day.
As per the Academy’s press release, "in the short [...]

In the next installment of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ "Oscar’s Docs, Part Three: Academy Award-Winning Documentaries 1977–1988," Karl Hess: Toward Liberty and From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China will be screened on Monday, October 1, at 7:30 p.m. in the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood.
Filmmaker Murray Lerner will discuss [...]

No way to treat a neighbor. Michael Haneke’s 1997 psycho-thriller Funny Games.
 
In The New York Times, John Wray discusses Michael Haneke’s American remake of his 1997 crime thriller Funny Games:
"The premise of Funny Games is simple: a likable, prosperous, well-adjusted family — played, in the version to be released early next year, by Naomi Watts, [...]

Resident Evil: Extinction soared to the top of the North American box office this weekend with an estimated US$24 million.
Helmed by Russell Mulcahy, the third installment in the series based on the popular Capcom video game outperformed both opening weekend grosses of its predecessors. The first Resident Evil collected $17 million after opening [...]

"As an 18-year-old girl who lives in Iran today and who faces very specific ideological, political and social pressures, I have a lot to say … Even though my film was not made in Iran, it shows my desire to speak of collective suffering, in Iran as well as in Afghanistan."
That’s director Hana Makhmalbaf, whose [...]

Mime artist Marcel Marceau died in Paris on Saturday, Sept. 22, at the age of 84. The cause of death was not immediately known.
The Strasbourg-born Marceau’s most famous character was Bip, a melancholy clown with a limp red flower in his hat. According to reports on his death, the mime’s artistic inspirations were the [...]

Writer-director Adolfo Alix Jr.’s drama Donsol has been chosen as the Philippines’ entry in the best foreign-language film category for the 80th Academy Awards. Veteran film director Eddie Romero headed the selection committee.
Set in the fishing town of Donsol, known as a good spot for whale shark-watching, the plot revolves around the relationship that develops [...]

55th San Sebastian International Film Festival Awards - 2007
The 55th San Sebastian International Film Festival was held between Sept. 20-29, 2007.
The winners at the 55th San Sebastian International Film Festival were announced on Sept. 29, 2007.
San Sebastian Film Festival Awards 2007 Winners - Article
 

 
Official Selection
GOLDEN SHELL FOR BEST FILM: A Thousand Years [...]

En Passion / A Passion / The Passion of Anna (1969)
Direction and screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cast: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Erik Hell
 

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Ingmar Bergman’s 1969 drama En Passion / A Passion (in the U.S., mistitled as The Passion of Anna) is a great film — in fact, [...]

In the next installment of "Oscar’s Docs, Part Three: Academy Award-Winning Documentaries 1977–1988," The Flight of the Gossamer Condor, Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist, and Best Boy will be screened on Monday, September 24, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood.
The 1978 short subject [...]

 
Little Mary Sunshine 1915
Twin Kiddies 1916
A Sporting Chance 1919

Tol’able David 1921
The Seventh Day 1921
Romola 1924
Stella Dallas 1925
The Winning of Barbara Worth 1926
The Woman Disputed 1928 (w/ Sam Taylor)
Over the Hill 1931

State Fair 1933
Way Down East 1935
Ramona 1936
Lloyd’s of London 1936

In Old Chicago 1937

Seventh Heaven 1937

Alexander’s Ragtime Band 1938
Jesse James 1939

Stanley and Livingstone 1939
Little [...]

Opening Night Film
Eastern Promises David Cronenberg

Battle for Haditha Nick Broomfield

Buda az sharm foru rikht / Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame Hana Makhmalbaf

Ceot oi kap gei / Exodus Pang Ho-Cheung

Daisy Diamond Simon Staho

Emotional Arithmetic Paolo Barzman

Encarnación Anahí Berneri

Free Rainer - Dein Fernseher lügt / Reclaim Your Brain Hans Weingartner

Goong-nyeo / Shadows in the Palace [...]