Alternative Film Guide

John Horn talks about Michael Moore’s upcoming documentary, tentatively titled "While America Slept," in the Los Angeles Times:
"Even though he says the new film ‘isn’t about Bush,’ the president is clearly a central target.
"’He and his cronies and his supporters literally got away with murder,’ Moore says. But it is also obvious that the country’s [...]

James Mottram on Woody Allen in the [London] Times:
"This weekend Vicky Cristina Barcelona [above], the 38th film of Allen’s 42-year career, has its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, in an out-of-competition slot. The story of two American students on holiday in Spain, it stars three of Hollywood’s hottest current stars: the recent Oscar winner [...]

"Watching the film I want the audience to embrace the journey of being a girl. Everyone in the room has to identify [with] a fifteen-year-old teenage girl. That’s why there are no adults in the movie, nor boys."
That’s screenwriter-director Céline Sciamma, talking about her widely praised first film, Naissance des pieuvres / Water Lilies. Initially [...]

Laura Bialis‘ well-received documentary Refusenik chronicles the thirty-year grassroots movement to free Soviet Jews. (Read Ella Taylor’s positive — if sobering — review in The Village Voice.)
Refusenik is told through the eyes of the activists, among them those then living in the Soviet Union — some of whom were punished for their efforts. Much [...]

Andrew Collins Remembers David Lean in a lengthy piece in the London Observer/Guardian:
"If it’s David Lean, we must start with a bold, widescreen establishing shot that sets out our stall. A vast expanse of grey tarmac, viewed dramatically from above, bordered by asymmetric shadows and a single motorcycle. A blonde figure in grey jacket carefully [...]

Inspired by the "Red Roofs" segment from Dan Verete’s 2002 three-part Israeli drama Yellow Asphalt, which revolves around the lives of Bedouins in the Judean desert, the visually lush Before the Rains, which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, follows the self-destructive path of a British farmer intent on creating a "spice" road [...]

The 1994 Best Picture nominee Pulp Fiction screened as part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ "Great To Be Nominated" series on Monday, April 28, at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
Following the screening, production designer David Wasco, set decorator Sandy Reynolds-Wasco, costume designer Betsy Heimann, executive producer Richard N. [...]

Tom Hanks, who fell under the spell of 2001: A Space Odyssey way back when, introduced the 40th Anniversary screening of Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece this past Friday, April 25.
Others in attendance at the event, held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, were the film’s [...]

Céline Sciamma, the director of Naissance des pieuvres / Water Lilies, talking to Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net:
"I wanted to make a film for the biggest possible audience in Europe and perhaps beyond. The film itself reflects that as well, borrowing from two distinct traditions: the US teen movie and French adolescence dramas. The way [...]

Even though I’ve never been an Alfred Hitchcock fan, I do find the vast majority of his films at least watchable. A Hitchcock flick that I particularly like happens to be one of his least-renowned efforts, the 1944 adventure drama Lifeboat. So, it’s good to see that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [...]

I caught Jellyfish (Meduzot in Hebrew), which opens in New York tomorrow and in Los Angeles on April 25, at the 2007 AFI FEST.
What I liked best about this quirky look at several Tel Aviv denizens was the humorous, naturalistic touch of husband-and-wife team of writers-turned-filmmakers Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen (above).
Without any fanfare, [...]

Photos: © Joe Kohen / WireImage

Keith Richards, Variety editor Peter Bart, Martin Scorsese, CEO of Paramount Pictures Brad Grey, and Mick Jagger at the Daily Variety Gotham’s 10th Anniversary party on March 30, 2008, at Michael’s in New York City. Click on the photo to enlarge it.

Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger

Martin Scorsese [...]

In Strange Culture, which was released on DVD this past March 25, filmmaker Lynn Hershman-Leeson tackles the bizarre case of Steve Kurtz, an associate professor of art at SUNY/Buffalo and founding member of the award-winning art and theater collective Critical Art Ensemble, whose interactive projects include the examination of biotechnology and the issues surrounding it. [...]

Béla Tarr will not be attending tonight’s screening of The Man from London at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Béla Tarr retrospective, which began earlier this month, comes to a close this evening.
In Screen Daily, Jonathan Romney describes The Man from London as "a tour de force of camerawork, not only [...]

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil (1926)
 
Jack Neely’s "The Forgotten Director: Who was Clarence Brown?" at Metro Pulse:
"Dr. Gwenda Young, a film-studies professor at University College Cork, came across [Clarence] Brown by an unlikely route. Her Ph.D. thesis was about Jacques Tourneur, the French director of cult classics like Cat People [...]

Directed by George Clooney — in what looks like quite a change of pace from Good Night, and Good Luck., the romantic comedy Leatherheads stars Clooney, Renée Zellweger, and John Krasinski as the three sides of a romantic triangle set in the world of 1920s football. Hm… but if it’s 1920s football, why is Zellweger [...]

In the Washington Post, Desson Thomson’s Anthony Minghella appreciation, "Anthony Minghella, Bringing the Art House to the Mainstream":
"Minghella, famously bald, genial and perpetually clad in black, set his professional destiny with 1990’s critically lauded Truly Madly Deeply, a Ghost for the cinephile set, in which a bereaved wife (Juliet Stevenson) finds love after death with [...]

Anthony Minghella, who won an Oscar for directing The English Patient (above, 1996), died after suffering a brain hemorrhage earlier this morning at Charing Cross Hospital in London, where he had undergone an operation for cancer of the tonsils and neck. He was 54.
"It was a very hard job to get someone to give [...]

Ingmar Bergman (right) will be the subject of a weekend-long salute — with the screening of five of his Academy Award-nominated and winning films — beginning Friday, April 4, at 7 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood.
The opening night of "An Academy Salute to Ingmar Bergman" [...]

Edmund Goulding directs Joan Crawford in the MGM melodrama Sally, Irene and Mary (1925) at the beginning of their, respectively, directorial and acting careers. Photo: Matthew Kennedy Collection.
 
Even though the Academy Award-winning Grand Hotel (1932), the Bette Davis weepie Dark Victory (1939), and the Academy Award-nominated The Razor’s Edge (1946) are still well remembered, the [...]

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, to be held from April 3–6 in downtown Durham, N.C., has announced that the recipient of this year’s Career Award is filmmaker William Greaves.
The Career Award presentation will showcase Greaves’ first film, The First World Festival of Negro Arts, as well as a 20-minute section of his most [...]

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has just begun an homage to Hungarian director Béla Tarr, which runs until March 28. Titled "Reel Epics: The Films of Béla Tarr," the series is the first complete Los Angeles retrospective of the director’s work.
I’m unfamiliar with Tarr’s films — though I do recall that [...]

Dennis Lim in the New York Times:
"When referring to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, it is now — and has been for some time — customary to affix the phrase ‘world’s oldest active filmmaker.’ The operative word is ‘active.’ Mr. Oliveira, who turns 100 in December, has made at least one movie a year [...]

Oscar 2008: Backstage Photos
Photos: Matt Petit / © A.M.P.A.S.
Oscar 2008
Oscar 2008 ceremony
Click on the images to enlarge them.

Ethan Coen, Martin Scorsese, Joel Coen

Steve Carell, Brad Bird, Anne Hathaway

Marion Cotillard

Daniel Day-Lewis

Jan Archibald, Didier Lavergne - Best Makeup Oscar winners

Christopher Rouse - Best Film Editing Oscar winner

Dario Marianelli - Best Original Score Oscar winner

Daniel Day-Lewis, [...]

The 80th Academy Awards‘ Foreign Language Film Award Symposium was held yesterday, February 23, 2008, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
All five directors of this year’s nominated films were present: Joseph Cedar (Beaufort, Israel); Nikita Mikhalkov (12, Russia); Andrzej Wajda (Katyn, Poland); Sergei Bodrov (Mongol, Kazakhstan); [...]