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 [...]
IN COMPETITION
Laurent Cantet - Entre les murs / The Class
Nuri Bilge Ceylan - Three Monkeys
Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne -Le Silence de Lorna
Arnaud Desplechin - A Christmas Story
Clint Eastwood - Changeling
Atom Egoyan - Adoration
Ari Folman - Waltz with Bashir
Philippe Garrel - La Frontiere de l’Aube
Matteo Garrone - Gomorra
Charlie Kaufman -Synecdoche, New York
Eric Khoo - My Magic
Lucretia [...]
CANNES CLASSICS 2008
Synopses/intros from the Cannes Film Festival press release.
Main event: LOLA MONTÈS by Max Ophüls
The Technicolor restoration of LOLA MONTÈS, directed by Max Ophüls in 1955, is to have its world premiere, presented by the Cinémathèque française, on Saturday May 17th.
Documentaries about cinema
NO SUBTITLES NECESSARY: LASZLO & VILMOS (2008,105′, USA) by James Chressanthis. [...]
Geoffrey Macnab’s "The Day Cannes Burned," a highly entertaining look back at Cannes ‘68, in The Independent:
"Film-makers ‘occupied’ the festival’s Grande Salle, partly to prevent screenings and partly to hold a prolonged, open-ended debate. ‘Imagine a cinema about the size of a medium Odeon,’ the British journalist Peter Forster wrote of the scenes inside the [...]
"What we wanted to say is, if these people [Iranians, Muslims] scare you, look closer: They have parents, they have lovers, they have hope, they have stories." That’s filmmaker and cartoonist Marjane Satrapi, referring to Persepolis, at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
(Top photo: Brick Lane by Sarah Gavron. Right photo: Of Love and Eggs by [...]
Tribeca Film Festival Awards 2008
The Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature — Let the Right One In (Lat den rätte komma in), directed by Tomas Alfredson (Sweden).
Best New Narrative Filmmaker — My Marlon and Brando (Gitmek), directed by Hüseyin Karabey (Turkey, Netherlands, UK).
Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film — Thomas Turgoose and [...]
Celebrating Bette Davis‘ centennial, the Film Department of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting the series "Fasten Your Seat Belts: The Essential Bette Davis," which began on May 1, with the unveiling of a new US Postal Service stamp in the presence of Turner Classic Movies host Robert
Osborne and Davis’ personal [...]
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. [...]
Turin International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival Awards 2008
Turin International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival: April 17–25, 2008
Santiago Otheguy (above, right) directed and wrote (from a story he’d co-written with Juan Solanas) the Argentinian drama. La León, winner of the jury’s best film award at the 2008 Turin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Set in [...]
Ron Howard’s 1995 Best Picture nominee Apollo 13 will be the next film in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ ongoing "Great To Be Nominated" series. The sentimentalized tale of the failed 1970 lunar landing mission will screen on Monday, May 5, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.
Following the [...]
London’s BFI Southbank has been hosting an homage to Robert Donat, who died fifty years ago (on June 9, 1958) of a chronic asthma attack at the age of 53.
In spite of his best actor Oscar (for Goodbye Mr. Chips in 1939) and his starring in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935), Donat is all [...]
"Important international stars from the silent era of filmmaking are undeservedly forgotten today because of the unavailability of their motion pictures, which are often considered lost."
Thus begins the press release for the seventh "Meet the Makers: Silent Film Accompanists" series, which will attempt to rectify that problem by screening five little-seen star vehicles of the [...]
Savage Intruder (1970)
Direction and Screenplay: Donald H. Wolfe. Cast: Miriam Hopkins, John David Garfield (aka David Garfield), Gale Sondergaard, Florence Lake, Lester Matthews, Joe Besser, Virginia Wing, Riza Royce, Charles Martin, Minta Durfee
Savage Intruder was filmed in 1970 but (briefly) released in 1974, and is also known as either Hollywood Horror House (the video edition) [...]
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the 1994 Best Picture nominee (and, in my view, one of the most overrated movies of all time), will be screened in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ "Great To Be Nominated" series on Monday, April 28, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
[...]
Blonde Venus (1932)
Direction: Josef von Sternberg. Screenplay: Jules Furthman and S. K. Lauren. Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, Cary Grant, Dickie Moore, Gene Morgan, Rita La Roy, Sidney Toler, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Hattie McDaniel
Blonde Venus is my favorite of the Marlene Dietrich-Josef von Sternberg collaborations. This melodrama simply has it all.
The film begins with the [...]
2008 David di Donatello - Italian Academy Awards
The 2008 David di Donatello: films released between April 27, 2007, and March 7, 2008.
2008 David di Donatello nominations: March 20, 2008.
2008 David di Donatello winners: April 18, 2008.
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
best film / miglior film
Caos calmo, produced by Domenico Procacci, directed by Antonello Grimaldi [...]
Writer-director Jane Campion’s Gothic drama The Piano, the best of the 1993 Best Picture Oscar nominees and one of the greatest — and greatest-looking — films of the 1990s, will be screened as the first feature in the fifth and final season of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ "Great To Be Nominated" [...]
In Christophe Honoré’s Chansons d’Amour / Love Songs "a young threesome pace the streets of Paris, collars upturned, singing of love in this Umbrellas of Cherbourg-inspired musical-comedy-drama." In the cast: Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier, and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet.
"When Scot’s mother dies her brother, one half of a straight-laced gay couple, takes him in but no-one is [...]
"Three flatmates become suspicious of their tenant in Rent, No Utilities [45 min.], a stylish thriller in the tradition of Shallow Grave, while single people everywhere come under treat in Speed Dating [above, 30 min.]." Those are two medium-length films by Gregor Buchkremer.
In Nelson George’s Life Support, "Ana Wallace risks her own health to raise [...]
Screendaily reports that four documentaries scheduled for the 21st Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF), which kicked off on April 4, have been banned by local censors.
According to the report, two of the documentaries — Arab-American director Bassam Haddad’s Arabs and Terrorism, about opposing views on political terror, and Mano Khalil’s David the Tolhildan, which [...]
In Alfred Schirokauer and Reinhold Schünzel’s 1927 silent comedy Der Himmel auf Erden / Heaven on Earth, Schünzel plays a moralistic city councilor who "is forced by his brother’s will to take a legacy of 500,000 marks on condition that he takes over the running of notorious nightclub Heaven on Earth. Initial disdain gives way [...]
Described as a gay version of a John Hughes flick, Russell P. Marleau’s The Curiosity of Chance revolves around a new — and openly gay — kid at school, appropriately named Chance Marquis, who does his best to survive the usual bullies and the overall conformity. In the cast: Tad Hilgenbrink, Brett Chuckerman, and Aldevina [...]
While London’s Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is going on in full force, here’s a brief q&a (via e-mail) with Lisa Daniel, the director of another gay film festival elsewhere in the world, the Melbourne Queer Film Festival.
First held in 1991, the Melbourne Queer Film Festival is reportedly one of the longest-running of its kind. [...]
Fred Barney Taylor’s documentary Polymath, or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman is described as a "biography of the award-winning, highly acclaimed science fiction writer Samuel Delany, entangling literary criticism with tales of the author’s considerable sexual exploits."
Delany claims to have had sex with 50,000 men, even while referring to himself as [...]
To celebrate Bette Davis‘ centenary, Dr. Martin Shingler will give "an illustrated lecture on Bette’s movies and why gay men and lesbians love her so." (Talk about a sweeping generalization…)
Many consider Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager (1942) the best Bette Davis vehicle of her Warner Bros. years. I’m not one of those many. I find [...]
