Several weeks ago, I chatted with actor-director-screenwriter Guillaume Canet, 35, at a West Hollywood hotel where Canet was promoting his romantic thriller Ne le dis à personne / Tell No One, which opens in Los Angeles and New York City tomorrow.
Based on Harlan Coben’s bestseller, Canet’s accomplished and visually lush thriller follows pediatrician Alexandre Beck’s [...]
Tina Mascara and Guido Santi’s Chris & Don. A Love Story opened today in New York City and will be opening in Los Angeles at the Nuart in West LA on July 4.
Chris & Don chronicles the relationship between British writer Christopher Isherwood, whose The Berlin Stories inspired the musical Cabaret, and his American [...]
Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop, which opens today in Los Angeles, has received widespread praise since its premiere at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. The French daily Le Monde called it "the major revelation of the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight," while John Anderson remarked in The Washington Post that Bahrani "has created a not-to-miss gem [...]
Formerly known as Padre Nuestro (not to be confused with Rodrigo Sepúlveda’s Chilean drama of the same name), screenwriter-director Christopher Zalla’s debut feature Sangre de Mi Sangre ("Blood of My Blood") received the Grand Jury prize for best narrative feature at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. More than a year after its win, the Spanish-language [...]
"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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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, [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
As it says on the cover, Allan R. Ellenberger’s Celebrities in the 1930 Census (McFarland, 2008, US$49.95) is a compilation of household data — as collected by 1930 census takers — of more than 2,000 "U.S. actors, musicians, scientists, athletes, writers, politicians and other public figures." (The woman in the photo is aviatrix Amelia Earhart.)
The [...]
It’s Oscar time. What better way to celebrate the 80th Academy Awards than by having a q&a about the best actress Oscar winner …
… of 1931?
(Or rather, for the period 1930-31, as the Oscars in those days covered films released in the Los Angeles area from August 1 to July 31.)
And who was the best [...]
Directed by John Ealer and Laura Bialis (above, lower photo), View from the Bridge: Stories from Kosovo, described on the film’s official website as "the first documentary feature about post-war Kosovo" was recently screened at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
The bridge in question is located in the town of Mitrovica, which [...]
Joan Blondell, 1938. Photo by A. L. Schafer.
Joan Blondell. Those who have heard the name will most likely picture either a blowsy, older woman playing the worldwise but warm-hearted saloon owner in the late 1960s TV series Here Come the Brides, or a lively, fast-talking, no-nonsense, and (unconventionally) sexy gold digger in numerous Pre-Code Warner [...]
Rudolph Valentino romances Alice Terry in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, one of the biggest box-office hits of the silent era. Eighty-six years after its original release, Rex Ingram’s epic melodrama still impresses for its scope and the director’s visual flair.
At Falcon Lair, Donna Hill’s website devoted to Rudolph Valentino, the 1920s film icon [...]
Veteran author Anthony Slide has another book out, Incorrect Entertainment or Trash from the Past: A history of political incorrectness and bad taste in 20th century American popular culture (BearManor, 2007, paperback, US$19.95).
Lengthy title for a highly controversial subject matter. Chapters range from "This Race Business" and "Sex" to "Bodily Functions and Dysfunctions" and "Hollywood’s [...]
The Hollywood Book of Extravagance. How do you write something with that sort of title without falling into the trap of sensationalism or cheap journalism? And could you say something about the formatting of your text — the mini-bios divided into specific chapters — and what you wanted to accomplish with it?
To my mind [...]
Back in the late 1920s, Anita Page could never have dreamed that eight decades later she would be a celebrity of sorts: The Official Last Surviving Silent Film Star.
In truth, Anita Page was never a star in silent movies. She appeared on screen later in the decade, right at the time when the part-talkie [...]
Anita Page: Q&A with Author Allan Ellenberger - Part I
Anita Page and Bessie Love play two sisters who try their luck on Broadway — and who, while at it, fall in love with the same man.
Anita Page and Bessie Love played singing-and-dancing sisters in the blockbuster "The Broadway Melody," the first sound film and first [...]
I’ve already mentioned film historian Anthony Slide’s stunning new book Now Playing, which documents the work of artists who created movie posters for urban movie palaces and neighborhood theaters alike, from the silent era to the 1950s.
Tony has kindly agreed to answer a few questions about both his work on Now Playing and the [...]
The most famous — and most effective — sequence in Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 Academy Award-winning Cinema Paradiso is the film clip montage at the end.
In the 1950s, a small-town Catholic priest suffering from some serious sexual hangups and with way too much time — and power — in his hands had ordered that scenes [...]
"Promising careers that don’t pan out, I always want to find out what caused it," John O’Dowd told the Star Ledger. "Superstars [of today in particular] are written about all the time. I find that their [those whose careers were cut short due to tragedy or hardships] stories are more fascinating."
O’Dowd is the author of [...]
Some have called her the greatest movie star ever, but even if that’s a sort of exaggeration — how does one measure stardom-ness? — Joan Crawford most likely is the film performer who worked most assiduously and for the longest time on creating and maintaining the image of the movie star par excellence.
In fact, it’s [...]
I’ve known Tibor Szakaly for a couple of years. Each time I’d see him after French class at a language school in Beverly Hills, he would tell me about the making of his and William Fiala’s musical short Cubicle: The Musicle.
About a year later, Cubicle was screened for a group of Tibor’s and Fiala’s [...]
