Alternative Film Guide

World Cinema Clips: Writer-director Carlos Reygadas‘ Stellet licht / Silent Night deals with the conflicts faced by a devout married Mennonite after he falls in love with another woman.
Stellet licht was one of the many acclaimed films that I missed at the 2007 AFI FEST in Los Angeles. The film shared the Cannes Film Festival’s [...]

 
Technorati Tags: Tito Guizar, centennial tribute, Million Dollar Theater
 
Tito Guízar Centennial Tribute Tonight
Charlton Heston
JELLYFISH: Q&A with Etgar Keret
STRANGE CULTURE: Q&A with Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Steve Kurtz, and Lucia Sommer
Budd Schulberg, David Chase Writers Guild Salute
Clarence Brown, Forgotten Film Director
Paul Scofield
Arthur C. Clarke and the Making of 2001
Anthony Minghella Appreciation in the WASHINGTON POST
Ramon [...]

The Cervantes Center of Arts & Letters will celebrate the birth centennial of Mexican actor-singer superstar Tito Guízar (1908–1999) with a screening of the 1936 cowboy musical ("charro") Alla en el rancho grande / Over at the Big Ranch this evening at 7pm at USC’s Leavey Library Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. Free admission. (Parking [...]

2007 Ariel Awards - Mexican Academy Awards
2007 Ariel nominations: February 21, 2008
2007 Ariel winners: Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City on March 25, 2008
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
 

Writer-director Carlos Reygadas‘ drama Stellet licht / Luz silenciosa was the big winner at the 50th Ariel Awards, taking home statuettes for best film, [...]

El Laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Direction and screenplay: Guillermo del Toro. Cast: Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones, Ariadna Gil, Álex Angulo, Manolo Solo
 

OFELIA’S ADVENTURES IN WEIRDLAND
This review contains spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you expect to get laid after this screening," filmmaker Guillermo del Toro told the midnight [...]

Guillermo del Toro’s dark fairy-tale El Laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth was the big winner at the Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ 49th Ariel Awards ceremony held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City on Mar. 20.
Set in the 1940s, the Mexican-Spanish co-production about a young girl’s entry into [...]

2005 documentary short subject Academy Award nominee The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club, and the documentary feature KordaVision will be screened at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 28, as the next installment in the 2006–2007 Contemporary Documentaries series at the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. The series is [...]

The Cervantes Center of Arts & Letters in Los Angeles will be celebrating the birth centennial anniversary of actor Cesar Romero with a screening of the 1954 biopic La Rosa blanca / The White Rose, accompanied by Romero’s last filmed interview. The tribute will take place on Thursday, Feb. 15, at 6:30p.m. at the University [...]

Perhaps there’s something I’m missing here, but the Orange British Academy of Film and Television Arts has decided that Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland is the outstanding British film of 2006, coming out ahead of United 93, Notes on a Scandal, Casino Royale, and Stephen Frears’s The Queen. Yet, that very same Orange [...]

Here’s another belated awards-related post, this time on the Spanish Academy’s Goya Awards, which were presented on Jan. 28.
Although Volver seemed like an easy pick, it actually faced stiff competition from both Agustín Díaz-Yanes’s period adventure piece Alatriste and Guillermo del Toro’s dark fantasy El Laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth.
Ultimately, Volver took home five [...]

Penélope Cruz told Academy members to vote for her — or else. Pedro Almodóvar should have applied the same vote-getting technique.
 
"There’s so many Mexicans!" exclaimed Mexican actress Salma Hayek, too excited to conjugate her verbs properly, upon announcing — along with Academy president Sid Ganis — some of the nominees for the 79th Academy Awards.
Indeed. [...]

The Palm Springs International Film Festival announced its jury and audience winners this past Sunday, Jan. 14.
The New Voices New Visions Grand Jury Prize was given to Rafi Pitts’s Iranian drama Zemestan / It’s Winter, the story of a woman left behind in a small Iranian town after her husband travels abroad looking for work.

The [...]

Globers and Globettes Strike Again
Everything — at least as far as the winners were concerned — went according to plan at the 2007 Golden Globe awards ceremony. That is, until the very last winner of the evening was announced: Babel. Babel??
Set in multiple countries, in multiple time frames, and with dialogue in multiple languages, Babel [...]

Though usually more open to non-English-language films than the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Orange British Academy of Film and Television Arts failed to place either Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver or Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth as one (or two) of its best film or best director [...]

The National Society of Film Critics (NSFC), composed of 58 U.S. critics mostly based in New York City and Los Angeles, has chosen Guillermo del Toro’s Spanish-language dark fantasy El Laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth as the best film of 2006. Curiously, the two runners-up were also shot in a language other than English: [...]

Via Adam Dawtrey’s article "’Casino,’ ‘Queen’ lead pack" in Variety:
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has announced the longlists for the 2006 Bafta Awards. The lists consist of 15 titles per category picked after the first round of BAFTA voting.
Casino Royale and The Queen, the two most commercially successful British [...]

The American Cinematheque and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will present all five foreign-language films nominated for the 2006 Golden Globe Awards at The Aero’s Max Palevsky Theatre in Santa Monica.
The five nominees are: Apocalypto (U.S.), El Laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth (Spain / Mexico / U.S.), Das Leben der Anderen / The Lives [...]

There were few major surprises in the Online Film Critics Society’s list of 2006 nominees, though Guillermo del Toro’s haunting and ultra-violent "fairy tale for adults," El Laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth, scored remarkably well: 6 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Foreign Film, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay (also del Toro). (Unfortunately, there [...]

Agustín Díaz Yanes’s 17th-century tale of a Spanish soldier turned mercenary, Alatriste, and Pedro Almodóvar’s story of the women of La Mancha, Volver, dominated the Spanish Film Academy’s XXI Goya Award nominations announced yesterday, Dec. 18, by actors Pilar López de Ayala and Juan José Ballesta. Alatriste, the most expensive Spanish film ever made (€24 [...]

I’ve finally posted the list of winners at the 10th Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival. The award winners were announced by Edward James Olmos and Marlene Dermer this past Oct. 16.
For a variety of reasons, I skipped this year’s edition of the Latino festival. After the fact, I was sorry I did.
Among [...]

A Mexican production and a Mexican-Bolivian co-production were the two top winners at the 32nd Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival, which came to a close at a ceremony in the town of Huelva in southwestern Spain on Nov. 25.
Francisco Vargas Quevedo’s feature-film debut, El violín / The Violin, won the Colón de Oro for Best Feature, [...]

With five nods each, the crowd-pleasing dysfunctional family comedy Little Miss Sunshine (US$59 million at the U.S./Canada box office) and the socio-psychological drama Half Nelson ($2.7 million at the U.S./Canada box office) led the pack of the 2006 nominees for the Independent Spirit Awards. In addition to its five nods, Half Nelson was listed (along [...]

At one point known as Mexico’s Sweetheart, Lupita Tovar had a surprisingly brief film career. Apart from a handful of films in the early 1930s, including the Spanish version of Dracula and the Mexican classic Santa, Tovar worked only sporadically in motion pictures.
In Hollywood, she either played in Spanish-language versions of American films, or [...]

Recommended reading:
"Will an Oscar run end the long artistic alliance between Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his countryman, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga? Their brilliant collaborations have thus far given us the intricate and intense dramas Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel, which hits theaters Oct. 27. Along the way, they have become one of the [...]

Rio de Janeiro is currently hosting the 8th Rio Film Festival (site in Portuguese), reportedly the largest film event in Latin America, with screenings of more than 300 films from 64 countries.
The festival — which this year has focused on Canadian cinema — ends its run tomorrow, though beginning Friday, it unofficially continues with screenings [...]