Contact Help Wanted

Cannes 2009: Heath Ledger in THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian:
"Heath Ledger takes a poignant final bow in Terry Gilliam’s loopy, sweet-natured but madly self-indulgent fantasia The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, showing here at the Cannes film festival out of competition. Halfway through shooting, Ledger had made a desperately sad early exit, so the director ingeniously re-invented his character as a series of personae. Jude Law, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp gamely stepped into the breach.
…
"When Gilliam shoots off into his surreal wonderland, his film has a kind of helium-filled jollity and spectacle. … But the film’s convoluted curlicues are tiring, insisting too loudly on how ‘imaginative’ everything is. And when it descends into the real world – Lucy [...]

Sally Potter’s RAGE Multi-Platform Release

Judi Dench, Jude Law (as a female top model), Riz Ahmed

In conjunction with its traditional media release worldwide, Sally Potter’s Rage will be released — as a series of episodes — by web TV service Babelgum online and via mobile through the fall/winter of 2009.
Starring Simon Abkarian, Patrick J. Adams, Riz Ahmed, Bob Balaban, Adriana Barraza, Steve Buscemi, Jakob Cedergren, Lily Cole, Judi Dench, Eddie Izzard, Jude Law, John Leguizamo, David Oyelowo, and Dianne Wiest, Rage premiered at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival.
The film’s setting is a New York fashion house, where a young blogger shoots behind-the-scenes interviews on his cell-phone with an eclectic group of people, including a celebrity supermodel, a seamstress, a [...]

THE AVIATOR Screening

Martin Scorsese’s 2004 Best Picture nominee The Aviator is the next feature in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ "Great To Be Nominated" series. The handsome but vapid Howard Hughes biopic will be screened on Monday, July 28, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
Following the screening, cast members Alec Baldwin, Jacob Davich, J.C. Mackenzie, and Amy Sloan, production sound mixer Petur Hliddal, special effects supervisor R. Bruce Steinheimer, and miniature effects supervisor Matthew Gratzner will take part in a discussion about the film.
The US$100-million-plus The Aviator wasn’t quite the hoped-for critical and box-office hit, though the biopic won numerous accolades and did good business thanks to the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio [...]

César Awards 2007: Michèle Morgan Homage

César 2007 Winners: Part I
In spite of its nine nods, Days of Glory was another sentimental favorite that failed to receive much love from French Academy members. The war drama won only one César — for best original screenplay (Rachid Bouchareb and Olivier Lorelle). Days of Glory, about North African soldiers who fought for France during World War II, is up for a best foreign-language film Oscar. In addition, the war drama won an ensemble best actor award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Karl Zéro and Michel Royer’s Dans la peau de Jacques Chirac / Inside the Skin of Jacques Chirac, a mockumentary about the opportunistic French president and his four-decade political life, became the first documentary feature to win [...]

Best Films – 2002

A man is dead. Who among the greedy, ruthless, amoral singing-and-dancing suspects stuck in the snowbound countryside mansion has done it? 8 women is an acquired taste, bien sûr. What seems silly the first time around becomes increasingly wittier and funnier — though no less bizarre — with each repeated viewing. Beautifully shot by Jeanne Lapoirie and chock-full of bitingly sardonic lines and situations (adapted by director François Ozon and Marina de Van, from Robert Thomas’ play), this murder musical is dotted with 8 of the brightest stars of the French cinema of the last 7 (!) decades.
More than seventy years after her film début, Danielle Darrieux, in full form both as an actress and as a singer, joins [...]

Best Films – 2001

 
FILM

Gosford Park
d: Robert Altman; scr: Julian Fellowes
Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
d: Ashutosh Gowariker; scr:
Mulholland Dr.
d, scr: David Lynch
 
CHECK THESE OUT
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
d: Woody Allen
Monster’s Ball)
d: Marc Forster; scr:
No Man’s Land
d: Danis Tanovic; scr:
ACTOR
Woody Allen (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion)
Gael García Bernal (Y tu mamá también / And Your Mother Too)
Rene Bitorajac (No Man’s Land)
Ricardo Darín (El Hijo de la novia / Son of the Bride)
Ethan Hawke (Training Day)
Diego Luna (Y tu mamá también)
Ewan McGregor (Moulin Rouge!)
Haley Joel Osment (A.I.: Artificial Intelligence)
Sean Penn (I Am Sam)
ACTRESS
Isabelle Huppert (La Pianiste / The Piano Teacher)
Juliane Köhler (Nirgendwo in Afrika / Nowhere in Africa)
Audrey Tautou (Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain / Amelie)
Maribel [...]

ALFIE – Jude Law, Susan Sarandon

Alfie (2004)
Direction: Charles Shyer
Screenplay: Elaine Pope and Charles Shyer; from Bill Naughton’s 1964 play and 1966 screenplay, which were based on Naughton’s 1962 radio play Alfie Elkins and His Little Life
Cast: Jude Law, Susan Sarandon, Marisa Tomei, Jane Krakowski, Omar Epps, Sienna Miller, Nia Long
 

Jude Law in Alfie
 

A major financial flop that received — at best — mixed reviews, Charles Shyer’s Alfie remake deserved better. This dramatic comedy about a thirty-something supreme narcissist who must shag every good-looking woman in sight until he is taught a Lesson is no worse than other trendy, moralizing films like the well-received About a Boy and Bridget Jones’ Diary. In fact, Alfie is actually better than these two and than most of the product [...]

CLOSER – Julia Roberts, Jude Law

Closer (2004)
Direction: Mike Nichols
Screenplay: Patrick Marber, from his 1997 play
Cast: Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman
 

 

THE PERFECT DYSFUNCTIONAL DATE MOVIE
Mike Nichols‘ first feature film, an adaptation of Edward Albee’s acclaimed play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is a harrowing dissection of two married couples whose inner demons are let loose during a night of game playing, drinking, and screaming. That was nearly forty years ago. Fast forward to 2004 and to Nichols’ newest film adaptation of an acclaimed play, Patrick Marber’s Closer, another look at two dysfunctional heterosexual couples, this time in the age of cyberspace and AIDS.
On the surface, not much has changed since 1966: although the action has been stretched out from one night [...]

I HEART HUCKABEES – Jason Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin

i ♥ huckabees / I Heart Huckabees (2004)
Director: David O. Russell
Screenplay: David O. Russell and Jeff Baena
Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Huppert, Jude Law, Lily Tomlin, Mark Wahlberg, Naomi Watts, Tippi Hedren, Talia Shire
 

 
SPANKING THE NIETZSCHE
Beginning with Spanking the Monkey (not a film about animal abuse), David O. Russell has made a reputation as a director of quirky comedies. I Heart Huckabees is no exception. Not that the comedy works — the film is as funny as a funeral mass — but simply because in this age of formulaic filmmaking, I was flabbergasted to be watching a Hollywood movie that is so abrasively unconventional both in form and content.
The storyline — if the film’s meandering thread [...]

ROAD TO PERDITION – Tom Hanks, Paul Newman

Road to Perdition (2002)
Director: Sam Mendes
Screenplay: David Self; from Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner’s graphic novel
Cast: Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law, Tyler Hoechlin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stanley Tucci, Daniel Craig, Dylan Baker, Ciarán Hinds, Liam Aiken

 

 
British director Sam Mendes won an Academy Award for his first film, American Beauty, released in 1999. Three years later, for his second film, Road to Perdition, Mendes once again relied on the assistance of cinematographer Conrad L. Hall and composer Thomas Newman to create another stylized look at dysfunctional American families. But instead of 1990s suburbia, Road to Perdition throws us into the warped universe of a Depression-era Midwestern town, a place where family values include loyalty, faith, extortion, [...]

Recently Posted

• European Film Awards 2009: Rules & Relevance
• European Film Awards 2009: Nominations
• European Film Awards 2009
• Chicago Lesbian & Gay Film Festival 2009
• AFI FEST 2009: THE LAST STATION, AFTER.LIFE
• AFI FEST 2009 Awards
• AFI FEST 2009: POLICE, ADJECTIVE; TO DIE LIKE A MAN
• Grace Kelly: TO CATCH A THIEF, THE SWAN
• Grace Kelly on TCM
• AFI FEST 2009: A SINGLE MAN, THE SINGULARITY

Most Popular Tags

2008 Oscar Academy Awards Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Animation Best Films Books Box Office Brokeback Mountain Censorship Classic Movies Daniel Day-Lewis Documentaries DVDs Film Awards Film Festivals Film Reviews Gay Film Festivals Gay Interest Gay Movies Heath Ledger Helen Mirren Interviews London Film Festival London Film Festival 2009 Los Angeles Screenings Martin Scorsese New York Screenings No Country for Old Men Oscar Movies Penélope Cruz Photos Political Movies Politics Sex Shorts Silent Films Slumdog Millionaire Sundance Film Festival Trailers Turner Classic Movies


Related Posts

Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD PhotosLeonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD TrailerPaul NewmanTom Sherak Elected Academy PresidentAFI FEST 2009: SOMETHING’S GONNA LIVE, NORTH BY NORTHWESTBest Films – 2002