London Film Day: NANNY MCPHEE AND THE BIG BANG
The British Film Institute has announced that the new initiative London Film Day will feature the World Public Premiere of Susanna White’s Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, starring Emma Thompson (who also wrote the screenplay adaptation), Ralph Fiennes, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans, Maggie Smith, and Daniel Mays. This BFI London Film Festival and Film London partnership will offer 15 simultaneous public premieres across London on Sunday 21 March. Tickets for each public premiere will be £5 for adults and £1 for children.
Another BFI announcement: The 2010 BFI London Film Festival dates have been announced. The Festival will run from 13-28 October, 2010. According to the festival’s press release, "the programming team are busy [...]
by Arthur Leander | February 16, 2010
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Tags: Emma Thompson, London 2010, London Film Day, London Film Festival, London Screenings, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, Ralph Fiennes, Susanna White
Marion Davies, Ronald Colman, Constance Talmadge, Phyllis Haver: “Sound and Silents”
"Sound and Silents" is the title of a four-film series — part of the wider "Birds Eye View Film Festival" celebrating women filmmakers — to be held at London’s bfi Southbank and the Barbican from March 6-10.
The four screening silent films are: King Vidor’s The Patsy (1928), starring Marion Davies; Sidney Franklin’s Her Sister from Paris (1925), starring Constance Talmadge and Ronald Colman (right); Cecil B. DeMille’s Chicago (1927), with Phyllis Haver and Victor Varconi; and Lotte Reiniger’s animated The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). All four films will feature live musical accompaniment.
The most enjoyable of the four is Sidney Franklin’s Lubitschesque Her Sister from Paris, which offers Constance Talmadge at her screwballish best — and this before screwball [...]
by Andre Soares | February 14, 2010
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Tags: Cecil B. DeMille, Chicago, Classic Movies, Constance Talmadge, Her Sister from Paris, King Vidor, London Screenings, Lotte Reiniger, Marion Davies, Phyllis Haver, Ronald Colman, Sidney Franklin, Silent Films, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, The Patsy, Victor Varconi
Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, The Village People, Valerie Perrine: Out at the Pictures
Julie Harris, Claire Bloom in The Haunting (top); The Village People in Can’t Stop the Music (bottom)
"Out at the Pictures" at London’s bfi Southbank:
Robert Wise’s horror-house classic The Haunting (1963), starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn
Nancy Walker’s costly box-office disaster Can’t Stop the Music (1980), starring a rollerblading Steve Guttenberg (in some tight, tight shorts that would get him arrested today for indecent underexposure), Valerie Perrine, and The Village People
The Haunting is one the best horror movies ever made. Julie Harris is sensational, and Claire Bloom is almost as good in a less showy role — a Lesbian. Now, who’s that knocking at the door?
Can’t Stop the Music would have been better had the [...]
by Andre Soares | December 7, 2009
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Tags: bfi Southbank, Can't Stop the Music, Claire Bloom, Classic Movies, Gay Interest, Julie Harris, London Screenings, Nancy Walker, Robert Wise, The Haunting, The Village People, Valerie Perrine
CITIZEN KANE Screenings in the UK
Orson Welles‘ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane, winner of the best original screenplay Academy Award, will hit UK theaters on Nov. 30. In addition to London’s bfi Southbank, Citizen Kane will also be screened in Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Glasgow.
Written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, Citizen Kane stars Welles as a newspaper magnate based on William Randolph Hearst. Also in the cast: Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore (a distorted version of Marion Davies), Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, and Everett Sloane.
Cinematography by the masterful Gregg Toland, music by Bernard Herrmann.
Citizen Kane was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including best picture, director, and actor (Welles).
More information here.
by Joan Lister | October 23, 2009
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Tags: bfi Southbank, Citizen Kane, Classic Movies, Herman J. Mankiewicz, London Screenings, Orson Welles
London 2009: THE ROAD, MEN ON THE BRIDGE
A handful of Friday highlights at the 2009 The Times-BFI London Film Festival:
The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, sounds like the perfect Thanksgiving movie:
"An unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) travel alone through a post-apocalyptic landscape, ravaged by an unspecified catastrophe. Ash and soot hang in the air, it is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is grey. The sky is dark, the cities abandoned and empty, the roads littered with corpses, the countryside deserted save for marauding gangs eating human flesh to survive."
Appropriately enough, The Road opens in the US on Nov. 25. Mortensen, I should add, is a potential [...]
by Andre Soares | October 15, 2009
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Tags: Asli Özge, Dirigible, Jorge Drexler, London Film Festival, London Film Festival 2009, London Screenings, Men on the Bridge, The Ferrari Dino Girl, The Road, This Very Instant, Viggo Mortensen