Contact Help Wanted

Lana Turner in IMITATION OF LIFE Screening

Karen Dicker, Juanita Moore, Terry Burnham, and Lana Turner in Imitation of Life

Douglas Sirk’s classic melodrama Imitation of Life, starring Lana Turner, will have its 50th anniversary celebrated with a screening of a recently struck print at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills on Friday, August 21, at 7:30 p.m.
Hosted by film critic Stephen Farber, the Imitation of Life screening will feature an onstage discussion with Oscar-nominated (supporting) actresses Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore, conducted by Kohner’s sons, filmmakers Paul and Chris Weitz. The print, which is part of the Academy Film Archive collection, was made from the Universal Pictures restoration.

Sandra Dee, Lana Turner

Douglas Sirk’s reputation has gained some belated recognition in [...]

AMERICAN SWING d: Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart

American Swing (2009)
Direction: Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart
Screenplay: Keith Reamer
Interviewees: Buck Henry, Annie Sprinkle, Melvin van Peebles, Ron Jeremy, Jamie Gillis, Helen Gurley Brown, and others
 

 
By way of interviews, photos, and home movies, Mathew Kaufman and journalist Jon Hart’s American Swing humorously chronicles the rise and fall of all-American entrepreneur Larry Levenson, free-sex advocate and self-proclaimed "King of Swing," while painting a nostalgic — though hardly all-flattering — portrait of the heyday of Plato’s Retreat, New York City’s foremost sex club-disco of the late 1970s.
Earlier in the decade, wholesale meat purveyor Larry Levenson had decided to reinvent himself as a Sexual Liberation Messiah. Even so, it’s debatable whether Levenson actually saw himself as a Man with [...]

SOLD FOR MARRIAGE – Lillian Gish

Sold for Marriage (1916)
Direction: Christy Cabanne
Screenplay: William E. Wing
Cast: Lillian Gish, Frank Bennett, Walter Long, Allan Sears, Pearl Elmore, Curt Rehfeld
 

Though all but completely forgotten today, Christy Cabanne (at times billed as William Christy Cabanne) was a respected name in the 1910s and 1920s. Among his credits are the1916 Douglas Fairbanks vehicle The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, considered by some Fairbanks’ best film of the 1910s; the highly successful 1925 actioner The Midshipman, which helped to seal Ramon Novarro’s stardom; and several key scenes in the mammoth 1925 version of Ben-Hur, also starring Novarro.
An apprentice to D. W. Griffith, Cabanne seems to have not only learned a good deal from the (now all but insufferable) Master, but [...]

MUNICH d: Steven Spielberg

Munich (2005)
Direction: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Tony Kushner and Eric Roth; from George Jonas’ book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team
Cast: Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush, Daniel Craig, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ciaran Hinds, Hanns Zischler, Ayelet Zurer, Michel Lonsdale, Gila Almagor, Mathieu Amalric, Moritz Bleibtreu, Marie-Josée Croze, Lynn Cohen, Omar Metwally, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
 

Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds, Hanns Zischler, Mathieu Kassovitz in Munich
 

Alternately intriguing and irritating, thought-provoking and banal, subtle and patronizing, the biggest surprise about Steven Spielberg’s Munich is that it — however grudgingly — works. The film, which Spielberg himself has referred to as "prayer for peace," follows five men contracted by Israel to avenge the massacre of that country’s athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in [...]

MATCH POINT d: Woody Allen

Match Point (2005)
Direction and screenplay: Woody Allen
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox, Penelope Wilton
 

 

If Alfred Hitchcock were to direct a screenplay co-written by Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, the result would be something like Woody Allen’s latest opus, Match Point. A dark fable about the vagaries of chance in a godless world, Allen’s aesthetically old-fashioned crime drama belies a haunting postmodern sensibility.
Set in London, the basic plot of Match Point follows certain key elements of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy: After experiencing the joys of wealth and high social standing (read: power), an ambitious petit bourgeois resorts to whatever it takes to maintain his newfound status. Between the [...]

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN d: Ang Lee

Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Direction: Ang Lee
Screenplay: Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana; from E. Annie Proulx’s short story
Cast: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid, Linda Cardellini, Kate Mara
 

 

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is without a doubt a culturally significant motion picture. The same-sex romantic drama has won numerous awards, has been discussed all over the media, and has been labeled "groundbreaking" by numerous film critics. Of course, the fact that those critics’ knowledge of film history only goes as far back as Revenge of the Sith should not be held against Lee’s film. Yet, except for a few touching moments in its second half Brokeback Mountain fails to become fully involving chiefly because its central relationship — between a [...]

IN GOOD COMPANY – Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace

In Good Company (2004)
Direction and screenplay: Paul Weitz
Cast: Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, Scarlett Johansson, Marg Helgenberger, David Paymer, Philip Baker Hall, Clark Gregg, Malcolm McDowell
 

 

Better known for his gross-out comedy American Pie and for co-directing (with brother Chris Weitz) the syrupy morality tale About a Boy (which received an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay), Paul Weitz is hardly the type of talent one would expect behind a movie about a ruthless corporate takeover. But rest assured, In Good Company, despite its business dog-eats-business dog setting, is anything but heavy drama.
In the film, Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid) is the head of ad sales for the New York-based magazine Sports America — though not for very much longer. Right [...]

BEING JULIA – Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons

Being Julia (2004)
Direction: István Szabó
Screenplay: Ronald Harwood; from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1937 novel Theatre
Cast: Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons, Shaun Evans, Bruce Greenwood, Miriam Margolyes, Juliet Stevenson, Lucy Punch, Michael Gambon, Sheila McCarthy, Leigh Lawson, Rosemary Harris, Rita Tushingham
 

 

A LITTLE ABOUT AVICE
In Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 Oscar-winning classic All About Eve, Bette Davis plays Margo Channing, a major Broadway star who, despite her talent and wit, falls prey to the ambitious wannabe Eve Harrington: sweet, soft-spoken Anne Baxter on the outside, ruthless, poisonous gargoyle on the inside.
More than a decade earlier, in 1937 to be exact, W. Somerset Maugham had written Theatre, a novel about a West End star, the stage diva Julia Lambert (that four years later would [...]

YESTERDAY d: Darrell Roodt

Yesterday (2004)
Direction and screenplay: Darrell Roodt
Cast: Leleti Khumalo, Lihle Mvelase, Kenneth Kambule, Harriet Lehabe, Camilla Walker
 

 
To date, nowhere has the AIDS pandemic been felt more strongly than in Sub-Saharan Africa, home to approximately 10% of the world population and to more than 70% of the planet’s 40 million AIDS cases. In the past twenty-five years, it is estimated that more than 20 million Sub-Saharan Africans have died from complications of the disease. Even today, drug cocktails that are relatively accessible in other parts of the globe are still beyond the means of the vast majority of Africans.
Writer-director Darrell Roodt’s South African drama Yesterday is set in this catastrophic scenario. The film depicts the effects of AIDS in the life [...]

CALLING HEDY LAMARR d: Georg Misch

Calling Hedy Lamarr (2004)
Direction: Georg Misch
 

 

MY PHONE LADY
Shot in digital format, Georg Misch’s entertaining documentary Calling Hedy Lamarr has the look of a well-crafted low-budget movie and the feel of a quirky independent film. That is hardly the sort of approach one would expect to find in a documentary about one of the most beautiful, most glamorous, and most synthetic film stars of the 20th century. Yet, Misch mostly gets away with it. What Calling Hedy Lamarr lacks in terms of style and depth of analysis is compensated for by a sly, offbeat look at the cult of celebrity in American culture.
In Calling Hedy Lamarr, several friends and family members of Austrian-born actress and phone addict Hedy Lamarr (1911 or [...]

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON – Sean Penn

The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004)
Direction: Niels Mueller
Screenplay: Niels Mueller and Kevin Kennedy
Cast: Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle, Jack Thompson, Michael Wincott, Brad William Henke
 

 

Although technically a psychosocial drama about those for whom the American Dream is nothing more than a pathological delusion, Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon actually works as a suspenseful horror movie. From the very start, we know that something dreadful is about to happen. As the fact-based story inexorably progresses toward its bloody climax, the suspense keeps increasing until the violence, depicted in brutal detail, explodes on screen. That’s the stuff that nightmares are made of.
As depicted by Emmanuel Lubezki’s appropriately gritty, washed-out cinematography, it all begins in the winter of 1974, as [...]

MACHUCA d: Andrés Wood

Machuca (2004)
Direction: Andrés Wood
Screenplay: Andrés Wood, Roberto Brodsky, and Mamoun Hassan
Cast: Matías Quer, Ariel Mateluna, Manuela Martelli, Aline Küppenheim, Ernesto Malbran, Tamara Acosta, Francisco Reyes
 

 

Machuca is a generally well-made, at times moving depiction of a difficult historical period — Chile on the verge of the US-backed military coup that deposed popularly elected president Salvador Allende — as seen through the eyes of three pre-adolescents from different social classes.
Despite an excessive use of hip sounds from the ’70s that tend to be more distracting than mood enhancing, director and co-screenwriter Andrés Wood does manage to capture the feel of early 1970s Chile, especially in the street scenes.
As a plus, Wood has an excellent grip on his solid cast, eliciting several outstanding [...]

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET – Fernanda Montenegro

O Outro Lado da Rua / The Other Side of the Street (2004)
Direction: Marcos Bernstein
Screenplay: Marcos Bernstein and Melanie Dimantas
Cast: Fernanda Montenegro, Raul Cortez, Laura Cardoso, Luiz Carlos Persy, Miguel Lunardi
 

As in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller Rear Window, the amateur sleuth in Marcos Bernstein’s feature film début, O Outro Lado da Rua / The Other Side of the Street, believes she has witnessed a murder while spying with binoculars on a neighbor. But has she, or is it all a figment of the imagination of a lonely, embittered older woman?
Unlike Hitchcock, Bernstein (co-writer of Central Station) is less preoccupied with the alleged murder than with the psychological and emotional workings of the two protagonists: a widower (Raul Cortez) [...]

MUSIC OF THE HEART – Meryl Streep – d: Wes Craven

Music of the Heart (1999)
Direction: Wes Craven
Screenplay: Pamela Gray
Cast: Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett, Aidan Quinn, Cloris Leachman, Gloria Estefan, Kieran Culkin, Charlie Hofheimer, Michael Angarano, Jay O. Sanders
 

 
Wes Craven, the director of the Scream franchise and of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, is hardly the kind of filmmaker from whom one would expect a syrupy motion picture about a determined violin teacher who wins the hearts and minds of her inner-city school students.
Yet, Craven is the man responsible for Music of the Heart, a film completely devoid of slashed faces, lethal stabbings, and deadly fingernails. Instead, this distaff version of Mr. Holland’s Opus — with touches of To Sir with Love — offers loads of sentiment, [...]

PERFECT CRIME d: Álex de la Iglesia

Crimen ferpecto / Perfect Crime (2004)
Direction: Álex de la Iglesia
Screenplay: Álex de la Iglesia and Jorge Guerricaechevarría
Cast: Guillermo Toledo, Mónica Cervera, Luis Varela, Enrique Villén, Fernando Tejero

 

In Álex de la Iglesia’s daring, pitch-black comedy Crimen ferpecto / Perfect Crime, the ambitious, suave Rafael (Guillermo Toledo) has two major goals in life: to bed every beautiful woman in sight and to become the head of the clothing department at one of Madrid’s major department stores.
Everything seems to be going Rafael’s way — until he discovers that his chief rival, Don Antonio (Luis Varela), has been chosen as the new Emperor of the Floor. A heated confrontation between Rafael and his newly appointed boss leads to the latter’s accidental [...]

HOTEL RWANDA – Don Cheadle

Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Direction: Terry George
Screenplay: Keir Pearson and Terry George
Cast: Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix, Desmond Dube, Neil McCarthy, Jean Reno
 

 
In the second quarter of 1994, while much of the world was gearing up to the World Cup to be held in Los Angeles, one of history’s deadliest wholesale slaughters of human beings was taking place in Central Africa. Following the death of Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu whose plane was shot down above the Kigali airport on April 6, 1994, the Hutu powers-that-be decided it was time to eliminate the Tutsi minority who were blamed for the crash. What followed in the next three months was an orgy of hackings and shootings throughout [...]

VERA DRAKE d: Mike Leigh

Vera Drake (2004)
Direction and screenplay: Mike Leigh
Cast: Imelda Staunton, Philip Davis, Peter Wight, Daniel Mays, Alex Kelly, Eddie Marsan, Ruth Sheen, Sally Hawkins, Chris O’Dowd, Heather Craney
 

 
Director Mike Leigh’s touches are found everywhere in Vera Drake, from the drab working-class social setting to the somewhat bizarre characters that inhabit that milieu (at least in Leigh’s oeuvre). Even so, Vera Drake cannot quite be considered a Mike Leigh Film. This bleak drama about a kind and gentle — if none too bright — part-time cleaning woman, part-time wife and mother, and part-time abortionist truly belongs to its leading lady, veteran stage and screen actress Imelda Staunton, whose superb tour de force carries the film to heights it would never have [...]

THE DEVIL STRIKES AT NIGHT d: Robert Siodmak

Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam / The Devil Strikes at Night (1957)
Direction: Robert Siodmak
Screenplay: Werner Jörg Lüddecke, from an article by Will Berthold
Cast: Claus Holm, Annemarie Düringer, Mario Adorf, Hannes Messemer, Carl Lange, Werner Peters
 

 

After more than a decade in Hollywood, German-born director Robert Siodmak (nominated for an Academy Award for The Killers in 1946) resumed his European career in the mid-1950s. In 1957, he directed Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam / The Devil Strikes at Night, an intriguing, well-crafted crime drama about the pursuit of a serial killer — and its political consequences — during the last months of the mass-murderous Nazi regime.
Inspired by real events, The Devil Strikes at Night begins as war-scarred Hamburg is deeply shaken by [...]

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL – Johnny Depp

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Direction: Gore Verbinski
Screenplay: Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio; from an original screen story by Stuart Beattie and Jay Wolpert
Cast: Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Jack Davenport, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg
 

 

WHEN KEITH MET ZASU
Pirate films were a popular Hollywood staple for about three decades, from the mid-1920s (The Sea Hawk, The Black Pirate) to the mid-1950s, when the genre, by then relegated to mostly B films, began to die down. Sporadic resurrections in the last two decades have been disastrous (Pirates, Cutthroat Island), something that didn’t bode well for Disney’s "film adaptation" of one of their theme-park rides. However, Neptune and assorted sea gods have apparently been in [...]

21 GRAMS – Sean Penn, Naomi Watts

21 Grams (2003)
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga
Cast: Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio del Toro, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melissa Leo, Danny Huston, Eddie Marsan, John Rubinstein
 

 

Shot in documentary-style, 21 Grams is a bleak, convoluted, and surprisingly powerful drama about three individuals linked to both one another and to the immediacy of death: Paul (Sean Penn) is a dying man in dire need of a heart transplant; Jack (Benicio Del Toro) is a born-again ex-con who has run over a father and his two daughters as they were crossing a street; and Cristina (Naomi Watts) is the woman whose family Jack has killed. (By the way, the film’s title refers to the alleged weight of a person’s soul. That figure came [...]

THE GRANDFATHER d: José Luis Garci

FAHRENHEIT 9/11 d: Michael Moore

Recently Posted

• 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
• AFI FEST 2009: THE ROAD, EASIER WITH PRACTICE
• Academy Awards $450,000 to US Film Festivals

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 Meryl Streep New York Screenings No Country for Old Men Oscar Movies Photos Political Movies Politics Sex Shorts Silent Films Slumdog Millionaire Sundance Film Festival Trailers Turner Classic Movies


Related Posts

FAHRENHEIT 9/11 NotesCannes ‘07 ReviewsToronto 2009: Michael Moore PhotosOscar 2005: Documentary ShortlistTHE WORLD ACCORDING TO BUSH Internet LawsuitSan Francisco Film Critics Awards 2004