Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival 2009

The 4th Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, which runs April 23-30, will kick off with a screening of Joshua Sinclair’s Jump, starring Ben Silverstone (of the coming-of-age gay drama Get Real) and Patrick Swayze.
Jump will screen on Thursday, April 23, at 8:00 pm at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. Based on a real story, the film (co-written by Sinclair and Ryan James) follows the biased murder trial of the young Jew and future celebrity portrait photographer Philippe Halsman (Silverstone), who was accused of murdering his father in late 1920s Austria. Swayze plays the young man’s Jewish attorney.
Also in the Jump cast: Martine McCutcheon, and veterans Stefanie Powers, Richard Johnson, and Sybil [...]

Australian Film Institute Awards 2008

2008 Australian Film Institute Awards
2008 Australian Film Institute Award nominations: Oct. 29, 2008
2008 Australian Film Institute Award winners: Dec. 5 ("industry" categories) and Dec. 6 (top categories), 2008
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
 

Elissa Down’s feature-film debut, The Black Balloon, chronicles the difficulties encountered by a teenager (Rhys Wakefield) whose younger brother (Luke Ford) is autistic. With the help of his girlfriend (Gemma Ward), the teen struggles to come to terms with the issue.
 

FEATURE FILM NOMINEES
L’Oréal Paris AFI Award for Best Film
* The Black Balloon. Tristram Miall
The Jammed. Dee McLachlan, Andrea Buck & Sally Ayre-Smith
The Square. Louise Smith
Unfinished Sky. Cathy Overett & Anton Smit
AFI Award for Best Direction
* The Black Balloon. [...]

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE – Awards and Nominations

Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Paul Dano, Toni Collette, Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine

Unless otherwise stated, all Little Miss Sunshine awards/nominations are for the year 2006.

Academy Awards: 4 nominations (best film; best supporting actor, Alan Arkin; best supporting actress, Abigail Breslin; best original screenplay, Michael Arndt)
American Cinema Editors: 1 nomination (best edited feature film, comedy or musical, Pamela Martin)
British Academy Awards: 2 wins (best supporting actor, Alan Arkin; best original screenplay, Michael Arndt)

4 additional nominations (best film; best directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris; best supporting actress, Abigail Breslin; best supporting actress, Toni Collette)

Broadcast Film Critics Association: 4 wins (best acting ensemble; best writing, Michael Arndt; best young actor, Paul Dano; best young actress, Abigail Breslin)

3 additional [...]

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE d: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Direction: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Screenplay: Michael Arndt
Cast: Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Abigail Breslin, Alan Arkin, Paul Dano
 

More often than not, the term "independent film" merely indicates that an American production has received its financing from sources outside — or somewhere in the outskirts of — the Hollywood studio system. Only sporadically does the label "independent film" refer to edgy, challenging, and/or unconventional filmmaking.
Instead, "independent filmmakers" usually concoct storylines as conventional as those being churned out by the studios, probably in the hopes of selling their screenplays (or finished films) to a major distributor. Considering the amount of money involved, who can blame them? All they need is to wrap their films’ cliché-ridden core [...]

THE HOURS d: Stephen Daldry

The Hours (2002)
Direction: Stephen Daldry
Screenplay: David Hare, from Michael Cunningham’s novel
Cast: Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Allison Janney, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Dillane, John C. Reilly, Miranda Richardson, Eileen Atkins
 

 

Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-winning The Hours uses Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway (whose working title was "The Hours") as the link that binds its three leading female characters. Far apart in terms of time and space, those three disturbed, unhappy women have in common both the deadness of a life of self-abnegation and the living reality of death itself.
Despite gaps in the narrative, Stephen Daldry’s stabs at melodrama, and one poor central performance, The Hours stands as an intelligent and deeply moving achievement. Most [...]

ABOUT A BOY – Hugh Grant

About a Boy (2002)
Director: Chris and Paul Weitz
Screenplay: Chris Weitz, Paul Weitz, and Peter Hedges; from Nick Hornby’s novel
Cast: Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, Nicholas Hoult, Rachel Weisz
 

 
"No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."
With the above statement, seventeenth-century English writer John Donne reached beyond the apparent [...]