Dany Boon’s hickland comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis could well be on its way to becoming the biggest hit ever at the French box office.
Simone Françoise
Simone Françoise
Simone Françoise is an Alt Film Guide contributor/editor-at-large, focusing on international cinema.
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The Orphanage movie box office: J.A. Bayona’s supernatural psychological thriller has had a sensational debut in its native Spain.
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Among the 8 controversies linked to Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 are a Disney battle and mysterious late-night Saudi flights.
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Sikh protests and 2 as-yet-unclaimed bomb attacks at Delhi film theaters have followed the release of a Bollywood action comedy starring Sunny Deol.
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Submission: Part 1 controversies continue: Clip from Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s anti-Islam short film to be broadcast on Italian television.
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The WWII-era Katyn massacre is the topic of Andrzej Wajda’s next project + Criterion’s ‘3 War Films’ DVD includes the classic Ashes and Diamonds.
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Egyptian movie star Ahmed Zaki is best remembered for playing presidents Gamal Abdul Nasser and Anwar Sadat in flag-waving historical dramas.
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Lord of the Rings lawsuit: Former professional partners fight over TLOTR profits as Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films sues ‘wanton’ New Line Cinema.
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Documentary or docudrama? Is it possible to pinpoint the line separating fiction from one recent Oscar winner’s extensive use of reenactments?
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Movie festival news from around the world cover big-screen events from New York’s Tribeca to the century’s ‘biggest’ French cinema retrospective in Beijing.
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What’s the highest grossing comedy ever? That depends on how you come up with the box office figures, how you interpret them, and how you define ‘comedy.’
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What are the Academy Awards? 1 famous Oscar winner doesn’t seem to hold them in high regard, while a film publication lists the 10 Worst Best Pictures ever.
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A Bollywood ‘priest sex movie’ - about the affair between a clergyman (Shiney Ahuja) and a much younger woman - has infuriated Indian Catholic radicals.
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El Chupacabra terrifies Big Pharma: How polemical filmmaker Michael Moore has become an urban legend within the American pharmaceutical industry.
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Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach Film Society has had to fight (anti-gay?) puritanism, as a complaint about big-screen ‘explicit sex’ has led to a police investigation.
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Producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr has publicly derided the Academy Awards’ arcane Best Foreign Language Film rules that keep prestigious work out of the running.
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Set to open the Berlin Film Festival, Régis Wargnier’s ‘missing link movie’ starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Joseph Fiennes focuses on ‘science-based’ racism.
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Jehane Noujaim’s Al Jazeera documentary Control Room has sparked outrage at the first edition of the Dubai Film Festival.
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A crowd-pleasing Wine Country movie and an polemical political documentary are American critics’ top selections this awards season.
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7 Quotes: Joan Collins on Nicole Kidman’s ‘screen legend’ status + Michael Moore on George W. Bush + Kinsey collaborator Paul Gebhard on Bill Condon’s 2004 movie.
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Gay Republicans and their mind-boggling support for the party that despises them + the horrors of the Rwanda genocide are this year’s disturbing AFI FEST winners.
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The London Film Festival’s Satyajit Ray Award has gone to Nicole Kassell’s U.S. drama The Woodsman, starring Kevin Bacon as a child molester.
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Robin Williams is the Golden Globes’ next recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement - despite less than 25 years in movies.
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Was Alexander the Great gay? Inflamed Greek attorneys threaten to ‘take the case further’ if Oliver Stone doesn’t spell out that his 2004 epic is ‘pure fiction.’
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Award-winning Iraq War-themed drama gets US distribution + veteran Oscar winner has been hospitalized + Antarctica is getting its very first movie theater.
Are there Iraq War parallels in George Lucas’ Revenge of the Sith? The American filmmaker tackled the issue at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Creationist fanatics are going after IMAX theaters’ nature documentaries. Why? Anti-science Christians are enraged by evolution being presented as an empirical fact.
Marie Antoinette Versailles shoot: Sofia Coppola project about doomed Austrian-born French queen will be adding some local color around star Kirsten Dunst.
The controversy surrounding the Meera Nazar kiss has the Pakistani actress vs. that country’s Ministry of Culture. Ashmit Patel is her Bollywood costar.
A restored print of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Soviet masterpiece Battleship Potemkin will be screened at next year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Jesus Christ and George W. Bush missing link? See past examples of the mystical connection between US presidential elections and Best Picture Oscar nods.
Featuring attendees like Omar Sharif and Youssef Chahine, Tunisia’s Arab cinema showcase has bestowed top honors on a socially conscious Moroccan drama.
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