Mike Leigh to be Berlin Film Festival Jury President. No Mike Leigh film has taken home the Berlinale’s Golden Bear, but Happy-Go-Lucky was in contention in 2008, eventually earning star…
Director Christopher Nolan bypassed for the Academy Awards: Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio and Cillian Murphy. Despite the box office success of the sci-fier/thriller Inception, Christopher Nolan was snubbed once again…
Mainstream – “at best, mainstreamish” – critics group picks: Lisa Cholodenko’s audience-friendly The Kids Are All Right topped three New York Film Critics Circle award categories, including Best Actress honors…
Of Gods and Men, directed by Xavier Beauvois. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a dreamlike Thai drama about a man dying of kidney failure that…
Silvio Berlusconi corruption. “Spring had just begun along the beautiful peninsula and they were after Berlusconi. It was a shitty day like so many others …” the narrator explains in…
Vera Drake with Imelda Staunton. Vera Drake (2004) movie review: At the center of Mike Leigh’s family/socially conscious drama, Imelda Staunton delivers a phenomenal performance as a do-gooding wife and…
Based on real-life events, Alejandro Amenábar’s pro-euthanasia drama and the Goya Awards’ record-breaker The Sea Inside revolves around a tetraplegic man’s fight to end his own life. The box office…
One of several British Academy Awards “casualties,” Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s sweeping World War I drama A Very Long Engagement received one single BAFTA nomination – in the ghettoized Best Foreign Language…
Culture clash movies have dominated this year’s socially conscious European Film Awards: Fatih Akin’s German-Turkish drama Head-On was named Best European Film, while euthanasia and abortion dramas topped the acting…
Best British Films ever made? Directed by Carol Reed from a screenplay by Graham Greene, the iconic British production The Third Man was partly financed by an American company, David…
Venice Festival: Starring Imelda Staunton as a one-woman abortion clinic in 1950s England, Mike Leigh’s abortion drama Vera Drake was this year’s Golden Lion winner; Staunton took home the Best…