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Tiff Opening With Creation

15 July 2009 2:03 PM, PDT | From HollywoodNorthReport.com | See recent HollywoodNorthReport.com news

Hnr's Michael Stevens reporting from Toronto... Director Jon Amiel's newest feature Creation, a film about radical evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin, will open the 34th Toronto Film Festival, Sept. 10. "This intimate look at Darwin puts a human face on a man whose theory remains controversial to this day," said Tiff director/CEO Piers Handling. Produced by Jeremy Thomas, the bio-pic stars actor Paul "Gangster One" Bettany as the English author of "The Origin of Species", with Jennifer "A Beautiful Mind" Connelly playing his wife 'Emma'. The screenplay by John Collee adapts the book "Annie's Box," written by Darwin's great-great-grandson Randal Keynes. The film was developed by the Recorded Picture Co., BBC Films and the UK Film Council. This year's Tiff has so far announced three galas and 19 special presentations. Galas include Aaron Schneider's Get Low, starring actors Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek, the biopic Max Manus, focusing

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Toronto Film Festival Announces 2009 Galas and Special Presentations

14 July 2009 10:37 PM, PDT | From FilmJunk | See recent FilmJunk news

The first wave of major titles for this year's Toronto International Film Festival [1] were announced yesterday, and there were certainly more than enough high profile picks to get people talking. Ricky Gervais's The Invention of Lying, Neil Jordan's Ondine and Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising were among the world premieres unveiled for September, along with North American premieres of such films as Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!, Bong Joon-ho's Mother and Johnnie To's Vengeance. There was some controversy over the choice of Jon Amiel's Darwin biopic Creation as the festival opener -- not because of the subject matter, but rather because of the fact that this is the first time the fest will kick off with a non-Canadian film. It does seem like a bit of a strange choice, but how can you say no to Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly? Sundance hit Precious, Based

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Sean

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First Tiff (Toronto International Film Festival) titles announced

14 July 2009 3:05 PM, PDT | From QuietEarth.us | See recent QuietEarth news

The first announcement includes 12 world premiers including Nicholas Refn's (Bronson, Pusher trilogy) Valhalla Rising which looks nothing short of stunning.

Full list after the break.

Galas

Get Low Aaron Schneider, USA

World Premiere

Inspired by the true story of Felix "Bush" Breazeale, this stately frontier drama stars Robert Duvall as a backwoods eccentric who stages his own funeral.while still alive. Ten thousand people arrive to hear him speak and to learn why this local legend exiled himself 40 years ago to the foothills of Eastern Tennessee. Set in the early 1930s, Get Low is a story of mystery and discovery that speaks of timeless things. Can we know who we are? Should we judge anyone? Is there redemption for those of us lost in the dark catacombs of our past? Also starring Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek and Lucas Black.

The Invention of Lying Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, USA

World Premiere

From Ricky Gervais,

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August: Osage County (The Movie)

7 July 2009 10:20 AM, PDT | From FilmExperience | See recent FilmExperience news

Cast This!

But before the movie... the tour! It starts in just under three weeks in Denver. I'm not getting paid for this but I'm going to shill because live theater needs to be promoted. It's so much cooler than TV ... even if Corporate America can't profit off of it as much (finite audience = number of seats in house) and thus makes it seem uncool by ignoring it or dismissing it as irrelevant.

Oscar winner Estelle Parsons, 81, headlines the August tour

And given that The Movie -- all caps because if it's any good it'll be Big -- is going to be the subject of much discussion whenever it begins to film and especially once it's in theaters, you'll want to be in the know early on. Even if you're not normally a theater person. If you haven't been following theatrical buzz and awardage these past couple of years, it's

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NATHANIEL R

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Streep Nom #3, 1981

20 June 2009 5:40 AM, PDT | From FilmExperience | See recent FilmExperience news

Streep at 60: Let's talk each Streep nomination and its competition.

Meryl Streep won the BAFTA, Golden Globe and the Lafca prize for her two part role in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) but she lost the Oscar anyway. The nominees were:

Katharine Hepburn, On Golden PondDiane Keaton, RedsMarsha Mason, Only When I Laugh

Susan Sarandon, Atlantic City

Meryl Streep, The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman opened.

On Golden Pond made Katharine Hepburn a four-time Oscar winner. She's still far out in front of everyone in the acting Oscar derby save Jack Nicholson who has three and could conceivably join her. He is 72 and still works far more often than Hepburn was working in her 70s when she won this.

The snubbed in '81? Sissy Spacek in Raggedy Man and Sally Field in Absence of Malice were Globe Drama nominees and Bernadette Peters was the Musical/Comedy Globe winner for Pennies From Heaven.

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NATHANIEL R

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Supernatural 'Ghosted', doc 'It Came From Kuchar' and Thriller 'El Nino Pez' screen at Outfest 2009

2 June 2009 5:58 PM, PDT | From Pretty/Scary | See recent pretty-scary news

Ghosted (Directed by Monica Treut and written by Astrid Stroner), It Came From Kuchar by Jennifer Kroot, and El Niño Pez (The Fish Child) are stand-out genre films by women playing at the 2009 Outfest Film Festival.

These award-winning women directors deal with subjects like murder, revenge, twisted love, unsolved murders, and the absolutely awesome B-movie industry in their films...

Writer-director Lucía Puenzo won awards - including two prizes at Cannes - and critical acclaim all over the world for Xxy, and now the Argentine filmmaker returns with a lesbian romance that’s also a Chabrol-esque mystery thriller and a scathing examination of class differences in the South American nation. Lala (Inés Efron, whose performance has inspired comparisons to the early film roles of both Sissy Spacek and Chloë Sevigny), the privileged daughter of a powerful judge, wants to run off with her Paraguayan lover La Guayi (Mariela Vitale), a maid

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Superheidi

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Cinematical Seven: Horror Replacement Actors

28 May 2009 8:02 PM, PDT | From Cinematical.com | See recent Cinematical news

Oh, what might have been! Alison Lohman gives a terrific performance as the cursed loan officer Christine Brown in Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, which opens tomorrow. If not for the vagaries of scheduling, though, Ellen Page would have played the lead role. Would Page have been any better? We'll never know, but she joins a long list that inspires thoughts of 'What if ...?'

Once upon a time, we might have seen Leslie Howard as the titular Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi as The Monster. Instead, Colin Clive played the good doctor, Boris Karloff got a jump-start on life, and the rest is horror history. Here are seven more recent examples of actors and actresses who were considered for key roles in great horror films ... and the ones who replaced them, listed in chronological order. [Disclaimer: Based on information provided on IMDb's "trivia" pages, so no guarantees on accuracy.] Better? Worse? You decide.

1. Melanie Griffith / Sissy Spacek (Carrie)

Even though she was in her mid-20s,

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Peter Martin

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Tuesday Top Ten: The Best of 1984

16 May 2009 4:13 AM, PDT | From FilmExperience | See recent FilmExperience news

For no reason whatsoever I have declared today 1984 day! It's a 25th Anniversary Jamboree or some such. (Don't ask questions. Just go with it) Herewith a tripled top ten: What the public liked, what Oscar liked, what I liked from the year that was. All movie title links go to their Netflix page in case you're interested in giving them a looksie. First a little historical entertainment context: Vanessa Williams was not starring on Ugly Betty but resigning her Miss America tiara due to nude photos (the more things change...), Ricky Martin was a new member of Menudo, people were just discovering what Madonna looked like on MTV, and Scarlett Johansson was fresh out of the womb.

What Oscar Liked

The Oscar nominees for Best Picture were the Mozart bio Amadeus (11 noms / 8 wins), the legendary David Lean's swan song A Passage to India (11 noms / 2 wins), Roland Joffé's war

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NATHANIEL R

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May Flowers, Kathleen Turner

12 May 2009 8:24 AM, PDT | From FilmExperience | See recent FilmExperience news

May Flowers, weeknights @ 11:00

Kathleen Turner as Joan Wilder. She's a hopeless... no, a hopeful romantic. What a slam dunk star turn that was. And how galling that Romancing the Stone didn't net her an Oscar nomination. It was deglam and glam in one package. Plus it was super fun and Oscar should remember to have fun more often. Fun movies sometimes have more staying power than dutiful prestige pics. Not all the time but why eliminate them because they aren't serious? Screwball comedies were as far from serious as it gets and Oscar didn't hate those.

The Oscar Nominees that year were four previous winners and one breakthrough performer (Judy Davis)

Judy Davis, A Passage to IndiaSally Field, Places in the Heart (winner)

Jessica Lange, CountryVanessa Redgrave, The Bostonians

Sissy Spacek, The River

If I had been giving out my awards back then, the Best Actress list would not have been 60% farm wives.

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NATHANIEL R

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April Showers, Carrie (Twice Over)

16 April 2009 8:00 PM, PDT | From FilmExperience | See recent FilmExperience news

When I began the April Showers series I was frustrated that I'd already written about the famous opening sequence of Carrie (1976). But then, Eureka! Something more to say.

Though it might be impossible to choose one thing that's "best" about Carrie, I think the juxtaposition of its two shower scenes is definitely in the running. I've never read the Stephen King book so I don't know which of the film's strengths to attribute to the famed horror novelist but Brian De Palma unquestionably did a lot of things right in the transfer.

The first triumph is his undiluted understanding of Carrie's sexual development as adolescent terror themes. The second is his facility with cinematic language. In the opening shower sequence there's slow motion bodies and soft music. Carrie herself (Sissy Spacek) is completely entranced by the water, lost in the pleasure of it. Until her hand, soaping between her legs,

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NATHANIEL R

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Marilyn Chambers 1952 - 2009

14 April 2009 1:01 PM, PDT | From FilmJunk | See recent FilmJunk news

Marilyn Chambers, probably best known for her role in Behind The Green Door, the first hardcore pornography to go mainstream, has passed away. Chambers had worked as a model and an actress before stumbling into the career that made her one of the great cinematic icons of the '70s. To many film fans, myself included, Chambers will best be remembered as the lead in David Cronenberg's second commercial feature film, Rabid. Chambers plays Rose, a woman who undergoes experimental surgery that inadvertently changes her physiology such that she craves blood, with her victims becoming infectious psychopaths. Cronenberg originally wanted Sissy Spacek for the role, but when that didn't turn out, producer Ivan Reitman suggested Chambers. Reading that back, I realize that Canada was a truly groovy place back then. As great as Spacek would have been, Chambers' combination of wide-eyed naivety and predatory sexuality adds a considerable amount

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Wintle

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Oscar's Youngest Winners

6 April 2009 3:12 PM, PDT | From Vanity Fair | See recent Vanity Fair news

Jessica Tandy, one of the most revered stage and film actresses of the 20th century, toiled until she was 80 before she won an Oscar, for Driving Miss Daisy. Tatum O’Neal waited until she was 10. Oscar’s young winners have had vastly different destinies—while some have found their way to the tabloids, others, like Anna Paquin, continue to grace the pages of Vanity Fair. Click through the slide show below for a gallery of Hollywood’s golden children, from Patty Duke to Timothy Hutton and more. Ten-year-old Tatum O’Neal clutches her best-supporting-actress Oscar, which she won for her debut role, in director Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973). She still holds the record for the youngest actor ever to win an Oscar. By Hulton Archive/Getty Images.Anna Paquin poses with her best-supporting-actress Oscar at the 66th annual Academy Awards, in 1994. Paquin, 11 at the time, won for her performance in the 1993 film The Piano.

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Rebecca Romijn to join ABC's "Eastwick" series

10 March 2009 | From Movie Jungle | See recent Movie Jungle news

Rebecca Romijn will star as the third witch on ABC's drama pilot "Eastwick: which tells of three young witches who discover their powers. Romijn will apparently play Roxie, a single mother with a sharp tongue. The other two witches will be played by Lindsay Price and Jaime Ray Newman.Romijn co-starred in ABC's "Ugly Betty" prior to her maternity leave to give birth to her twins. Prior to that, her film career has dwindled since her last appearance in Fox's "X-Men: The Last Stand" back in 2006.   The last film she starred in the Hunter Hill and Perry Moore helmed "Lake City" drama along with Sissy Spacek and Troy Garity.  

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Rental Queue Alert: Australia, Ashes of Time, Wonder Woman

8 March 2009 10:01 AM, PDT | From FilmExperience | See recent FilmExperience news

Calling out sick never quite works for me...confessions of a blogaholic, I guess. Here are today's new DVDs. (Links go to Netflix for your ease of queue'ing)

The Must See

Ashes of Time Redux I once tried to watch a copy of Ashes of Time before the "reworking" and the image quality was so bad that I gave up after five minutes. Who wants a Wong Kar Wai movie with its visuals compromised? Nobody who knows how ravishing his imagery is, that's who. I'm thrilled to have a real go at this swordsmen drama starring the unbeatable Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and his two greatest screen lovers: Happy Together's Leslie Cheung and In the Mood for Love's Maggie Cheung. Plus there's Tony's frequent co-star and offscreen wife Carina Lau, Jacky Cheung and the legendary Brigitte Lin (The Bride With White Hair). Yes please sextupled.

Your Other Options

I've Loved You So Long

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NATHANIEL R

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Watch out, Mickey Rourke: Indie Spirit is Oscar's consolation prize

21 February 2009 1:43 PM, PST | From Gold Derby | See recent Gold Derby news

The Independent Spirit award is supposed to salute what past ceremony host Samuel L. Jackson once called "the strange, the weird, the eclectic, the visionary, the new blood." Ideally, its purpose is to help those low-profile quality films that could use a boost so that someday, maybe, the filmmakers and performers could compete in the big league of the Oscars.

And back when the Spirits took flight, they tried hard to keep to that mission. Indeed, its first best-picture winner in 1985, "After Hours," wasn't nominated for a single Oscar. But then "Platoon" won best pic at both the Spirits and the Oscars the next year. From then on, the Spirits focused more and more on seemingly academy-friendly films, with a corresponding increase in its own profile. While 1987 best-pic winner "River's Edge" was snubbed at the Oscars, other early champs made it into Oscar categories like screenplay ("sex, lies and videotape,

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tomoneil

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Cinematical Seven: Glaringly Obvious Oscar Omissions

19 February 2009 7:02 PM, PST | From Cinematical.com | See recent Cinematical news

Okay, really this should be more of a top 100 list, so these seven are more "off the top of my head" than any kind of definitive selection. There are several kinds of Oscar snubs. There are talented actors, artists and filmmakers who have never been nominated, and others who have been nominated many times and never won. There are great films that received one or two nominations in minor categories (Vertigo, Singin' in the Rain) and great films that received none at all. The ones I've chosen here are the ones that, especially in retrospect, seem like the most obvious omissions. 1. Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive (2001)

Watts did receive a nomination two years later for 21 Grams, though that was clearly a case of making up for this mistake. In 2001, no one gave a slyer or more canny performance, in any film, in any category. Watts not only plumbed the depths of her soul for material,

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Jeffrey M. Anderson

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Valentino Goes Truly Indie

19 February 2009 2:30 PM, PST | From Spout.com | See recent Spout news

Matt Tynauer's doc Valentino: The Last Emperor (see our Toronto coverage here) has been scheduled for a NY premiere at Film Forum since December, but now indieWIRE is reporting that the film will have a further theatrical rollout via Magnolia's Truly Indie asissted self-distribution model.

This is interesting timing, because in the context of a conversation about self-distribution the other day, somebody asked me if Truly Indie was still running, and I couldn't remember the last film I knew for sure that they helped to release. When the Valentino news broke, I went on Truly Indie's website, and saw that they have been involved recently with the release of films I've either covered (Boogie Man) or at least heard of (Lake City, starring Sissy Spacek). It's ...

Karina Longworth

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Valentino Goes Truly Indie

19 February 2009 2:30 PM, PST | From Spout.com | See recent Spout news

Matt Tynauer's doc Valentino: The Last Emperor (see our Toronto coverage here) has been scheduled for a NY premiere at Film Forum since December, but now indieWIRE is reporting that the film will have a further theatrical rollout via Magnolia's Truly Indie asissted self-distribution model.

This is interesting timing, because in the context of a conversation about self-distribution the other day, somebody asked me if Truly Indie was still running, and I couldn't remember the last film I knew for sure that they helped to release. When the Valentino news broke, I went on Truly Indie's website, and saw that they have been involved recently with the release of films I've either covered (Boogie Man) or at least heard of (Lake City, starring Sissy Spacek). It's ...

Karina Longworth

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Spring Preview: Anywhere But a Movie Theater

18 February 2009 9:44 PM, PST | From ifc.com | See recent IFC news

Film releases certainly aren't limited to theaters these days -- here's a rundown of titles making their way to you via alternative pathways.

On Demand

Our sister company IFC Films made a splash at this year's Sundance with the announcement of a partnership with the SXSW Film Festival to premiere four of the festival's picks concurrent with their debut in Austin. Joe Swanberg's latest, "Alexander the Last," headlines the group making their on demand debut on March 14, along with Australian comedy "Three Blind Mice," Bulgarian noir "Zift" and SXSW '08 alums "Medicine for Melancholy" and "Paper Covers Rock."

On DVD

It's a sign of the times that a serviceable Tommy Lee Jones thriller can sit alongside the latest from Steven Seagal at your local Blockbuster, but "In the Electric Mist" is far more interesting than the actor's paycheck output of the late '90s, even if it is missing

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Stephen Saito

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Oscar Week: The Best Best Actresses

18 February 2009 5:22 PM, PST | From GetTheBigPicture.net | See recent Get The Big Picture news

It's likely that the Oscar has gone to the wrong performance in the Best Actress category more times than it has for Best Actor. You won't find Bette Davis here for All About Eve, or Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard; they were both beaten by Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday.

There's no Shirley Maclaine for The Apartment, no Sigourney Weaver for either good Alien performance, no Angela Bassett for What's Love Got to Do With It?, no Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth, and no Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Just think of how different this list would look only counting those oversights.

But here are our rankings of the best performances to ever win Best Actress. Debate away...

1 - Meryl Streep - Sophie's Choice (1981)

I'll make this really simple. There has never been a better female actor in film than Meryl Streep. Making the argument against it

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Colin Boyd

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2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2004 | 2002 | 2001

1-20 of 37 articles from 2009   « Prev | Next »

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