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The Coens, Justin Timberlake, Carey Mulligan & Oscar Isaac Give Seven Easy Steps to Get To Know 'Llewyn Davis'
15 hours ago
The Coen Bros' re-visit of the early folk music era in New York's Greenwich Village was certainly not lost in translation here in Cannes where it was received with almost universal affirmation earlier this week. "Inside Llewyn Davis" may also mark a turning point for actor Oscar Isaac, who's presence is in virtually every frame of the film; he even gets to show off his musical chops, while carrying the film about an unheralded folk singing talent who attempts to succeed solo after the suicide of his singing partner. Isaac gets a bit of on-screen competition from a feline who may very well upstage the winner of the unofficial Palme Dog prize, which is annually awarded by international film critics (the cat deserves it this year, even if its woof is in the form of a meow!). Also starring Carey Mulligan, John Goodman and Justin Timberlake, the film "doesn't really have a plot, »
- Brian Brooks
Cannes Deals Update: Sundance Selects Nabs 'Young & Beautiful' and 'Blue Is the Warmest Color,' Lionsgate Takes 'Blood Ties,' Starring Cotillard and Owen
16 hours ago
Sundance Selects is acquiring U.S. rights to writer-director François Ozon's competition drama "Young & Beautiful" from Wild Bunch. The coming-of-age film, which received mixed festival reaction, stars Marine Vacth, Geraldine Pailhas, Frederic Pierrot, Fantin Ravat, Johan Leysen and Charlotte Rampling, who also starred in Ozon’s 2003 competition film "Swimming Pool." Sundance Selects’ sister label IFC Films previously released Ozon 's "Angel" and "Ricky." This marks the third acquisition deal during the festival for Sundance Selects, which took Us rights to Abdellatif Kechiche's "Blue Is the Warmest Color," which made its world premiere in competition at the fest this week. The film centers on a lesbian romance between two teenage girls, played by Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos. It is loosely based on Julie Maroh's comic book of the same title. Kechice has previously won Cesars for "The Secret of the Grain" and "Games of Love and Chance. »
- Anne Thompson and Beth Hanna
Watch: New 'Man of Steel' Trailer; How Nolan, Goyer and Snyder Reinvented the Big Blue Boy Scout
18 hours ago
Who knew, when Brandon Routh took on the alien Kal-El in Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns," that fans would split so divisively? The 2006 movie, which paid homage to the Richard Donner "Superman" movies without completely updating the franchise the way Christopher Nolan did with "Batman Begins," grossed $391 million worldwide off strong reviews for a genre sequel. But it cost more than $232 million. Warners felt it could have performed better with more action and a powerful villain--and no Superman kid. So Singer was taken off the franchise. The debate continued to rage about what Warner Bros. should do with the DC Comics super-hero. Fans clamored all over the web for a complete reboot. Warner Bros. motion picture chief Jeff Robinov struggled with what to do. As the last movie didn't break the mold --Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor was very been there, done that--and wound up in some kind of middle limbo, »
- Anne Thompson and Beth Hanna
'Before Midnight' Interview with Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater (Exclusive Video)
19 hours ago
Well, you've been reading about "Before Midnight," the third film in Richard Linklater's trilogy about Celine and Jesse's ongoing romance, since Sundance, and now you finally get to see one of the most delightful and insightful movies of the year. The movie opens Friday. The trio, who could earn a second Oscar nomination for original screenplay, describe their unusual process in our interview below. What's the big whoop about? Anyone who has been through a relationship of any duration will recognize the degree to which Linklater and his co-writers and actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy dig into the essentials of the male/female dynamic. (Joel Stein writes about this in Time.) The Austin-based director ("School of Rock") did something right back in 1995 when he first cast the American actor and French actress as two strangers who meet on a European train and enjoy a brief romantic liaison in Vienna in "Before Sunrise. »
- Anne Thompson
Cannes Market: Weinstein Co. Lands Jeunet's 3D 'Young and Prodigious Spivet,' Olivier Assayas to Helm First Us Film
20 hours ago
More news is coming in from the ever-busy Cannes Market. The Weinstein Company has snapped up the latest Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, 3-D epic "The Young and Prodigious Spivet," while French director Olivier Assayas is set to helm his first Us shoot, true-crime drama "Hubris." -In what will be one of the highest-profiled deals inked at the Cannes Marche this year, the Weinstein Company has picked up Us rights to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's ("Amelie") latest directorial endeavor, the 3D adventure epic "The Young and Prodigious Spivet." Adapted from the novel by Reif Larsen, the English-language tale follows the cross-America adventure of a 12-year-old Montana boy (Kyle Catlett) to receive a prize at Washington D.C.'s Smithsonian Museum. Helena Bonham Carter and Kathy Bates also star. Watch the trailer below. -Meanwhile, the Weinstein Co.'s genre-oriented boutique label Radius has snapped up North American rights to Keanu Reeves' directorial debut "Man of Tai Chi. »
- Beth Hanna
Critics’ Choice Television Award Nominations Led by HBO with 21, Surprising Omissions
21 hours ago
Nominations are in for the third annual Critics’ Choice Television Awards, which will be held the evening of Monday, June 10, 2013 at The Beverly Hilton Hotel. The Broadcast Television Journalists Association (Btja) nominates and votes for the awards. For the first time the show, hosted by "Parks and Recreation" star Retta, will be webcast live on UStream. It's not surprising that usual critics' fave HBO dominated the networks in nominations with 21, but FX came on strong with 19. "American Horror Story: Asylum" (FX) and "The Big Bang Theory" (CBS) led the field with six nominations each, followed by "Parks and Recreation" (NBC) and "Top of the Lake" (Sundance) with five each, and "The Americans" (FX), "Breaking Bad" (AMC), "Game of Thrones" (HBO), "The Good Wife" (CBS), "Louie" (FX), "New Girl" (Fox) and "Political Animals" (USA) with four each. Steven Soderbergh is having a good week as his well-reviewed Cannes competition film "Behind the Candelabra »
- Anne Thompson
Now and Then: Obituary for 'The Big C,' Starring Luminous Laura Linney
22 hours ago
Cathy Jamison was a brave bitch. Through four seasons of Showtime's "The Big C," which ended its run Monday, she suffered the indignities of metastatic melanoma, chemotherapy, brain tumors, hospice, and bad insurance, yet remained steadfast in her belief that "surviving" and "living" do not necessarily amount to the same thing. She will be missed. I'm not spoiling anything by telling you that Cathy eventually succumbed to the disease. Her death was not a plot point. It was, rather, the series' structuring logic: creator Darlene Hunt's sardonic comedy of cancer thrived not on the hope for miracles but on the certainty of death. "Your insides are dying, too," Cathy tells a mall worker who makes a ham-handed effort to sympathize with her plight. "Right now. Every day." A brave bitch -- her words, not mine -- indeed. Like the other women of premium cable in recent years (Nancy Botwin, »
- Matt Brennan
'Only God Forgives': Gosling No-Show at Cannes, Press Conference, Review Roundup
22 hours ago
"Only God Forgives" was unveiled Wednesday morning to the most divisive response at the Cannes festival thus far, and even with the smattering of boos and walkouts we’d hazard a guess that Nicolas Winding Refn couldn’t be more delighted by the reception. As empty, soulless, frenziedly art-directed viewing experiences go, "Only God Forgives" is one of the better examples. At the press conference following the screening, the Danish filmmaker expounded on his ultra-violent, hyper-stylized follow-up to "Drive," which features dismemberments, torture, eye gouging, Kristin Scott Thomas as a trashy, bestial, peroxide-wigged mother who calls her son’s female companion a “cum dumpster” and Gosling as a vaguely sketched mean machine operating in a seedy Thai underworld who makes the "Driver" look like a motormouth. Winding Refn happily admitted to approaching filmmaking “like a pornographer: it’s about what arouses me. Certain things turn me on more than other »
- Matt Mueller
Trailers from Hell: Katt Shea on 'Poison Ivy,' Starring Drew Barrymore as a Teen Femme Fatale
22 hours ago
Femmes Fatales Week! continues at Trailers from Hell with director Katt Shea introducing her own erotic psycho-thriller "Poison Ivy," starring a teenage Drew Barrymore."What Ivy wants, Ivy gets." Depraved teen seductress Barrymore is the houseguest from hell in Tfh Guru Katt Shea's thriller, which didn't pack them in on its limited theatrical release but became a big enough hit on cable and home video to spawn three exploitation-minded sequels. Blink and you'll miss a young Leonardo DiCaprio in a bit part. »
- Trailers From Hell
Cannes Review Roundup: Robert Redford Keeps Things Afloat in Chandor's Dire Existential Adventure 'All Is Lost'
22 hours ago
Reviews are coming in from Cannes for J.C. Chandor's ("Margin Call") second feature, "All Is Lost," a virtually dialogue-free adventure starring Robert Redford as a 70ish man battling the ocean elements solo on his boat. Reactions are largely positive, praising Redford's "tour de force" performance and Chandor's existential direction, while dissenters wish Godspeed to the film's languid pace -- that "a shark attack might put poor Redford out of his misery." Roundup below. Indiewire: J.C. Chandor's flashy directorial debut "Margin Call" contained a complicated plot involving financial turmoil, an ensemble of name actors and numerous locations. His followup, "All Is Lost," takes place at the complete opposite end of the production scale: Robert Redford spends its entire duration fighting for his life while lost at sea, hardly speaking at all, and barely given much definition. While simplistic to describe, however, the movie is an impressively realized work of minimalist storytelling. »
- Beth Hanna
Cannes Fest Diary: Le Weekend, from Compelling 'Jimmy P.' to Toback's Doc and 'Jodorowsky's Dune'
21 May 2013 7:46 PM, PDT
It was a weird, wooly and wet weekend in Cannes. And it began with what has to be one of the stranger ideas ever put forward for a film: “Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian” from Arnaud Desplechin (the wonderful “A Christmas Tale”). Based on a book by French anthropologist/psychotherapist George Deveraux, it’s the more or less true story of a Native American WWII vet, played by Benicio del Toro, who winds up in a military hospital suffering from post-war injuries, real or imagined. When the staff decides the problems are not physical, but don’t have a grasp on the potential mental issues an Indian might face, they call in Deveraux, who is also an expert in Native American culture. I found the film itself quite strange, the imagery flat, the editing choppy, many of the performances unconvincing, some of the relationships unsatisfying. Even the »
- Tom Christie
Boston's Best Dennis Lehane Adapts Beach-Bum Pi Travis McGee for Producer-Star Leonardo DiCaprio
21 May 2013 7:19 PM, PDT
John D. MacDonald’s paperback hero Travis McGee was the protagonist of twenty-one Gold Medal Originals, all with color words in their titles, beginning with "The Deep Blue Good-Bye" in 1964. McGee is a six-foot-plus sun-baked blonde hunk with a heart of gold, a lady-killer with a sentimental streak and a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale. He gets around, but he truly is God's gift. His sexual ministrations can be downright therapeutic for the troubled, abandoned women who seek his services as an unlicensed “salvage consultant,” recovering missing or stolen property in exchange for half its value. As strange as it may sound, we have no particular problem with the recent announcement that Leonardo DiCaprio will be playing McGee, in an upcoming adaptation of "Deep Blue" that Boston-noir novelist Dennis Lehane ("Gone Baby Gone") is currently writing. Clearly DiCaprio has a potential franchise in his sights. Leo may be slightly less apt »
- David Chute
Casting Watch: Angelina Jolie May Play Her Late Mother, Actress and Charity Founder Marcheline Bertrand, in Biopic
21 May 2013 12:34 PM, PDT
Following last week's news that Angelina Jolie underwent a preventative double mastectomy to drastically lower her likelihood of developing breast cancer, Brit tabloid The Daily Mail has reported that Jolie will play her mother actress and charity founder Marcheline Bertrand, in a biopic based on her life. Bertrand died in 2007 at age 56 to cancer, and Jolie sites the traumatic loss of her mother as a reason behind her recent medical procedure. No further details on the project at the moment, but if true, The Mail reports that it could go into production in 2014. In the upcoming pipeline, Jolie has Disney's "Maleficent" in 2014, in which she plays the title role of the nefarious evil witch originated in 1959's animated "Sleeping Beauty." In costume and makeup, Jolie is a ringer for the part. "Salt 2" has been announced, in which Jolie also plays the eponymous lead, and a "Kung Fu Panda 3" is in the works, »
- Beth Hanna
Interview: Brit Marling Writes and Toplines Anarchist Thriller 'The East,' "an action film for a girl" (Exclusive Video)
21 May 2013 12:29 PM, PDT
Brit Marling is a fascinating example of a brainy talent who in 2009 turned her back on the financial security of Wall Street to follow her yen to make movies. She and her Georgetown buddy Zal Batmanglij, while they were unable to get work in film, spent that first summer trawling around the country with backpacks living off the grid with anarchist collectives, direct action groups and freegans, dumpster diving and train hopping, which later became rich fodder for their current film, their second together, the terrorist thriller "The East." See our flipcam interview and trailer below. After co-directing a 2004 documentary with Mike Cahill ("Boxers and Ballerinas"), Marling broke out at Sundance 2011 as the co-writer-producer-star of two provocatively watchable indie features directed by Georgetown grads, Cahill's haunting sci-fi film "Another Earth" and Batmanglij's "The Sound of My Voice," in which she held the screen as a mesmerizing cult leader. The films proved yet again that. »
- Anne Thompson
Cannes: James Toback Talks 'Seduced and Abandoned,' Double Act with Alec Baldwin on the Croisette and More
21 May 2013 11:47 AM, PDT
Last year, James Toback descended on Cannes with cohort Alec Baldwin to shoot the documentary "Seduced and Abandoned." This year, Toback is in town to screen the film and discuss its contents with interested parties. Of which I am one, having thoroughly relished his supremely entertaining and frequently illuminating portrait of the sorry state of the film business today. If "Seduced and Abandoned" meanders and strays off course throughout, it matters not a jot because Toback and Baldwin form a magnificent double act, and the talent they’ve rounded up to spout off includes Bertolucci, Scorsese, Polanski, Coppola, Chastain and Gosling. They all prove willing accomplices for Baldwin and Toback’s canny probing, yielding endlessly fascinating nuggets about the industry and their own careers. The nuts and bolts of the doc, though, are Baldwin and Toback’s efforts to raise the financing for a fictional (we think) sex romp to »
- Matt Mueller
Cannes: First Clip from 'Max Rose,' Marking Jerry Lewis' Return to Movies After 18 Years (Video)
21 May 2013 10:27 AM, PDT
Check out this first clip from writer-director Daniel Noah's "Max Rose," which premieres at Cannes on May 23 and marks the big-screen return of legendary comedian Jerry Lewis. The film centers on an octogenarian jazz pianist (Lewis) who discovers an unsettling secret upon his wife's death. Claire Bloom ("The King's Speech"), Kevin Pollak ("The Usual Suspects") and Kerry Bishe ("Argo") also star. This is Noah's second feature film, following 2001's "Twelve." Though he's done the occasional TV and voice actor work over the past two decades, Lewis' last onscreen role was in 1995's "Funny Bones." The film should go over swimmingly at Cannes, as the country's love for Lewis is so well-known it's long been the stuff of cultural jokes. Lewis recently told the Hollywood Reporter that when he arrives in Paris, "the front page of the biggest paper says, 'Jerry Is Here.'" Here's a more detailed synopsis:87-year-old »
- Beth Hanna
Review Roundup: Critics Go Ga-Ga for Soderbergh's Outrageously Mesmerizing 'Behind the Candelabra'
21 May 2013 9:51 AM, PDT
Critics are over the glittering, bedazzled moon for Steven Soderbergh's Cannes competition entry "Behind the Candelabra," set to premiere on HBO on May 26 and starring a no-holds-barred Michael Douglas and Matt Damon as the famed pianist Liberace and his younger lover, Scott Thorson. The Telegraph refers to it as a "gay Pygmalion myth: call it My Fair Laddie," while the Guardian raves that "the film is mesmeric, riskily incorrect, outrageously watchable and simply outrageous." Roundup below. The Hollywood Reporter:Behind the Candelabra is fabulous -- so much so that, were it not for the fact that it reveals everything about his private life that he worked so hard to conceal, Liberace himself might well have loved it. The big screen’s loss is HBO’s gain in what is billed as Steven Soderbergh’s farewell to the cinema, at least for the time being. Superbly scripted, brilliantly directed, smart but »
- Beth Hanna
Review: Rama Burshtein's Luminous 'Fill the Void' Looks at the Strange, Painful Romance of Choice
21 May 2013 3:05 AM, PDT
Rama Burshtein’s “Fill the Void,” Israel’s official Oscar entry earlier this year, is set in the Haredi Orthodox Jewish community in Tel Aviv. It focuses on one young woman’s turbulent experiences with traditional matchmaking -- a custom which, it should be noted, differs from arranged marriage, and is abundantly foreign to many of us Westerners. Yet Burshtein renders a portrait that is universal: of the necessity of choice, and its connection to putting away childish things. Everything’s going well for 18-year-old Shira (Hadas Yaron). She’s been matched for marriage with a boy who sets butterflies aflutter in her tummy, at least upon her first fleeting glance of him in the dairy section of her local grocery store, and her sister, Esther, is pregnant with her first child. But when the unthinkable happens and Esther dies during childbirth, Shira is left at emotional -- and social -- loose ends. »
- Beth Hanna
Cannes Review: Douglas and Damon Shine in Soderbergh's Funny, Poignant Melodrama 'Behind the Candelabra'
21 May 2013 1:30 AM, PDT
The Cannes Film Festival accorded Steven Soderbergh's lush period melodrama "Behind the Candelabra" a prime competition slot (his fourth) for a reason. While it's not the first time an HBO movie has played in the mainbar (Stephen Hopkins' "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" was in competition in 2004), it will be Soderbergh's last, if he sticks to his planned retirement from making films. With "Behind the Candelabra," the 50 year-old filmmaker is coming full circle at Cannes. He landed in competition with his first film in 1989, "sex lies and videotape," even though it had played Sundance, and took home the Palme d'Or. "It's not often you get the opportunity to arrange that kind of symmetry," Soderbergh told The Huffington Post. "It's funny to think about how long ago that was." If "Behind the Candelabra" is his final film, it's a winner, easily among the best of his 26 features »
- Anne Thompson
Cannes Review: James Franco's 'As I Lay Directing'
20 May 2013 11:35 PM, PDT
Back in her “Pretty Women” days, I interviewed the young Julia Roberts and at one point she mentioned her dog, which she called Faulkner. Well, that’s one way to add some intellectual heft to your resume. Is it so different with James Franco? He says he loved the book when he first read it back in high school. Well, I loved a girl named Becky but I didn’t make a film about her. Honestly, I root for James Franco, but he exhausts with his incessant need to produce every little thought into something for our consumption. His recent art exhibition in Berlin included some fairly lame paintings he did in college of his high school yearbook photos; you know, things like sitting on the bleachers at a swim meet. Yes, of course that’s better than the guy who sits on his ass and never produces anything. Although »
- Tom Christie
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