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The Academy Awards have been handing out a Best Actress trophy since the very first ceremony in 1928. Janet Gaynor for a combo of 7th Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans was the first recipient for his leading roles.

Since then, only one woman has won the category four times: Katharine Hepburn for Morning Glory, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, and On Golden Pond. Next with three is Frances McDormand. The ladies with two lead wins have included Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Jodie Foster, Glenda Jackson, Vivien Leigh, Luise Rainer, Emma Stone, Meryl Streep, and Hilary Swank. Streep holds the record of most lead nominations at 17.

The oldest winner was Jessica Tandy (Driving Miss Daisy) at age 80. The oldest nominee was Emmanuelle Riva (Amour) at age 85. The youngest winner was Marlee Matlin (Children of a Lesser...

We have ourselves a race! The Oscar contests for Best Actor and Best Actress got especially interesting at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday because the winners disagreed with another industry peer group honor, the BAFTA Awards. But who tends to win the Oscar under those circumstances, the SAG winner, the BAFTA winner, or someone else entirely?

SEE2025 Oscars race scorecard: 'Conclave,' Timothée Chalamet pull off SAG Awards wins while Demi Moore rebounds

Let's start with Best Actress, where Demi Moore (The Substance) won the SAG Award while Mikey Madison (Anora) won BAFTA. This is the fifth year in a row that the two awards diverged. Let's break down all those disagreements year by year.

2023: Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) won SAG, Emma Stone (Poor Things) won BAFTA — Oscar went to the BAFTA winner.

2022: Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once) won SAG,...

The SAG Awards are shaping up to be a showdown between some of Hollywood’s biggest comeback stories and the next generation of breakout stars.

On one side are the resurgence narratives — like lead contenders Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”) and Demi Moore (“The Substance”). They’re joined by supporting nominees Edward Norton (“A Complete Unknown”) and Zoe Saldaña (“Emilia Pérez”), who many feel are overdue for recognition. On the other side are Hollywood’s rising stars — the fresh faces poised to define the industry’s future. Think Timothée Chalamet and Mikey Madison in the lead races, with Kieran Culkin and Ariana Grande gaining traction in supporting roles.

Brody, now 51, became the youngest best actor Oscar winner for his tour de force performance in “The Pianist” (2002). But after that early triumph, his career took an uneven path, and he didn’t ride the momentum to further Oscar glory. Now, his critically...

Spoiler alert: The crazy, unpredictable Oscar season? Still crazy. Still unpredictable.

Fresh off a one-two punch weekend where “Anora” cleaned up at the PGA and DGA Awards, the BAFTAs decided to stir the pot with their own take on the race. If history tells us anything, it’s that BAFTA can be either a crystal ball or a red herring.

In 2024, every BAFTA winner (except for visual effects) went on to win the Oscar, making it the most predictive year in recent memory. The year before, however, BAFTA charted its own path — only “Everything Everywhere All at Once” editor Paul Rogers repeated at the Oscars. So, with the final Oscar voting closing on Tuesday, Feb. 18, let’s break down the key takeaways from BAFTA’s curveballs and what they could mean for Hollywood’s biggest night.

Carlos Diehz stars as Cardinal Benitez in director Edward Berger’s Conclave, a Focus Features release.

Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour is a cinematic masterpiece. There’s no way to deny that fact. Its debut at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival was met with instant acclaim, and it’s since become a go-to film for both casual and academic research. However, it’s generally categorized as either a drama or romance film.

And — admittedly — neither designation is wrong. On its face, Hiroshima Mon Amour is the dictionary definition of romance. Its 90-minute runtime revolves entirely around an extramarital love affair between a Japanese man and a French actress. Similarly, its meandering and borderline abstract narrative style is packed with emotional drama. However, neither of these facts should cross this pioneering black-and-white piece off a war film buff’s must-see list.

Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour Blends Two Age-Old Genres

Iranian director Bahman Pour-Azar released an “updated” version of the film, Where or When, to reflect growing global tensions.

Margaret Menegoz, the head of French production company Les Films du Losange, who produced the movies of Michael Hanke, Wim Wenders and Éric Rohmer, among others, has died. She was 83.

The company issued a statement confirming that Menegoz died in Montpellier on August 7. They cited her “love of films and work, and her loyalty to her filmmakers that have become the hallmarks of Les Films du Losange,” describing Menegoz as “open-minded towards Europe and the international scene, which she particularly cherished.”

Menegoz led Les Films du Losange for close to 50 years, taking over at the company in 1973. She produced more than 60 films, including Haneke’s Amour, The White Ribbon and Cache, Wenders’ 1977 feature The American Friend, Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love (1984), Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa (1990), Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime (1990) and A Tale of Winter (1992), among many others.

Amour received 5 Oscar nominations in 2013, including a nomination for Menegoz for best feature.

Margaret Menegoz, who led iconic French film company Les Films du Losange for close to 50 years, producing the films of Éric Rohmer, Michael Haneke and Wim Wenders among others, has died at the age of 83.

The German and French film producer was born in Hungary in 1941. Her family, which was of German origin, was expelled from the country in the wake of the 1945 Siege of Budapest, and Menegoz grew up in Germany.

Menegoz entered the film industry as an editor and then connected with the French independent filmmaking scene via her documentarian husband Robert Menegoz, who she met at the Berlin Film Festival in the early 1970s.

She took the reins of Les Films du Losange in 1975, having been originally hired as an assistant on co-founder Rohmer’s 1976 German-language film Marquise Of O, co-starring Edith Clever and Bruno Ganz.

Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder had created the company in 1962, but with...

For the fourth consecutive year, we’ve got a firecracker of a Best Actress Oscar race. Lily Gladstone took home the Screen Actors Guild Award on Saturday for “Killers of the Flower Moon” over Emma Stone, who had been on a roll since the two won their respective Golden Globes, having pocketed the Critics Choice and BAFTA Awards for “Poor Things.” Now they each have an industry prize and Best Actress feels like a coin-flip. Gladstone has closed the gap on Stone in the Oscar odds since Saturday. Don’t be surprised if she overtakes the top spot soon. But when the SAG Awards and BAFTAs don’t align in Best Actress, which one has the edge at the Oscars?

Since BAFTA became an Oscar precursor 23 years ago, the Brits and the actors guilds have disagreed 13 times in the category prior to the Battle of the Stones. But not all splits are created equally.

Once upon an awards season, Lily Gladstone looked to be the Oscar frontrunner for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Then, she switched categories and was many experts’ tips to win Best Actress instead. Now, however, her status as Oscar favorite has dwindled — with an omission at the BAFTAs contributing to that.

Instead, Emma Stone looks like she might take home her second Best Actress Oscar for “Poor Things” after she won her first in 2017 for “La La Land.” Stone will surely cement that status with a predicted win at the BAFTAs, where she is nominated alongside Fantasia Barrino (“The Color Purple”), Sandra Hüller (“Anatomy of a Fall”), Carey Mulligan (“Maestro”), Vivian Oparah (“Rye Lane”), and Margot Robbie (“Barbie”).

Stone is the overwhelming favorite to win this BAFTA award and she sits top of our BAFTA odds chart for this category with Hüller in second.

After premiering at the Venice Film Festival, Netflix’s awards season pony “Maestro,” the Leonard Bernstein biopic from sophomore director Bradley Cooper, in which he also stars, is gearing up for its next major stop at the New York Film Festival on Monday.

Ahead of its New York bow, the streamer invited a small group of journalists and friends of the Bernstein family to the Academy Museum on Tuesday night in Los Angeles. The famed composer’s daughters, Jamie Bernstein and Nina Maria Felicia Bernstein, introduced the screening, followed by an intimate discussion with some of the filmmaking team, including Oscar-nominated producer Kristie Macosko Krieger (“The Fabelmans”) and three-time nominated sound mixer Steven Morrow.

Read: Variety’s Awards Circuit for the latest Oscars predictions in all categories.

“Maestro” follows Bernstein through decades of creating music and teaching while he’s married to Felicia Montealegre, played fiercely by Carey Mulligan.

The...

Next time someone wistfully insists, “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” why not point that nostalgic cinephile to the work of Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon? The Belgium-based creative couple are almost single-handedly keeping the classic burlesque tradition alive on-screen — if the word “single-handedly” can fairly be used to describe a near-silent comic duo with four hands between them, plus a growing company of collaborators (including dancer Kaori Ito) and a prosthetic arm with a mind of its own.

In “The Falling Star,” Abel and Gordon bring their old-school comedic sensibility to what could loosely be described as a detective story, told in a film noir style punctuated with flashes of color: a red dress, a tiny green car, a bright yellow scooter. Centered on a tiny Brussels bar, the pair’s relatively minor new project features a missing persons investigation, a sorta-kinda kidnapping, a fugitive couple...

Films about the end of the world are nothing new. But films about the real end of the world–the moments in human history that seem to have put us on an inevitable path toward our own self-destruction–are less frequent. In the 1950s, as the Cold War took hold and the threat of nuclear war escalated, most of the films that came out dealt with it in terms of metaphor, usually sci-fi ones, like giant irradiated lizards and insects standing in for hydrogen bombs.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer addresses one of those moments in history head-on, giving us not just a glimpse into the tormented mind of the “father of the atomic bomb,” but a you-are-there, immersive front row seat to the very moment in which the first bomb was detonated and the end of the human race came into clear view, starting with what many now consider to...

Recently Gold Derby revisited each of Jennifer Lawrence‘s four Oscar nominations to coincide with the release of her new movie, “No Hard Feelings.” Today we’ll go more in depth on her road to winning Best Actress for “Silver Linings Playbook” back in 2012. That win made her the second youngest Best Actress (at age 22) in Oscar history, only behind Marlee Matlin, who was 21 when she prevailed for “Children of a Lesser God” in 1986.

SEERevisiting ‘Cleopatra’: The epic love story of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton

In this film adaptation of Matthew Quick‘s 2008 novel of the same name, Lawrence plays Tiffany, a young widow who meets Pat Solitano Jr. (Bradley Cooper), a man with bipolar disorder, leading to an unlikely romance. The movie was written and directed by David O. Russell, who was coming off of receiving his first Oscar nom for helming 2010’s “The Fighter,” which won...

One of this summer’s most anticipated comedies is the R-rated “No Hard Feelings” starring Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence. The Sony Pictures film opens June 23, 2023 and promises a change of pace for the actress best known for her dramas, like “Winter’s Bone,” “Joy” and last year’s “Causeway.” Much of her work brought her Academy Award nominations in the previous decade, so with “No Hard Feelings” on the horizon, let’s look back at Lawrence’s four exciting Oscar races.

Her first Academy Award nomination came in 2010 in the Best Actress category for her dramatic performance in “Winter’s Bone,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and became the little indie that could throughout the rest of the year. She had appeared in a few movie and TV projects before this one, but “Winter’s Bone” was the movie that put the young actress on the map.

Lawrence showed up at...

Bernard-Henri Lévy with Sergiy Kyslytsya (Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine and Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the United Nations) and Nicolas de Rivière (Ambassador Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations) with Ukrainian soldiers at the Slava Ukraini première Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the second instalment with Bernard-Henri Lévy we discuss war films, including Rémy Ourdan’s The Siege, André Malraux’s Espoir: Sierra de Teruel, and Terre d’Espagne by Joris Ivens; Chernobyl, quoting a line by Emmanuelle Riva in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, screenplay by Marguerite Duras, and chapters five, nine, and twelve of Slava Ukraini, co-directed with Marc Roussel (produced by François Margolin with associate producer Emily Hamilton and advisor Gilles Hertzog).

Bernard-Henri Lévy with Nicolas de Rivière and Sergiy Kyslytsya at the United Nations Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

At the United Nations in New York inside the Eocsoc Chamber on the evening of May 4, Nicolas de Rivière,...

The 2023 Oscar nominees for Best Supporting Actor are Brendan Gleeson (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), Brian Tyree Henry (“Causeway”), Judd Hirsch (“The Fabelmans”), Barry Keoghan (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), and Ke Huy Quan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”). Our odds currently show Quan (31/10) triumphing, followed in order of likelihood by Gleeson (4/1), Keoghan (4/1), Hirsch (9/2), and Henry (9/2).

Hirsch is the only returning nominee among the five, as he was previously recognized for his featured turn in “Ordinary People” in 1981. He is the 74th man to earn at least two supporting notices and the sixth to be added to that list in the last five years after Mahershala Ali, Sam Rockwell, Anthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt, and J. K. Simmons. The 42-year gap between his first and second bids is the largest for any performer across any of the lead or supporting categories. The previous record holder was Henry Fonda, who won Best Actor for...

It’s “Everything Everywhere’s” world — we just live in it.

Last weekend, the PGA and SAG awards gave the final clues to which films and performances might be the victors at the 95th Academy Awards. All evidence points to A24’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which won both ceremonies.

With final Oscar voting running March 2-7, the race is still impossible to call in several categories, notably some acting ones. However, best picture and director are locked in for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s multiverse sensation. Assuming a likely WGA victory at Saturday’s ceremony, the movie will be the first to win all the major guilds — PGA, DGA, SAG and WGA — since “Argo” (2012). No film has ever lost best picture with all four behind it.

PGA is one of the most crucial awards to land on the way to the Oscar statuette. That’s because the...

The 76th BAFTAs take place on Sunday, February 19 at the Royal Festival Hall with Richard E. Grant hosting. Germany’s ‘”All Quiet on the Western Front” leads with 14 nominations, followed by 10 for “The Banshees of Inisherin” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and nine for “Elvis.”

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts was founded in April 1947 as the British Film Academy by luminaries including David Lean, Carol Reed, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Lean was named chairman of the awards that would “recognize those which had contributed outstanding creative work towards the advancement of British film.” Eleven years later, the British Film Academy merged with the Guild of Television Producers and Directors.

The first awards were handed out on May 29, 1949 at the Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square to honor films released in Britain in 1947-48. Best Picture went to William Wyler’s 1946 release “The Best Years of Our Lives,...

The following article is reprinted from The Many Rantings of John with his permission. We have attempted to lure him to joining The Film Experience but we had to share this wonderful stat-fascinating piece! You should also follow him on Letterboxd. (Consider this piece a companion of sorts to Chris's piece on statistically who might still be vulnerable despite love from the precursors)

Sipping Oscar tea

by John T.

Every year since 2006 at least one nominee for the Oscars was not highlighted by either the HFPA (the Golden Globes) or SAG-AFTRA, and becomes the "shock" of the morning.  At this point in the season, predicting the Oscars is something of a slog because so much is "decided" so trying to guess who will be this nominee becomes quite fun.  

Here are the people from the past ten years who fit this bill:

2021: Penelope Cruz, Jesse Plemons, Jk Simmons, Judi Dench,...

Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front earned 14 BAFTA Award nominations on Thursday morning in London, including one for Best Film. The other Best Film nominees are Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere all at Once and Todd Field’s Tár.

The following photo gallery includes BAFTA Awards Best Film winners from 1990, starting with Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas through last year’s winner, The Power of the Dog, from Jane Campion.

Some notable BAFTA highlights:

Most awards won by a single film: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), with nine wins.

Most nominations received by a single film: Gandhi (1982), with 16 nominations.

Most nominations without winning an award: Women in Love (1969) and Finding Neverland (2004), with 11 nominations each.

Oldest person to win an award: Emmanuelle Riva winning Best Actress in a Leading Role for Amour (84 years old).

Youngest...

Celebrated actor was married three times, loved motor racing.

Jean-Louis Trintignant, a leading light of the French New Wave who broke out in Claude Lelouch’s A Man And A Woman and later in life starred in Michael Haneke’s Amour, has died. He was 91.

According to Agence France-Presse Trintignant died on Friday (June 17) at his home in the southern region of Gard. His wife Marianne Hoepfner was with him.

Trintignant was born on December 11 1930 in the southern Vaucluse region to businessman Raoul and Claire. As a shy man in his 20s – his personality would inform a personal aversion to...

French film great Jean-Louis Trintignant, best known for his roles in “A Man and a Woman,” “Z,” and “The Conformist,” died Friday. He was 91.

Trintignant died at his home in southern France, his wife, Marianne, and agent told the Agence France-Presse.

Trintignant was more recently known for roles in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Red” and for starring opposite Emmanuelle Riva in Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” winner of the 2013 Oscar for best foreign film.

Taciturn and enigmatic, the “reluctant” actor, who came by his profession by accident and several times announced he was quitting, returned time and again to appear in more than 100 films and achieve international stardom over of a period of more than 40 years working with some of the world’s great directors including Claude Chabrol, Abel Gance, Bernardo Bertolucci, Costa-Gavras, Ettore Scola and Francois Truffaut, as well as Kieslowski and Haneke.

Though he claimed to prefer racing cards, he once told an interviewer,...

Jean-Louis Trintignant, a French actor known for art house classics like “The Conformist,” “Z,” “My Night at Maud’s” and more recently the Palme d’Or winner “Amour,” has died. He was 91.

Trintignant died in his home Friday in the Gard region of Southern France, his wife Marianne told the French press agency. He had announced in 2018 a diagnosis for prostate cancer.

Considered one of the best French actors of his generation, Trintignant was an international star who worked with auteurs from Costa-Gavras, Éric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut, Michael Haneke, Claude Chabrol, Bernardo Bertolucci and Krzystof Kieslowski throughout his career across over 130 films. He also had a career as a French race car driver and a filmmaker.

Also Read:

French President Emmanuel Macron Pays Tribute to Journalist Frederic Leclerc-Imhoff Who Was Killed in Ukraine

Trintignant started his career on stage in the early ’50s and first gained attention in one of his first screen roles,...

Jean-Louis Trintignant is dead at 91. The French actor assembled as diverse a career as any film performer of the second half of the 20th century, with a 60-year output that all but came to define arthouse cinema.

Just in the past decade, he broke cinephiles’ hearts with his devastating turn in Michael Haneke’s 2012 film “Amour,” in which he played a husband caring for his Alzheimer’s-suffering wife. Playing his spouse in that film was Emmanuelle Riva, herself one of the pioneering actors of the French New Wave. Their collaboration was perhaps the last truly great one of Trintignant’s career, in which so many partnerships resulted in deeply emotional artistry. Trintignant followed up “Amour” with another Haneke film, 2017’s “Happy End.”

Trintignant was an actor with matinee idol looks in his youth, but he always put the work before his own vanity. Just look at a fraction of the...

The French veteran, who starred in some of the finest new wave films and won the best actor César for the end-of-life drama Amour, has died aged 91

Jean-Louis Trintignant had a long and distinguished career on stage and screen, but his cinema presence was never stronger or fiercer than in old age. In later characterisations he projected with renewed force a natural keen intelligence, an uningratiating manner and air of being politely, or not so politely, disgusted with the moral vacuities and hypocrisy of everything around him, together with his own tragic and passionate sense of loss.

All of these themes were present in the role which was arguably his greatest: Georges, the elderly retired music teacher in Michael Haneke’s Amour, whose wife Anne (unforgettably played by Emmanuelle Riva) suffers a stroke, and having promised he would never put her in a home, Georges looks after her as best...

Fifteen years have passed since Penélope Cruz broke new ground as the first Spanish woman to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Although her performance in Pedro Almodóvar’s Spanish-language film “Volver” was passed over in favor of Helen Mirren’s in “The Queen,” she bounced back two years later by triumphing in the supporting category for “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” Now, based on her work in Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers” (their seventh collaboration), she may have another shot at lead glory. If she does land in the lineup, she will join an exclusive club as the fifth leading lady to be recognized for two non-English language performances.

The first woman to accomplish this feat was Sophia Loren, who was nominated for “Marriage Italian Style” (1965) after winning for “Two Women” (1962). Both are Italian-language films directed by Vittorio De Sica. After losing on her second outing to Julie Andrews (“Mary Poppins...

“I can’t deny the fact that you like me!” exclaimed Sally Field after winning the Best Actress Oscar for “Places in the Heart” at the 57th Academy Awards in 1985. Just five years prior to that memorable speech she had won for “Norma Rae,” but said she could barely feel it because “it was all so new.”

This year our Oscar nominations odds include eight leading contenders for Best Actress who could earn their own bookend. Five of them already have at least one Best Actress Oscar on their mantle while two took home the supporting award and one won for songwriting.

Olivia Colman (“The Lost Daughter”)

Colman won Best Actress for playing Queen Anne in “The Favourite.” At the ceremony in 2019 she defeated Yalitza Aparicio (“Roma”), Glenn Close (“The Wife”), Lady Gaga (“A Star is Born”) and Melissa McCarthy (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”).

Nicole Kidman (“Being the Ricardos...

Jessica Chastain has been nominated twice at the Oscars without winning, but the Critics Choice Awards had her back when they gave her Best Actress for “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012). She’s nominated again this year for playing the title role in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” Can she win again and this time ride that wave to her first Oscar win?

See‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ director Michael Showalter on ‘looking past the surface’ and not judging a book by its cover [Exclusive Video Interview]

“Zero Dark Thirty” was hailed by film journalists at the time, winning Chastain awards from multiple regional critics groups across the country as well as that Critics Choice prize, but momentum shifted when industry peer groups weighed in. Emmanuelle Riva (“Amour”) won at the BAFTAs, and Jennifer Lawrence (“Silver Linings Playbook”) took SAG and Oscar.

The good news for Chastain is that if she wins Critics Choice again,...

It looks like Penelope Cruz could get her fourth Oscar nomination with the help of the filmmaker who got her her very first. As of this writing the Expert journalists we’ve surveyed from major media outlets rank her third in the race for Best Actress for “Parallel Mothers,” the latest film from Pedro Almodovar, who directed her to a Best Actress bid for “Volver” 15 years ago. That now puts her ahead of Lady Gaga (“House of Gucci”) and Jennifer Hudson (“Respect”) and right behind front-runner Kristen Stewart (“Spencer”) and strong challenger Jessica Chastain (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”).

In “Volver” (2006), Cruz played Raimunda, whose late mother returns from the dead with unfinished business. After that awards breakthrough she won Best Supporting Actress for “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (2008) and was nominated again for Best Supporting Actress for the movie musical “Nine” (2009), so she racked up all three of her nominations in...

If Jean-Paul Belmondo had gotten his way, he would have been a stage actor. He applied to the Conservatoire de Paris three times before the illustrious drama school accepted him and spent the 1950s trying to launch a theater career.

Lucky for world cinema, Belmondo had greater success on screen, thanks to his role in 1960’s “Breathless,” the movie that launched the French New Wave — and instantly rendered everything Hollywood had been doing old-fashioned. In “Breathless,” Belmondo wasn’t playing a gangster so much as someone who had seen too many gangster movies, a self-styled tough guy who took Humphrey Bogart as his model. His crime spree feels more improvised than scripted, while his doesn’t-care, screw-society attitude effectively thumbed its nose at all the good reasons on-screen criminals had used to justify their actions before.

Godard’s film made Belmondo the face of the New Wave — a handsome mug...

Two internationally-acclaimed documentaries from the Nordic region – “Flee” and “Gunda” – are among the five films nominated for a Nordic Council Film Prize.

This is the most prestigious film award in the Nordic region, celebrating films with unique artistic visions that actively engage with Nordic culture. It’s the eighteenth year the Nordic Council Film Prize is awarded, and the winner will be announced on Nov. 2 in Copenhagen, taking home a prize of Dkk 300,000 to be shared equally among the screenwriter, director, and producer. Here are the five film nominations:

“Flee,” (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Denmark)

Co-written by Amin (a pseudonym), and produced by leading Danish company Final Cut for Reel (nominated for an Oscar for both “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence”), the film has already had a hugely successful festival circuit run. At Sundance, it won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary section, while...

As usual, Gaspar Noe kept us waiting. The director’s latest film, Vortex, was the last film to arrive in the projection rooms and the last to play in any of the official sections (the newly-created Cannes Premiere sidebar), the final gasp of a film festival that made it over the finish line wheezing and exhausted but triumphant.

It also started 50 minutes late, after Bill Murray refused to leave the stage from the preceding musical event screening. So it was nearly midnight when Cannes boss Thierry Fremaux announced there had only been 70 positive Covid tests throughout the festival – meaning movie theaters are, after all, safe spaces – and then introduced the attending celebrities, who included Tilda Swinton and Asia Argento as well the unlikely stars of Vortex, Italian horror director Dario Argento and nouvelle vague legend Francoise LeBrun. And, of course, Noe himself.

With “Vortex,” the controversial Argentinian who usually focuses his Cannes premieres on sex,...

The Academy Awards have been handing out a Best Actress trophy since the very first ceremony in 1928. Janet Gaynor for a combo of “7th Heaven,” “Street Angel” and “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” was the first recipient for his leading roles. The most recent champ was Renee Zellweger for “Judy.”

Since then, only one woman has won the category four times: Katharine Hepburn for “Morning Glory,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “The Lion in Winter” and “On Golden Pond.” The ladies with two lead wins have included Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Jodie Foster, Glenda Jackson, Vivien Leigh, Frances McDormand, Luise Rainer, Meryl Streep and Hilary Swank. Streep holds the record of most lead nominations at 17.

The oldest winner was Jessica Tandy (“Driving Miss Daisy”) at age 80. The oldest nominee was Emmanuelle Riva (“Amour”) at age 85. The youngest winner was Marlee Matlin (“Children of a Lesser God...

The Mole Agent director Maite Alberdi with Anne-Katrin Titze on her composer Vincent van Warmerdam: “He took the reference of film noir and really adapted it to the emotion of the film and the tone of the film in the soft humour.”

Maite Alberdi’s Oscar-nominated Best Documentary Feature The Mole Agent (El Agente Topo), produced by Marcela Santibáñez, shot by Pablo Valdés with a perfect score from Vincent van Warmerdam, and a wonderful dance scene to The Platters’ Only You (And You Alone) was also shortlisted as Chile’s submission in the International Feature Film category. A highlight of last year’s New Directors/New Films, Alberdi’s immensely entertaining and wildly funny film starts out as an investigation into a specific place and slowly evolves into something much larger. Bruno Dumont’s films may come to mind - all that humanity is breathtaking!

Rómulo (Rómulo Aitken) with...

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It’s hard to think of a cinematic movement more influential, and instantly recognizable, than the French New Wave. In the late 1950s, a group of young writers for the French publication “Cahiers du Cinéma” began to question the safe, compromising choices made by filmmakers and demand something more daring and honest. Many of these writers, including the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, became filmmakers themselves. And the results were extraordinary.

Happy endings and sentimentality were replaced with stripped down, meandering plots with conclusions that were often unsatisfying. Many films used nonlinear storytelling, packing a stronger emotional punch by utilizing techniques that shocked the world. Slick production values were often abandoned,...

When we’re young, it’s natural — even necessary — to imagine that we’ll eventually grow into ourselves. Someday. Today we’re new and unsure, but tomorrow we’ll be old and inhabit our skin with the confidence of someone who’s been sewn inside of it for a lifetime. We’ll have the wisdom to understand how we got there, the permission to do whatever our bodies will still let us, and the imperative not to lie about who we are. And yet, those pieces don’t just fall into place on their own; they aren’t automatically conferred upon people of a certain age like wrinkles or social security benefits or the unsolicited subscription to AARP Magazine that every American finds shoved into their mailbox one day like an appointment reminder from the Grim Reaper. On the contrary, such dividends are often earned through difficult choices — if not choices about who you are,...

Laetitia Dosch is sensational as a lecturer passionately embroiled with Sergei Polunin’s reptilian Russian diplomat

The French-Swiss actor Laetitia Dosch lavishes all her underappreciated star quality on this insouciantly explicit movie about amour fou and erotic obsession, adapted by the director Danielle Arbid from the 1991 novel by Annie Ernaux.

Dosch plays Hélène, a university lecturer in Paris, divorced with a young son, who has fallen passionately in love with an icily sexy, dead-eyed and tattooed young Russian diplomat called Alexandre, played by Ukrainian-born ballet star Sergei Polunin. When he is not driving too fast while buzzing from Scotch in his top-of-the-range Audi and giving Hélène top-of-the-range orgasms, Alexandre has a habit of not returning her pitifully submissive voicemails. He casually leaves her waiting in the midday hotel room where they’d agreed to meet in all her brand new La Perla lingerie, while he disappears back to Moscow to...

“It’s an honor just to be nominated” is the overused line that many Oscar nominees have said over the years, particularly after a loss. Though that’s true, winning a coveted statuette is the real prize.

The highest-profile overdue veteran actor competing for an Oscar this season is Glenn Close, the wisecracking Mamaw in Ron Howard’s “Hillbilly Elegy.” With seven previous nominations (the most of any living actor without a win), Close, who has delivered win-worthy turns in “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Fatal Attraction” looks to finally have her moment. Her most recent loss, for 2018’s “The Wife” to Olivia Colman in “The Favourite,” was felt in awards enthusiast circles. With what seems a thin roster of supporting actress contenders this year, Close is in the running once again, looking to go against Colman’s work in “The Father.”

Close’s co-star Amy Adams is playing the same card this year in “Hillbilly Elegy.

The best actress race is full of veterans this year, with the likes of Meryl Streep, Michelle Pfeiffer and Ellen Burstyn all vying for Oscar attention. Joining the list is Sophia Loren, one of the most prolific actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age, in Edoardo Ponti’s “The Life Ahead.”

The Oscar-winning Italian actor landed her gold statuette for “Two Women” (“La ciociara”) in 1962, which made her the first actor to win an Academy Award for a foreign-language film. She put up one more nomination in 1965 for “Marriage Italian Style” (“Matrimonio all’italiana”) and if she manages a nomination for “The Life Ahead,” a new record could emerge. In 2021, it will mark 56 years since her last nomination, and if nominated, she will break the record currently held by Henry Fonda as the longest gap between acting nominations. Fonda was nominated in 1941 for “The Grapes of Wrath” and he won the Oscar in 1982 for “On Golden Pond,...

Belmondo and Melville is showing April and May, 2020 on Mubi in the United States.In 1961 Jean-Pierre Melville released Léon Morin, Priest—a deeply French film set during the Second World War—and in 1963 came his follow-up, Le doulos, a modern-day crime movie with American influences. In the year between those two films, Serge Gainsbourg released an album called Serge Gainsbourg N° 4. The record is notable for shifting the singer a little further away from his French troubadour roots and towards more contemporary, rock’n’roll sounds. The album features a song with a title in English, “Intoxicated Man”—a jazzy, Hammond organ-backed number in which Gainsbourg uses the English words “smoking” and “living room.” These little touches show the creep of American influences on French culture: Gainsbourg is affecting the cool nonchalance of a modern man, with the help of these particular lifestyle signifiers. A year later, Jean-Paul Belmondo also...

After he missed out on nominations at the Golden Globes and SAG Awards, you might think Robert De Niro‘s Oscar chances for “The Irishman” might be deader than Jimmy Hoffa, but he could still crack the Oscars’ Best Actor lineup.

The two-time Oscar winner has hit a bit of a speed bump on his way to nomination number-eight for Martin Scorsese‘s gangland epic. His role as Frank Sheeran, a low-level truck driver who becomes a hitman thanks to his association with Teamster leader Hoffa (Al Pacino) and Mafia kingpin Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), seems like it should have awards bait written all over it. Indeed, he still holds fifth place odds of 15/2 according to the combined predictions of thousands of Gold Derby users, even with those snubs by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Screen Actors Guild (who didn’t totally snub him since they’re giving...

Destin Daniel Cretton‘s “Just Mercy” is a thought-provoking legal drama about renowned civil rights defense attorney Bryan Stevenson‘s efforts to free Walter McMillian, a condemned death row prisoner. It is a showcase for Michael B. Jordan and Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx in these respective roles. This Warners release, due out at Christmas, screened as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

Jordan, who was so boisterous and bombastic in last year’s “Black Panther,” leaves all of that behind in a mature performance. He strips back all of his effortless charm (but still maintains his natural likeability) to give a performance that is, like his character, all about getting the job done.

It’s not a showy role; there’s only one scene where he allows his emotions to show, and even that is restrained. But this stylistic choice serves the film well. It may not naturally draw the...

Actress worked with Georges Franju, Luis Buñuel, Andrzej Zulawski, Jacques Rivette, Leo Carax, Olivier Assayas and Mia Hansen-Løve.

Tributes have been paid to French actress Edith Scob, who has died in Paris at the age of 81.

Scob made her big screen breakthrough in Georges Franju’s 1960 cult horror classic Eyes Without A Face and then worked in later years with the likes of Leo Carax and Olivier Assayas.

France’s Minister of Culture Franck Riester said Scob had a “magnetic presence that flooded every one of her films.”

French cinema promotional and export body Unifrance added on Twitter: “81 years...

Oscar ballots are closed, Directors Guild nominations have been revealed, and we’re just five days from the Academy Awards nominations announcement January 22. However, when it comes to Best Picture nominees, the only real mystery is how many there will be–they can fall anywhere from five to ten.

“The Favourite” and “Black Panther” are likely contenders; among the other possibilities are “First Man,” “A Quiet Place,” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But when it comes to the real race for Best Picture, we already know which ones will be the serious contenders: They are the same five films selected by the DGA. Some have more support from actors, while others are backed by the crafts.

Let’s break down their strengths, in order of likelihood. Which movies have all the right elements to make it to a Best Picture win?

1. “Roma” is a $15-million, black-and-white Spanish-language film set in 1971 and shot...

Oscar ballots are closed, Directors Guild nominations have been revealed, and we’re just five days from the Academy Awards nominations announcement January 22. However, when it comes to Best Picture nominees, the only real mystery is how many there will be–they can fall anywhere from five to ten.

“The Favourite” and “Black Panther” are likely contenders; among the other possibilities are “First Man,” “A Quiet Place,” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But when it comes to the real race for Best Picture, we already know which ones will be the serious contenders: They are the same five films selected by the DGA. Some have more support from actors, while others are backed by the crafts.

Let’s break down their strengths, in order of likelihood. Which movies have all the right elements to make it to a Best Picture win?

1. “Roma” is a $15-million, black-and-white Spanish-language film set in 1971 and shot...

No foreign-language film has ever won an Oscar for Best Picture.

But given the promotional push that Netflix is giving Alfonso Cuaron‘s “Roma,” which just made the cut as one of the nine titles to make the subtitled short list as Mexico’s entry, the Golden Lion winner at Venice has one of the best chances in years to finally take home both statuettes.

Not that subtitled nominees haven’t tried before. There have been 10 bold movies that have attempted grab the Academy Award’s ultimate gold, starting with France’s 1937 World War I masterpiece “Grand Illusion” and including Italy’s 1994 romantic drama “The Postman” and Clint Eastwood‘s 2006 Japanese-American World War II effort “Letters From Iwo Jima.” But none competed for foreign-language film as well. In the case of France’s “Grand Illusion,” directed by Jean Renoir, the category did not officially exist until 1956. The year that “The Postman” competed,...

Scores on Screen is a column by Clare Nina Norelli on film soundtracks.When French documentarian Alain Resnais was commissioned to produce a short film about the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, it initially seemed to him an impossible and daunting task. How does one convey onscreen the sheer magnitude of the horrific atomic attack and its devastating effects; how to reproduce on celluloid the ongoing trauma of that fateful August morning as experienced by the Japanese people? Resnais ultimately decided to focus his film on the “impossibility” of talking about, or fully knowing, the tragedy of Hiroshima. Eschewing the documentary form he was familiar with, the director instead embarked on his first narrative film, Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), enlisting the help of the celebrated French writer Marguerite Duras to write the film’s scenario and dialogue. Resnais still retained documentary-style images of the ruins of Hiroshima and the city’s survivors, but...

Despite being two of the longest running institutions in cinema, the Oscars and Cannes have not always been the best of bedfellows. Only one film, 1955’s “Marty,” has won both the Palme D’Or and Best Picture. But many more films that have played on the croisette at Cannes have been nominated or won other big prizes from the Academy. These are the 16 films that both won the Palme D’Or and won an additional Oscar.

“Marty” (1955)

In the first year that Cannes started calling their top prize the Palme D’Or, the Delbert Mann drama and romance based on the Paddy Chayefsky teleplay won four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing and Best Actor for Ernest Borgnine.

“The Silent World” (1956)

Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s pioneering, underwater nature documentary beat out films from Satyajit Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and more to win the Palme, and it also took home the Best Documentary Oscar.

“Black Orpheus” (1959)

Marcel Camus’s dreamy, contemporary take on the Orpheus and Eurydice Greek myth won the Palme and the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

“La Dolce Vita” (1960)

Federico Fellini’s sensuous reverie of a film “La Dolce Vita” managed Oscar nods for Best Director and Screenplay, but only won for Best Costume Design.

“A Man and a Woman” (1966)

The Academy rewarded this French New Wave romance starring Anouk Aimee and Jean-Louis Trintignant with two Oscars, one for its screenplay and another for Best Foreign Language Film.

“Mash” (1970)

It’s surprising to see Cannes anoint a film as irreverent as Robert Altman’s screwball war satire “Mash,” but though the Oscars nominated it for Best Picture, the award went to another war film, “Patton.” “Mash” did pick up a win for Altman’s ingenious ensemble screenplay.

“Apocalypse Now” (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war masterpiece was still a work-in-progress when it screened at Cannes, and it would split the Palme with “The Tin Drum” that same year. It was nominated for eight Oscars and won two, but lost Best Picture to “Kramer vs. Kramer.”

“The Tin Drum” (1979)

After splitting the Palme with “Apocalypse Now,” “The Tin Drum” won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar with ease.

“All That Jazz” (1980)

Weirdly, Bob Fosse’s musical was nominated alongside “Apocalypse Now” at the 1979 Oscars, opening in December of that year, but it won the 1980 Cannes after cleaning up four Oscars just a month earlier.

“Missing” (1982)

Jack Lemmon won Cannes’s Best Actor prize for Costa-Gavras’s political thriller in addition to “Missing” winning the Palme. And Lemmon and co-star Sissy Spacek each scored acting nominations in addition to the film being nominated for Best Picture, but it only won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

“The Mission” (1986)

Starring Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons as Spanish Jesuits trying to save a native American tribe, Roland Joffe’s “The Mission” won the Palme and earned seven nominations but only one Oscar win for Best Cinematography.

“Pelle the Conqueror” (1987)

The legendary Max von Sydow plays a Swedish immigrant in Denmark in this Danish film that won the Palme, the Best Foreign Language Oscar and netted Sydow his first acting nomination.

“The Piano” (1993)

Holly Hunter won the Best Actress prize at both Cannes and the Oscars for Jane Campion’s drama that won the Palme D’Or and was nominated for eight Oscars in all.

“Pulp Fiction” (1994)

Much has been written about the bombshell Quentin Tarantino set off when “Pulp Fiction” debuted at Cannes and polarized audiences by winning the Palme, not to mention the cultural rift it created when it went head to head with “Forrest Gump” at the Oscars and lost.

“The Pianist” (2002)

Winning Best Director for Roman Polanski and Best Actor for Adrien Brody, “The Pianist” was a strong favorite to win Best Picture after winning the Palme, but it lost to the musical “Chicago.” Just don’t expect a repeat from Polanski anytime soon.

“Amour” (2012)

Michael Haneke had just won his second Palme D’Or for his sobering romance about old age “Amour,” and rightfully so. The film paired French New Wave legends Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva and scored five Oscar nominations in all, including Best Picture, but only came away with a win for Best Foreign Language Film.

Read original story 16 Cannes Winners That Went on to Take Oscar Gold (Photos) At TheWrap...

There have been 342 Oscars given out to actors, but only one of them has won on their birthday. Jennifer Jones scored Best Actress for “The Song of Bernadette” on her 25th birthday at the 16th ceremony on March 2, 1944.

Jones received the award from reigning champ Greer Garson (“Mrs. Miniver”), which you can watch in the academy’s recap video above. It was the actress’ only win from five nominations, but none of the other ceremonies fell on her birthday.

See Oscar Best Actress gallery: See every winner in history

Several people have won close to their birthdays: Marie Dressler (1930’s “Min and Bill”), Peter Ustinov (1960’s “Spartacus”), Holly Hunter (1993’s “The Piano”) and Lupita Nyong’o (2013’s “12 Years a Slave”) all got a belated birthday gift from the academy the next day. Dianne Wiest (1994’s “Bullets Over Broadway”) received an early birthday present, winning her second Best Supporting Actress...

What jaw-dropping Oscar nominations could happen Tuesday morning? Though the odds may be against them, we shouldn’t be too surprised if these contenders in top categories are called out during the nominations announcement. Here are the top five most shocking inclusions that might conceivably happen:

See Oscars 2018: Nomination predictions in all 24 categories according to Gold Derby Experts, Editors, and Users combined odds

#5: Steve Carell (“Battle of the Sexes”) in Best Supporting Actor

Have we been underestimating Steve Carell this whole time? A past Best Actor nominee for “Foxcatcher” (2014), Carell has contended at the Golden Globes, SAG Awards, and Critics Choice Awards for his showy performance as tennis pro Bobby Riggs in “Battle of the Sexes.” True, the fact that he competed as a lead at the Globes and as a supporting actor at SAG could cause some category confusion (just ask Hugh Grant from “Florence Foster Jenkins...