- Los Angeles, 10 January: Raising questions about a recently instituted change in the way it conducts its voting, the People's Choice Awards presented Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 its trophy for favorite movie of 2004 and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ for favorite movie drama. The decision had been leaked last week on GoldDerby.com, a website that tracks entertainment awards. The website said that both Moore and Gibson had been tipped off ahead of time that they would win. It also pointed out that while previously winners had been conducted by a Gallup Poll, "which gave a more scientifically accurate reflection of the American people's choices," current voting is conducted online, allowing for political and religious groups to organize massive campaigns to support their favorite films. Other winners included Shrek 2, for best comedy film; Julia Roberts, for favorite female movie star; Johnny Depp, for favorite male movie star; Renée Zellweger, for leading lady; and Brad Pitt, for leading man. -- IMDb
- London, 11 January: The British box office rose 4 percent in 2004 to a record $1.58 billion. Today's London Daily Telegraph quoted analysts as saying that the figure was especially encouraging since the year failed to produce any runaway blockbusters. Unlike the U.S., which also saw a slight rise in overall revenue, attendance figures in the U.K. were also up, rising to 156.8 million versus 148.5 million in 2003, according to the newspapers, which cited figures from Neilsen EDI. The three top films of the year were Shrek 2 with $90.32 million; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with $86.38 million and Bridget Jones and the Edge of Reason (no figure provided). -- IMDb
 - Bangkok, 12 January: Despite the devastation and loss-of-life incurred by Thailand in last month's tsunami, the third annual Bangkok International Film Festival 2005 was expected to open as planned today (Thursday in Thailand) at several theaters, hosted by the country's Tourism Authority. The festival, produced by Beverly Hills, CA-based Film Festival Management, will feature more than 180 films, shown in several downtown Bangkok theaters over nine days. Commenting on the festival, the Bangkok Post observed that it faces the task of "establishing a meaningful niche in the film festival circuit as well as creating real significance for local filmmakers and audiences alike." However, the decision to hire a U.S. firm to produce the festival and to feature many English-language films without translation has upset many local film makers. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who received a Jury Prize award in Cannes last year, told the Post: "This event seems to me more like a celebration of movie stars rather than a celebration of movies." But Craig Peters, head of Film Festival Management responded: "Our objective is to expose international films to the Thai community and distributors, and to expose Thai filmmakers to the rest of the world. And sure, tourism is the important part." -- IMDb
- Los Angeles, 16 January:
 The Hollywood Foreign Press Association distributed its largesse around fairly evenly Sunday night, thereby giving no film a special boost for Oscar consideration. Here are the winners for 2004 in the Motion Picture categories:
· Best Motion Picture, Drama: The Aviator
· Best Actress, Drama: Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby
· Best Actor, Drama: Leonardo DiCaprio, The Aviator
· Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy: Sideways
· Best Actress, Musical or Comedy: Annette Bening, Being Julia
· Best Actor, Musical or Comedy: Jamie Foxx, Ray
· Best Foreign Language Film: The Sea Inside
· Best Supporting Actress: Natalie Portman, Closer
· Best Supporting Actor: Clive Owen, Closer
· Best Screenplay: Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Sideways
· Best Original Score: Howard Shore, The Aviator
· Best Original Song: "Old Habits Die Hard" (Alfie)
· Best Director: Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby
 - Los Angeles, 19 January: Stan Lee, who created the Marvel comic book characters The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, X-Men, Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Thing, Dr. Strange, Mighty Thor, Captain America, Daredevil, and more, must have been feeling like one of his own superheroes today as a judge ruled in favor of Lee's demand for 10 percent of Marvel's profits from the two Spider-Man movies. Lee had claimed in his lawsuit that Marvel had reneged on its agreement to give him 10 percent of the profits on movies, DVDs, merchandise and other items related to the characters he created. Following the ruling Lee said, "I am gratified by the judge's decision although, since I am deeply fond of Marvel and the people there, I sincerely regret that the situation had to come to this." -- IMDb
- Park City, 20 January:
 The Sundance Film Festival opens today with quirky comedy Happy Endings, but for 20,000 people heading to the top U.S. event for independent film, Endings is just the start of 10 days of packed screenings, star-gazing and parties. And this year, it is not just American films and filmmakers who will have a chance to showcase themselves at the Park City, Utah, festival -- but foreign ones as well. Backed by actor Robert Redford, Sundance, which runs from Jan. 20, to Jan. 30, is an essential stop for unknownfilmmakers looking to land on the marquee of independent moviemaking. Winning one of its awards, or selling a movie to a distributor, gives a huge lift to a rising star.
For the first time, Sundance this year is holding competitions for international films in drama and documentary categories in the same way it does for U.S. filmmakers. "This is a way of giving (foreign films) more visibility," said festival director Geoffrey Gilmore. The goal is to spotlight world cinema the way the festival has documentary films. Sundance has helped raise awareness of "docs," and the result was seen last year with the $28 million global box office of anti-fast food doc Super Size Me. "If anything, more and more, we will find the documentaries dominating the independent arena," said Mark Urman, head of the U.S. distribution for ThinkFilm.
World cinema competitions include dramas like Britain's On a Clear Day, about a middle-aged man who swims the English Channel, and South Korea's Green Chair, about an older woman's affair with a minor. Documentaries range from Finland's The 3 Rooms of Melancholia, examining the Chechnya conflict, to Australia's Dhakiyarr vs. The King, in which descendants of a disgraced Aboriginal man seek to restore his honor. A total of 120 films, about a third of them from foreign countries, will be screened, selected from more than 2,000 entries submitted. The festival reaches its dramatic climax on Jan. 29 when juries pick top films, directors, writers and occasionally actors, who are singled out for special mention. Sundance 2004 box office hits like Napoleon Dynamite ($45 million) and Open Water ($51 million) bode well for this year's marketplace, film buyers and sellers said.
- Los Angeles, 23 January:
 The Producers Guild of America, often an important barometer of Oscar® sentiment, last night named The Aviator, director Martin Scorsese's film biography of billionaire Howard Hughes, best film of 2004. In 11 of the past 15 years, the Producers Guild has honored films that went on to win the best picture Oscar -- including The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King last year. The producers are the first of three craft guilds to name their best picture for the year prior to the Oscars® on Feb. 27. Next Saturday night, the Directors' Guild will select its best film and then on Feb. 5, the Screen Actors Guild will do the same. The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has strong competition as Oscar® season enters its final weeks. Critics have hailed comedy Sideways and Clint Eastwood's tragic boxing drama Million Dollar Baby, and many Oscar® experts say there will be a tight race between the three films. The Aviator was named best dramatic picture at last week's Golden Globe Awards, but Clint Eastwood was named best director for Million Dollar Baby.
 - Los Angeles, 24 January: On Monday, the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation released its list of "worst-of" contenders for the group's Razzie Awards. Leading their list was Catwoman, starring Halle Berry and Sharon Stone, with seven nominations and Alexander with six. In the Worst Actor category, Ben Stiller was nominated for five films: Along Came Polly, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Envy and Starsky & Hutch. Also nominated for Worst Actor: George W. Bush for his performance in Fahrenheit 9/11.
- Los Angeles, 27 January: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has changed its rules applying to documentaries, allowing them to qualify for Oscar® consideration even if they are shown on television, provided that they are given a minimum of 25 commercial theatrical exhibitions in 15 states. Previous rules had barred films from being considered in the documentary category if they were shown on television within nine months after they appeared in theaters. Had these rules been in effect last year, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 would almost certainly have received a nomination in the documentary category. It was disqualified when it was shown on cable TV on election eve. -- IMDb
- Los Angeles, 30 January:
 In an important pre-Oscar® film industry award, the Directors Guild of America named Clint Eastwood best director last night for his bittersweet female boxing drama Million Dollar Baby. The 74-year-old Eastwood beat out the evening's other favorite for the award, Martin Scorsese, who has been nominated six times for the DGA best film directing award -- including for films Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) -- but never won. Scorsese's film The Aviator, a biography of billionaire Howard Hughes, has received 11 Oscar® nominations, the most of any film. Million Dollar Baby got seven, as did Finding Neverland, a drama about how Peter Pan came to be written.
"This is a surprise. ... I got to say this is a real pleasure. I am as pleased as punch," Eastwood told a black tie audience after receiving the award. Earlier in the evening, Scorsese had received a standing ovation from the Directors Guild audience, leading some to think he was the evening's favorite. This year's battle for the top Oscars® is seen largely as a contest between the two veteran directors. Scorsese has never won an Oscar® but Eastwood has a best director's Academy Award for his 1992 Western Unforgiven.
The Academy Awards are announced on Feb. 27 but before then several industry groups like the Directors Guild announce their awards. The Aviator was named best picture of the year by the Producer's Guild last week. While important barometers of how Academy members are thinking in the run-up to the Oscars®, the craft guilds awards are by no means infallible. Fifty of the last 56 winners of the DGA award have gone to win Oscars®, but two of those failures were in the last five years. In the DGA's other major film award for the evening, the prize for best documentary went to Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni for their tale of nomadic life in Gobi desert, Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel (The Story of the Weeping Camel). Among the documentaries it beat for the award was Michael Moore's controversial anti-Iraq war film Fahrenheit 9/11, which has fared poorly this awards season. It received no Oscar® nominations. -- Reuters
- Park City, 30 January: Ira Sachs' Forty Shades of Blue, starring Rip Torn, was the surprise winner of the American Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival Saturday, while the Audience Award went to Craig Brewer's Hustle & Flow. In the documentary category, Eugene Jarecki won the Grand Jury Prize for his Why We Fight, an appraisal of the military-industrial complex. Jarecki's brother Andrew, the founder and voice of Moviefone, won the same award two years ago for Capturing the Friedmans
 - Amsterdam, 31 January: The Amsterdam Filmmuseum announced today that the 83-year-old movie Beyond the Rocks (1922), the only film ever to costar film legends Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson, will be screened at the second annual Filmmuseum Biënnale on April 5, then released in Dutch theaters on May 26. A date for a U.S. release has not been set. The film, which has been fully restored and given a score by composer Henny Vrienten, had been lost for more than 75 years when a copy was discovered in the collection of a Dutch movie collector following his death. -- IMDb
- Tokyo, 1 February: For the second consecutive year, box office revenue in Japan has set a record, rising to $2.03 billion in 2004, up 3.8 percent over 2003, the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan said Monday. Ticket sales were driven in large part by local films, in particular Hayao Miyazaki's animated Hauru no ugoku shiro (Howl's Moving Castle), which alone earned $192 million. Revenue from domestic movies rose to 37.5 percent while revenue from Hollywood films declined 3.1 percent. Ticket sales were up 4.8 percent to 170 million. -- IMDb
- Los Angeles, 5 February:
 Modest wine country comedy Sideways staged a surprise knockout over favorites Million Dollar Baby and The Aviator by winning the top prize for best ensemble acting at the Screen Actors Guild awards this evening, an important pre-Oscar test. Hilary Swank won the best actress award for her performance as a gritty boxer in Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, and Jamie Foxx was named best actor for his pitch-perfect performance as soul singer Ray Charles in Ray. Veteran actor Morgan Freeman took the best supporting actor award for playing a gym manager and washed out fighter in Million Dollar Baby, and Cate Blanchett won best supporting actress for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator. The SAG awards are a major test on the road to the Oscars® because actors are the largest single group voting for the Academy Awards. Experts said The Aviator or Million Dollar Baby would have had front-runner's status for the best-picture Oscar®, Hollywood's highest award, if either had won. But the same might not be able to be said of Sideways, a modest comedy that has garnered several critics awards but is not the kind of showy film that wins the Oscar®. The film was released by News Corp.'s Fox Searchlight Pictures. -- Reuters
 - Beverly Hills, 7 February: Organizers of the 77th Annual Academy Awards have come up with a novel way to keep the Oscars® (relatively) short and sweet this year: in-audience trophy presentation. Yes, in an attempt to keep the interminably long award show running at a faster clip, producer Gil Cates has announced some major format changes, including handing some of the lower-profile statuettes to winners at their seats rather than having viewers wait for the largely unrecognizable behind-the-scenes folks to make that long trek to the stage. "The concept this year is to minimize the line between people onstage and in the audience," Cates announced at the annual nominee award lunch Monday in Beverly Hills. Not to mention minimizing the face time for the top sound-editing guys and makeup mavens.
Another strategy Cates intends to employ is to gather all of the nominees in several categories onstage and then hand out the Oscar, again to avoid that hike to the stage. Of course, Cates was quick to point out that the new rules will not apply to every category. As has become routine, Cates did urge all potential winners to keep their acceptance speeches quick and issue blanket thank-yous in lieu of reading long lists of names. The ceremony will also feature a new, more interactive set that will jut into the crowd, as well as cameras all over the Kodak Theater to show more of the celeb-filled audience. "It's very complicated," Cates said. "And I guess it could be a complete mess. But I don't think so."
In other Oscar® news, ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences have reupped their deal to keep the show on ABC through 2014, adding six years to their current contract. By the end of the new term, ABC will have aired a whopping 38 consecutive telecasts and 56 of the 61 of the televised Academy Award ceremonies. The 2005 Oscar® show will take place Feb. 27 live on, yes, ABC. -- Full story, E! Online
- Venice, 10 February:
 Academy Award®-winning animator and director Hayao Miyazaki, often described as the Walt Disney of Japan, has been selected to receive the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement this year. Miyazaki, whose films include My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away (which won the Oscar® for Best Animated Feature in 2003), and the recent hit Hauru no ugoku shiro (Howl's Moving Castle), will be the first animation director ever to be so honored by the festival. Previous directors who have been honored with the award include Federico Fellini and Stanley Kubrick. -- IMDb
 - New York, 11 February: Opening in theatres across the US this weekend -- Hitch, starring Will Smith in the title role as a male matchmaker; and, Disney celebrates the Valentine's Day weekend with Pooh's Heffalump Movie.
- Los Angeles, 11 February: Despite the severe punishment meted out last year to a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who turned over his Oscar® screeners to a friend, who in turn posted them on the Internet, there are even more Oscar® screeners turning up online this year than last, the Los Angeles Times reported today. The newspaper said that screeners for all five films nominated for best picture are currently available for online downloading. Contributing to the wholesale piracy, the Times said, is that some studios did not ask members who received the screeners to sign a pledge not to share them or warn them of the potential consequences if they did. Some studios also chose not to go to the expense of having the screeners "watermarked" so that they could be traced to the source. -- IMDb
- London, 12 February:
 The Aviator soared this evening at the British Academy Film Awards, taking four prizes including best film. The abortion drama Vera Drake won three, including best director for Mike Leigh. The Aviator -- which has 11 nominations for the Feb. 27 Academy Awards -- had led the field with 14 nominations. But members of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts scattered the prizes widely. While Aviator director Martin Scorsese and star Leonardo DiCaprio went home empty-handed, the film won a best supporting actress award for Cate Blanchett, as well as prizes for production design and best hair and makeup. Imelda Staunton won best actress for her wrenching performance as a 1950s Cockney housewife who performs illegal abortions in Vera Drake. The film also took the costume design prize. Jamie Foxx was named best actor for his uncanny depiction of singer Ray Charles in Ray; the film also won the award for best sound. British star Clive Owen was named best supporting actor for Closer.
The British awards, known as BAFTAs, have become an essential pre-Oscars® stop since they were moved in 2000 from April to a February date, preceding the Academy Awards. A clutch of Hollywood stars -- including DiCaprio, Keanu Reeves, Richard Gere, Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell and model Claudia Schiffer -- braved the rain and cold to walk up the red carpet in London's Leicester Square, watched by hundreds of fans.
The Ché Guevara road movie The Motorcycle Diaries won two awards -- best foreign-language film and best music. Another double winner was fractured romantic comedy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which took BAFTAs for editing and for Charlie Kaufman's original screenplay. The prize for best adapted screenplay went to Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor for the wine-tasting comedy Sideways. My Summer of Love, Pawel Pawliowski's bittersweet tale of romance between two teenage girls, was named best British film. The Orange Film of the Year prize -- the only award decided by the public -- went to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. -- AP
- Hollywood, 16 February: Four Hollywood organizations representing stunt men are banding together to petition the movie academy to create a new Oscar® category, best stunt coordinator, the New York Times reported today. The groups are Stunts Unlimited, Brand X, the Stuntmen's Association of Motion Pictures and the International Stunt Association. In a joint statement that the groups plan to release next week, they wrote: "Stunt performers are the only faction of the movie industry that must literally risk their lives for the sake of their art. ... The talent and expertise that is required of a stunt coordinator to be both creative and safe is enormous and highly deserving of academy recognition." However, John Pavlik, a spokesman for the academy, told the Times: "Stunt groups have asked for categories in the past. The board of governors has looked at it in the past, and is reluctant to add categories." -- IMDb
- Berlin, 19 February: A film that transports Georges Bizet's famous opera "Carmen" to the South African townships and translates the libretto into the Xhosa language won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival Saturday. Rank outsider U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha was the first South African movie to compete for Berlin's Golden Bear award, and its victory underlines the renaissance of African films. Also showing in Berlin this year were Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April, films shot in Africa that deal with the horrors of the 1994 genocide. The Berlin award comes hard on the heels of an Oscar best foreign film nomination for Yesterday, a South African film about an HIV-positive woman.
Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tagen (Sophie Scholl - The Final Days), a film about a heroine of the German resistance during World War II who was executed by the Nazis, took Silver Bear awards for best actress (Julia Jentsch) and best director (Marc Rothemund). The best actor Silver Bear went to Thumbsucker star Lou Taylor Pucci, who appears along side Hollywood star Keanu Reeves in the film. -- Reuters
- Los Angeles, 19 February: The Writers Guild of America selected the comedy Sideways as the best adapted screenplay of 2004 and another comedy, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as the best original screenplay of the year. At the WGA awards ceremony tonight, the award for Sideways was claimed by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor and the award for Eternal Sunshine, by Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth. Both scripts are also nominated for Academy Awards. -- IMDb
- Los Angeles, 22 February: Chris Rock will receive only union scale for hosting the 77th Academy Awards telecast, syndicated columnist Liz Smith reported today, noting that all the other Oscar® hosts before him were likewise paid only scale. "It's mostly for the exposure and the honor of it," Smith observed. She also noted that Rock and the presenters do receive a lavish "gift bag" for their services. This year's is worth an estimated $30,000, she said. -- IMDb
- London, 24 February:
 The British film magazine Empire has named Mel Gibson's Braveheart the worst Best Picture Oscar® winner, maintaining that writer Randall Wallace's dialogue for the film "has all the thudding subtlety of a parody." Runner-up was 2002's A Beautiful Mind, which was faulted for its "willfully dishonest screenplay." In third place was Cecil B. De Mille's 1952 "tawdry circus spectacle" The Greatest Show on Earth. The 1942 winner, How Green Was My Valley, apparently made the list primarily because it beat out Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon that year. -- IMDb
- Los Angeles, 28 February: The Oscars® presentations came off as predictably as a fixed fight Sunday, with Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby winning for best film, best director (Eastwood), actress (Hilary Swank), and supporting actor (Morgan Freeman). Jamie Foxx won for best actor in Ray and Cate Blanchett won for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator.The writing awards were captured by Sideways writers Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor for best adapted screenplay, and by writer Charlie Kaufman for his original screenplay, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The Incredibles won for best animated feature, while Spain's Mar adentro won for best foreign film. -- IMDb
- Paris, 1 March: A long-shot film swept France's César awards, beating out the favorite in every category. L'Esquive (The Dodge) won for best film, best director (Abdellatif Kechiche), best script, and best female newcomer (Sara Forestier). The favorite, Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement), starring Audrey Tautou, which had been nominated in 12 categories, failed to pick up a single top award. The best foreign film award went to Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, starring Bill Murray.
- Manchester, 4 March:
 Sarajevo-born film director Emir Kusturica, who won the Palme d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985 for When Father Was Away on Business and in 1995 for Underground, has balked at demands by British censors that he cut a two-second scene in his latest film showing a cat pouncing on a dead pigeon. In an interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper, Kusturica railed, "I am not cutting my film for this jerk. Was he brought up by pigeons or something? ... I just don't get it. The pigeon was already dead, we found it in the road. And no other censor has objected. What is the problem with you English? You killed millions of Indians and Africans, and yet you go nuts about the circumstances of the death of a single Serbian pigeon. I am touched you hold the lives of Serbian birds so dear, but you are crazy. I will never understand how your minds work." -- IMDb
- New York, 4 March: Features scheduled for general release this weekend -- Be Cool, another installment in the Chili Palmer saga, starring John Travolta, Uma Thurman and Vince Vaughn; The Pacifier, with Vin Diesel as a bodyguard hired to protect the five kids of a recently deceased government scientist; and The Jacket, a fantasy thriller with Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
- New York, 11 March: Both the critics and box office analysts are hedging their bets on 20th Century Fox's animated Robots. Forecasts for its weekend take range from $25 million to $60 million, an enormous spread. The unknown factor, the Hollywood Reporter suggested today, is how strong an audience pull the rival family film The Pacifier might exert. (The Vin Diesel starrer showed a considerable amount of strength not only last weekend, when it surprised analysts by placing first at the box office, but also during midweek, when it continued to dominate.) Also opening this weekend is the Bruce Willis/Kevin Pollak action thriller Hostage. And, Chan-wook Park's international award-winning Oldboy shows at the Cleveland International Film Festival.
- Paris, 15 March: Sofia Coppola has won approval from the French government to film scenes for her biopic Marie-Antoinette in the palace of Versailles, the French daily Le Parisien reported today. The newspaper said that production of the film, which stars Kirsten Dunst in the title role and Jason Schwartzman as her husband, Louis XVI, began in Paris last week and is due to be completed in 11 weeks. Filming at the palace has been closed to the press, according to the French wire service, Agence France Presse, which did not indicate whether the palace had also been closed to tourists.
- Hong Kong, 28 March: At ceremonies that featured many of Asia's top screen performers, the 24th Hong Kong Film Awards honored Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle as the best film of 2004, while the two stars of 2046, Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi, won the acting awards. Derek Yee won for best director for his One Nite in Mongkok. In a night that commemorated 100 years of Chinese cinema, the late Bruce Lee was named "Chinese Film's Bright Star of the Century." The award was accepted by Lee's daughter, Shannon Lee Keasler. -- IMDb
 - New York, 18 March: Horror films have had a good ride at the box office this year despite receiving their usual downpour of negative reviews. The Ring Two, directed by Japanese horror master Hideo Nakata, is probably no exception. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times concludes that despite "Mr. Nakata's track record and the radiant presence of its star, Naomi Watts, The Ring Two is a dud." Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun begins his review by asking, "Remember mood rings? The Ring Two is a mood movie -- a bad-mood movie." Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post admits that he was utterly baffled by the film. It "appears to have been written on a large piece of blank paper by chickens with their feet dipped in ink," he writes. On the other hand, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times argues that the "charm" of The Ring Two "is based on the film's ability to make absolutely no sense, while nevertheless generating a real enough feeling of tension a good deal of the time." And David Hiltbrand in the Philadelphia Inquirer found the film to be "unusually atmospheric" and although "subtler and slower-moving" than most American horror films, it is nevertheless "nightmarish, in the true sense of the word." -- IMDb
- Hollywood, 1 April:
 Oscar® organizers have sued several companies and 50 unknown parties for selling tickets for Hollywood's biggest award show, fetching up to $30,000 a pair from fans longing to rub shoulders with Leonardo DiCaprio or Hilary Swank. The suit, which involves three pairs of resold tickets, was filed last week by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It seeks to bar agencies and individuals from selling tickets to future Oscar® shows and asks for damages that include a return of profits. The lawsuit and the resale value of the coveted Oscar® tickets shows the lengths to which celebrity watchers go to mix with Hollywood's elite.
David Quinto, a partner at the academy's law firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, said he had heard of tickets going for as much as $40,000 a pair. To bar people who have bought the nontransferable tickets from resellers, Quinto's staff is stationed outside the Oscar® show to clear up issues if guest identification does not match a ticket. Security officers usher out illegitimate holders. "When you show up, you better have an I.D., or you're escorted off the red carpet," Quinto said, adding that every year there are a "couple of dozen" disputed tickets. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, names ticket resellers Musical Chairs, VIP Getaways and Stubhub Inc., as well as 50 "John Does," including a Sharon Oren, who claims to be Sharon Osbourne's limousine driver. Filing a lawsuit against a "John Doe" allows the Academy to add defendants later if it identifies those it holds responsible, a spokeswoman for the Academy said.
According to the lawsuit, VIP Getaways' Craig Banaszewski recommended an academy investigator buy the $30,000 pair and then put on the hard sell. The price would only go up next year, "probably to $30,000 per person," the suit quoted him as saying. A lawyer for Musical Chairs said he had not seen the suit and declined to comment. The other named defendants either did not return calls or could not be reached. Quinto said the academy began closely policing ticket reselling after the 1991 Gulf War, when security officials grew concerned about potential terrorism. -- Reuters
- New York, 1 April:
 Two vastly different new movies will be competing for box-office attention over the weekend, Beauty Shop, a female/African-American comedy starring Queen Latifah that opened on Wednesday, and Sin City, a male/comic-book thriller. Analysts give Sin City the edge to win. But it is not a clear winner with critics, who are vastly at odds. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, while praising some of the film's stylish images, suggests that Robert Rodriguez, and the Sin City graphic novel creator Frank Miller, who collaborated on the film, have failed to bring the comics' characters to life. "When stuff goes blam, you jump like someone who's landed on a whoopee cushion. But then you just sit there, wrap yourself in the dark and try not to fall asleep," she writes. Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal describes his reaction to the movie this way: "If there's a single scene that epitomizes the sensation that overtook me slowly but inexorably, it's the one in which Clive Owen's character ... sinks slowly into a tar pit." Dan DeLuca in the Philadelphia Inquirer also admires the film's visual presentation, but concludes, "Sin City ultimately comes off as an exercise in cold-blooded stylishness, uninvolving and overlong at 2 hours and 6 minutes." Likewise, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times concludes that the movie is mostly style and little else. "This isn't an adaptation of a comic book, it's like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids. It contains characters who occupy stories, but to describe the characters and summarize the stories would be like replacing the weather with a weather map," he says. Nevertheless, he acknowledges, the movie succeeds as "a visualization of the pulp noir imagination, uncompromising and extreme. Yes, and brilliant." Ty Burr in the Boston Globe puts the emphasis on the brilliant, writing that "Sin City is the first great Hollywood joy ride of the year ... a stunning, visceral piece of work -- cheap thrills polished to the level of high art." Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post describes the movie as "a dessert from hell ... pure outlaw art" and a blood descendant of The Wild Bunch and Kill Bill. He concludes: "Two hours and six minutes has never seemed so much like two and six-tenths seconds. It's pure pulp metafiction." And Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune bestows 3 ½ stars on the film, but warns: "Sin City is an evil place, full of awful people, an obsessive movie full of monomaniacal tough guys. Yet when Miller and Rodriguez move it into gear, noir lives." -- IMDb
- New York, 8 April:
 He stands tall, looking ready to kick your ass. But Hong Kong actor-director-writer-producer Stephen Chow (Shaolin Soccer) is also just as likely to dance a jig and make funny faces. He's a one-man comedy parade. In the seriously cuckoo Gung fu (Kung Fu Hustle), Chow knocks himself out to please and also to sneak in a little social satire. Set in China in the 1940s, the movie takes deft notice of how the poor are exploited in Pig Sty Alley. Chow stars as Sing, a wanna-be gangster who's willing to step on the underdog to impress the notorious Axe gang, whose members hack up a rival before doing a musical number in top hats and tails. You get the picture. And if you don't, join the hustle. Nothing is safe from Chow, who spoofs the CGI tricks of The Matrix, turns his characters into live-action cartoons and then, miraculously, makes it all ring true. Does the plot spin out of control? You bet. But dumb fun this smart is a gift. -- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
- Los Angeles, 9 April:
  The legendary Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which once was the reigning studio in Hollywood, has officially been sold to a consortium headed by Sony Corp. of America. On Friday, Sony and its partners -- which include Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Comcast Corp. and DLJ Merchant Banking Partners -- paid $12 per share for MGM and assumed $1.9 billion in debt as part of a deal valued at $4.8 billion. The acquisition closed nine days after the European Commission gave its blessing to the transaction, which first was unveiled in September. According to the agreement, MGM will continue to operate as an independently owned motion picture, television and home video company under the control of the consortium -- albeit on a greatly reduced scale -- with Sony taking over the distribution of MGM films and TV episodes as well as its home video library. About 250 of its 1,400 employees, mostly connected to the library, are expected to stay with MGM. -- Liza Foreman, Hollywood Reporter
- Paris, 12 April: France's Culture Ministry has decided that films partly financed by American film companies may qualify for state subsidies so long as they are filmed in the French language and produced in France. The decision comes after the movie Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement), filmed in France, with a French cast and crew, was denied a share of the film subsidy fund because it was co-financed by Warner Bros.' French subsidiary -- while, on the other hand, Oliver Stone's Alexander, made in English and in North Africa, received a subsidy because it was co-produced by the French film company Pathé and because Stone is half-French. According to the London Independent, Dimanche director Jean-Pierre Jeunet was so incensed at the government's decision that he began referring to Stone as "Oliver Caillou." (Caillou is the French word for stone.) In its report, the Independent observed, "Behind the row lies the difficulty of operating a system of national subsidies in an increasingly international industry. The large French movie production companies muddy the waters by occasionally making thrillers in English for a more global audience." -- IMDb
- Los Angeles, 18 April: Sony Pictures Entertainment is expected to announce at the National Association of Broadcasters convention today that it will convert its entire library of movies and television shows to the digital format. Ascent Media Group of Santa Monica will be performing the transfers using Hewlett-Packard technology. The fact that HP computers rather than those from Sony itself will be used is certain to raise eyebrows in the industry. Today's Los Angeles Times quoted Sony Pictures exec Jeff Hargleroad as saying that the move is designed to help the studio respond faster to the demand for digital versions of its movies and TV shows. The Ascent system, which will store the product on high-capacity hard drives will also hold descriptions of scenes, making searching easier than in the past. Ascent exec Vikki Pachera said that for example, a filmmaker will be able to search the library for scenes with the Eiffel Tower in them. -- IMDb
- Seoul, 18 April:
 Korea has emerged as a leading producer of motion pictures for the world market, with 194 movies exported to 62 countries in 2004, according to the Korean Film Council. The government body said that the films earned $58.3 million in overseas markets, with Japan accounting for $40 million of that amount. The Bangkok Post observed today that in the past year, "it has become the norm that at least one new Korean film opens in Thai theaters almost every weekend." The newspaper went on to comment: "In a stunning achievement, Korean cinema of recent years has managed to reconcile the classic dilemma of the movie industry: it has offered both commercially successful titles ... as well as heavier stuff that has become film festival faves." -- IMDb
 - London, 20 April: The film of Douglas Adams' cult novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy finally opens today after 26 years in the pipeline. The cast, from John Malkovich to Bill Nighy, is set to turn out in force for the red carpet premiere in London's Leicester Square. Martin Freeman, who starred in hit TV comedy "The Office," plays journeyman Arthur Dent, while Mos Def plays Dent's best friend, Ford Prefect. Zooey Deschanel plays Trillian, girlfriend of Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed three-armed ex-hippie President of the Galaxy, played by Sam Rockwell. Stephen Fry provides the voice of The Guide. Directed by Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, the film tells the story of tea-drinking earthling Arthur Dent, who wakes up one morning with a bad hangover to discover that his house is being demolished and Planet Earth is scheduled for destruction to make way for an intergalactic highway. His best friend, Ford Prefect, then reveals that he is actually an undercover alien researching the Hitchhiker's Guide and is determined to use Arthur as a guinea pig in his research experiment. Arthur has no choice but to tag along on a trip around the galaxy and throughout the experience remains unable to get a decent cup of tea.
Prior to his death in 2001 at the age of 49, Adams had been working on the screenplay. Adams was notoriously uninterested in deadlines and the film had languished in development for two decades. When he died, the project was put on hold again, but was later resurrected by his friend and business partner Robbie Stamp. The book was conceived on a starry night in 1971 when Adams, then a 19-year-old hitchhiker, lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, clutching a borrowed copy of Hitch Hiker's Guide to Europe by Ken Welsh. Staring at the night sky, he decided the world needed a guide to the galaxy. -- Reuters (Use this link to Jamie Russell's rave review from BBC Film.)
Cannes, 20 April:  The Cannes Film Festival, which gave its top Palme d'Or prize last year to Michael Moore's hotly debated documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, announced a slate of 20 films that will compete in this year's festival that appeared to be devoid of controversy. At a news conference in Paris, Thierry Fremaux, who headed the group that selected this year's competing films, said, "This year, there is a return to a certain classicism, the great authors, many of whom have already been in the competition." They included Gus Van Sant of the U.S., David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan of Canada, Lars von Trier of Denmark, and Wim Wenders of Germany. French director Dominik Moll's Lemming was chosen to open the festival on May 11. It is also one of the 20 films in the competition. Tommy Lee Jones's directorial skills will be assessed at Cannes with the debut of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, in which he also stars. Out of competition, George Lucas will be giving international critics a first look at Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith on May 15, and Woody Allen will be presenting his latest film, Match Point. (Lucasfilm also said on Tuesday that it plans to show all six Star Wars films at a London marathon screening at Odeon Leicester Square, the U.K.'s largest movie theater, on May 16.) -- IMDb
 Los Angeles, 22 April: Film critics have found much to admire about Sydney Pollack's The Interpreter, starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, but their overall reaction is one of reserved dissatisfaction. Mostly the film is criticized for its apparent effort not to offend. A. O. Scott in the New York Times observes that such a movie "is conventionally described as a political thriller, but The Interpreter is as apolitical as it is unthrilling. A handsome-looking blue-chip production with a singularly impressive Oscar pedigree, it disdains anything so crude, or so risky to its commercial prospects, as a point of view." Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times reacts similarly. "While it would be a mistake to devalue the qualities director Sydney Pollack and stars Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn bring to this complex political thriller, that's not the same as saying it is completely successful," he writes. Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe observes that the movie is supposed to be about "the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of black Africans, whose murders [Kidman's character] is forced, alas, to interpret. Kidman becomes the face of genocide, and I'm dismayed to report that atrocity has never looked so lovely." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post takes note of the fact that the script was reworked by five writers (apparently not collaboratively). "While superficially intelligent, this Hitchcock-inflected thriller ultimately plays out like a series of half-hearted compromises," he writes. In the end, writes Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post, "You're left with admirable, even noble, wreckage, but wreckage it is." Nevertheless, several critics, while finding fault with the film's script, conclude that there's a great deal to appreciate about the film -- particularly its use of the United Nations as a backdrop, the first time the U.N. has ever permitted itself to be used for such a purpose. The location, writes Robert Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, "adds an unstated level of authenticity to everything that happens." Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun adds: "The U.N. presence keeps the movie energized. ... The most enticing part of the structure may be how it opens up a city that embodies internationalism organically: Its vast picture windows showcase the miracle of New York." And Peter Howell in the Toronto Star suggests that the U.N. ought to have received star credit along with Kidman and Penn. "There is more to moviemaking than just the casting and directing," he comments. "Sometimes where you make a film is as important as who you put in it." -- IMDb
 Cannes, 29 April:  The second year of the Cannes Film Festival's Classics Series will feature two restored works of French director Jean Renoir, the 1925 silent film Whirlpool of Fate (La Fille de l'eau) and his 1951 English-language film The River (Le Fleuve) accompanied by an exhibit illustrating his other work, the festival announced yesterday. The Series, to be hosted by actress Betsy Blair, will also feature what it calls an "homage to Mexican cinema," with a selection of recently restored films. Marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of British filmmaker Michael Powell, the event will also feature seven films that he directed in the 1930s and '40s, including The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. Powell's widow, the Oscar®-winning film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, is due to attend the screening of Black Narcissus. In addition, the festival will honor James Dean, who died fifty years ago in an auto accident, by screening Michael Sheridan's unreleased documentary Forever Young and two of Dean's films, East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. Ten other restored prints are due to be presented during the series, including Delbert Mann's Marty, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes fifty years ago (and the Oscar® the following year).
New York, 2 May: Chinese director Li Shaohong's Stolen Film has received the Founders Award, the highest honor at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Accepting the award, Li, whose film has been banned in China, expressed the hope that it would now be "green-lighted so that my people in China can watch this film soon." Meanwhile, the biopic Kinsey won the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation award for outstanding film Saturday. -- IMDb
New York, 6 May:  Paul Haggis, the screenwriter of Million Dollar Baby, makes his directorial debut in Crash, which he also wrote, and which stars, among others, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Ludacris, and Brendan Fraser. The effort is receiving mixed reviews. Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News writes, "It's good to see a movie that views its characters as mixed bags instead of merely saints or sinners. And there's some very fine acting on display. Crash wants to be taken seriously as a meditation on our anxiety-plagued times, but the coincidences are too pat, the tugs on the heartstrings too insistent." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post also reveals some mixed feelings about the film: "This ambitious directing debut ... is uneven and its interlocking stories rely heavily on coincidence, but the acting is uniformly fine and there are some stunning sequences." Ty Burr in the Boston Globe describes the film as "one of those multi-character, something-is-rotten-in-Los Angeles barnburners that grab you by the lapels and try desperately to shake you up." However, he adds, "its characters come straight from the assembly line of screenwriting archetypes, and too often they act in ways that archetypes, rather than human beings, do." But Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution praises the film as a "literate, engrossing and occasionally funny look at race relations in Los Angeles" and says it's "blessed with a splendid cast and a smart script." And Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times praises it as "a movie of intense fascination." He adds: "Because we care about the characters, the movie is uncanny in its ability to rope us in and get us involved." Finally, Ebert concludes: "Not many films have the possibility of making their audiences better people. I don't expect Crash to work any miracles, but I believe anyone seeing it is likely to be moved to have a little more sympathy for people not like themselves." -- IMDb
 Cannes, 11 May:  Lemming, directed and co-written by Dominik Moll and the opening movie of the 58th Film Festival de Cannes, premiered here today and was weird; it's not easy to fit the movie in a category. The movie is funny, sad, confusing and dramatic at the same time. It's about Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas), who works for an company that produces household goods. His newest product is a flying webcam, with which you can surveil your house from everywhere. After a incident with a lemming, he lost control of his life. Suddenly neither the viewer nor himself knows what is happening. Other important characters in this confusing game are his boss (André Dussollier) and Alain's eccentric wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The story turns its direction all the time and rushes from incident to incident without explaining anything properly. Example: This excentric boss's wife (Charlotte Rampling) tries to seduce him, but fails to do so. Even though he goes over to his wife an tells her what happened, both of their reactions are low key. Why? The deaths and murders are not very easy to understand... The wife suddenly takes over a soul of somebody else? So many questions, so few answers. The whole thing is too mysterious... After one hour or so I stopped following the story and just kept laughing at the black humour -- which does not appear very often, because the movie has some longer parts that make the boring scenes even longer... Yesterday I had dinner with a moviehost from Scotland, who told me that you have to start a festival with the weakest movie. Let's hope that's the way it works here in Cannes as well. -- by Jacob Montrasio; translated from the original German at mysan.de
 Cannes, 12 May: Woody Allen's new film, March Point, starring Allen, Brian Cox and Scarlett Johansson, premieres today at the Cannes Film Festival. Making his first film in the U.K. with a story originally conceived for New York, Allen once again takes up issues of morality and guilt in what amounts to An English Tragedy, as in Theodore Dreiser. This well-observed and superbly cast picture is the filmmaker's best in quite a long time and as such represents an attractive potential acquisition for a U.S. distributor keen to break Allen's recent string of B.O. flops. Although the script is spiked with mordant humor, the prevailing serious mood is underlined by doom-laden laments from Italian grand opera and references to Dostoevsky, Strindberg and even Andrew Lloyd Webber's dramatically similar The Woman in White. In thematic terms, Match Point, whose tennis allusion reflects a preoccupation with the role of luck in life, comes closest to Crimes and Misdemeanors among Allen's films. -- full review: Todd McCarthy, Variety.com
Los Angeles, 13 May:  Critics are scratching their heads, trying to figure out what prompted Jane Fonda to return to the screen after 15 years in the comedy Monster-in-Law. Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is one of them, writing, "Why Fonda chose this embarrassing project for her first film in 15 years is, as they say, a puzzlement." Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune apparently thinks he's figured it out: "Perhaps the challenge of trying to energize mediocrity is just what she needed after her inactive years," he writes. Similarly, Wesley Morris writes in the Boston Globe that it's "insane that Fonda's first big part in so long is so grotesque. But by Hollywood standards, a movie carried with such gusto by a 67-year-old woman has to be considered a miracle." Jennifer Lopez costars in the movie with Fonda, but she's mostly ignored by the critics. To Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the idea of J.Lo and Fonda locking horns "sounds like fun. But Monster-in-Law, where Bridezilla meets Godzilla, is a comedy so anemic, so toxic, that even Dracula wouldn't bite." Stephen Holden in the New York Times describes it as "a comedy so one-dimensional and craven that it makes Meet the Parents look avant-garde." But Lou Lumenick in the New York Post, calling Fonda "a hoot and a half," remarks that the movie is "a cannily selected vehicle that's more than funny enough to relaunch [Fonda] as a major movie star." -- IMDb
Venice, 14 May:  Dante Ferretti, the most famous art designer in Hollywood, favorite of Federico Fellini and now Martin Scorsese, 2005 Oscar® winner for The Aviator, has accepted the offer to chair the international jury for the 62nd Venice Film Festival which will take place on the Venice Lido from August 31 to September 10. Mostra director Marco Müller confirmed that he will present an official selection of no more than 60 films. Alongside the official selection this year will be the Secret History of Asian Cinema, dedicated to the "invisible" cinema of the Far East (China, Hong Kong, Japan, India). The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, as previously announced, will go to the Japanese master of animation, Hayao Miyazaki. The award will be presented to the great artist on Friday September 9 during "Miyazaki day", when some of his, as yet, unreleased films in Italy and Europe, will be shown.
 Los Angeles, 18 May: Call it the critics' war over Star Wars. Seldom have reviews clashed as remarkably as they have with Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post praises director George Lucas not only for the remarkable special effects in the film but for his willingness to address the fundamental question, "What makes man evil?" The issue, he says, is "what drives the movie ahead -- it starts fast, gets fast and angry and ends fast and furious. And I do mean furious. Fury is its fuel, its raison d'etre and its destiny." Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun calls it "a pop masterpiece." A.O. Scott in the New York Times concludes that it is the best of all the "episodes," including the original Star Wars (renamed Episode IV -- A New Hope). Scott does mildly criticize the dialogue and the performances, but, he adds, "nobody ever went to a Star Wars picture for the acting. Even as he has pushed back into the Jedi past, Mr. Lucas has been inventing the cinematic future, and the sheer beauty, energy and visual coherence of Revenge of the Sith is nothing short of breathtaking." But clearly Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News was expecting something more. "The dialogue is astonishingly feeble, the acting unforgivably wooden," she writes. "To paraphrase Yoda ... Bored I am." Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle writes similarly: "The picture is laden with plot and difficult to follow, even for someone who has seen every Star Wars installment. The action scenes are overlong and unexciting, and if anyone needs to take a bathroom break, go during a light saber duel. They'll still be fighting when you get back." Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer describes the dialogue as "ponderous hooey" that "crashes and burns like an X-wing zapped out of the sky by a star destroyer." Many reviews fall somewhere between those two forces. Gene Seymour writes in Newsday, "The characters speak fluent billboard. The battle scenes, especially the ones at the very beginning, steal the show. And acting honors threaten to go, by default, to a 3-foot-tall special effect." Many of the critics conclude that Episode III is a major improvement over the other two prequels and that the special effects work is particularly impressive. Roger Ebert writes in the Chicago Sun-Times: "Episode III has more action per square minute, I'd guess, than any of the previous five movies, and it is spectacular. The special effects are more sophisticated than in the earlier movies, of course, but not necessarily more effective." Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times remarks, "It's a tribute to the power and durability of the universe Lucas and company created in the first three Star Wars movies that we want to see this episode despite the tedium of the previous two and despite knowing exactly what will happen in it." But Turan concludes that the special effects in the movie make it worth the wait. "It's not just in warfare that Revenge's visuals excel. The film is frankly overwhelming in its ability to create a spectacular variety of alternate worlds."
The film is set to open nationwide at midnight tonight, with numerous theaters reporting sellouts throughout the wee hours. Twentieth Century Fox distribution chief Bruce Snyder told the New York Times that he can't recall ever seeing advance sales for any movie running so strong. Analysts are predicting that the film could earn $120 million or more by the end of the weekend. Making the ticket sales even more extraordinary, he noted, is the fact that "it's not exactly summertime." The George Lucas film is certain to lift the box office out of one its longest-running slumps of recent years -- nearly three months long. Total box office is now down 8 percent for the year, with actual admissions down some 10 percent. -- IMDb
Cannes, 23 May:  Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne took the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or Saturday for L'Enfant (The Child), about a thief who sells his infant son. In a kind of display of Franco-Hollywood unity, the Dardennes received their award from recent Oscar® winners Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman. It was the second Palme d'Or for the Dardennes; they won in 1999 for Rosetta. They dedicated their prize this year to French journalist Florence Aubenas and her Iraqi assistant, Hussein Hanoun al-Saadi, who have been held hostage in Iraq since January. The festival's Grand Prize (regarded as the second-place award) went to Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray. The director's prize went to Austrian Michael Haneke for the French film Caché (Hidden). Though his film had been the favorite of critics to win the top award, Haneke said that the important thing for him was that it was picked up at the festival by distributors all over the world. He added, "That doesn't mean that it'll be on the same footing as Star Wars." Tommy Lee Jones, who competed at Cannes with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, his directorial debut, won the best actor award for his role in the movie. The film also won for best screenplay (by Guillermo Arriaga). Israeli actress/comedian Hana Laszlo took the best actress award for Free Zone. The Jury prize went to Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams. -- IMDb
New York, 3 June:  Some critics are already suggesting that Ron Howard's Cinderella Man may become the second boxing movie in a row to win the best-film Oscar® -- even critics that don't particularly like it. For example, Lou Lumenick of the New York Post writes that the movie "is an Oscar®-baiting fairy tale that manipulates the audience at every turn of the cliché." Lisa Kennedy in the Denver Post praises the performance of star Russell Crowe as former heavyweight champ Jim Braddock and says that it "will no doubt make the middleweight Cinderella Man a contender -- an Oscar® contender." Peter Howell in the Toronto Star calls it "the year's first guaranteed Best Picture Oscar® nominee." Several critics take exception to the unsympathetic portrayal of former heavyweight champ Max Baer in the movie, including Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post, who observes, "It's just not right. In fact, Baer was as beloved as any heavyweight in history, was seen as a friendly, clownish kind of guy, and when a fighter died after a fight with him, he was so upset he quit boxing for several months, then went 2-4 when he came back." Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News also points out that Baer became an American "hero in 1933, when he wore a Star of David on his boxing trunks as he TKOed Hitler's favorite, the German Max Schmeling, at Yankee Stadium." -- IMDb
London, 3 June: In an announcement that stunned an already reeling British film industry, David Heyman, producer of the Harry Potter movies, indicated yesterday that he may shoot the next episode of the franchise outside of Britain. In an interview with the British trade publication Screen Daily, Heyman said, "We are exploring all options to determine the best place in the world to make the film. We are looking at the U.K. and other places all over the world." Heyman's comments follow published reports that the producer of the James Bond movies is considering shooting the next film, Casino Royale, in Bulgaria and Romania. -- IMDb
 Seattle, 6 June:  German director Werner Herzog's (Aguirre: The Wrath of God) disturbing documentary Grizzly Man is screened at the Seattle Film Festival. Peter Travers writes in Rolling Stone: "...Herzog has created something unique and unforgettable. His film is a document of the life of Timothy Treadwell, who lived for fourteen summers among the grizzly bears of Alaska until one of the creatures clawed him to death in 2003. Using remarkably vivid homemade movies that Treadwell, a struggling Aussie actor, made of himself with the bears, along with interviews of those who knew him, Herzog conducts his own expedition into knowing the unknowable -- the true task of any filmmaker. Herzog makes it an art."
New York, 6 June: Even as it dropped to third place in domestic weekly box-office gross receipts, George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith established another record: fastest movie ever to cross the $300-million mark. It did so on its 17th day of release, one day faster than last year's Shrek 2. Trade reports noted that with $308.8 million Sith has already passed the $307 million taken in by the original Star Wars in 1977. However, using a standard inflation calculator, the original film's take would be worth nearly $1 billion in current dollars. The highest grossing film of the series was Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace, which earned $431 million during its run. Sith appeared stronger overseas than in the U.S., earning $38.5 million, a drop of just 37 percent, according to Daily Variety. Its worldwide total now stands at $617 million. -- IMDb
New York, 8 June:  Yesterday's death of Anne Bancroft from uterine cancer at age 73 made the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times today, befitting an actress who was as esteemed on the Broadway stage as she was in Hollywood films. In fact she had had a lackluster career in movies in the 1950s until she appeared on Broadway in The Miracle Worker to such acclaim that she was asked to recreate the role on film. It won her an Oscar® in 1963. As Daily Variety observed in its obituary today: "From that time on, her career went from strength to strength." She received four more Oscar® nominations -- for The Pumpkin Eater in 1965, The Graduate in 1967, The Turning Point in 1977, and Agnes of God in 1985. But she remains best remembered for her performance as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate in 1966, playing "the older woman" in Dustin Hoffman's life (despite the fact that, in real life, she was only six years older than he). Despite the fact that it was described as a match of opposites, her marriage to Mel Brooks, whom she wed in 1964, was regarded as one of the most enduring between Hollywood celebrities. She reportedly prodded Brooks to turn his movie The Producers into a Broadway musical. -- IMDb
 New York, 10 June: There's hardly a review of Mr. & Mrs. Smith that doesn't mention the "chemistry" between Brad Pitt an Angelina Jolie. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times argues that it's all important to the movie. "I think they have it," he writes, "and because they do, the movie works. If they did not, there'd be nothing to work with." Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles Daily News argues that their "visual appeal and edgy chemistry salvage a number of scenes that would otherwise simply collapse from the weight of their own preposterousness." Claudia Puig in USA Today comments that the "The best moments in the action-packed romantic comedy are when the couple exhibit their considerable chemistry." Gene Seymour in Newsday writes that the stars' "on-screen chemistry, even at moderate boil, is so combustible that you're tempted to put warning stickers on every frame they share." But the headline over Eleanor Ringel Gillespie's review in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reads, "The stars have chemistry, the script doesn't." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 14 June:  Batman Begins is set to begin in most theaters at one minute past midnight tonight, prompting many newspapers to publish their reviews of the movie today. And, while there's not a Joker among the critics, a few express some misgivings about the approach taken by director Christopher Nolan. Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe and Mail writes: "All of the story is so absurdly humorless that it is dramatically inert, as if Nolan had decided the only way to make the Batman character more substantial was to put weights on his wings." Although acknowledging that the movie "does far more right than it does wrong," Ty Burr in the Boston Globe concludes that it "feints at topical notions of airborne terrorism and fundamentalist disgust with American decadence, but it quickly devolves into rubble and noise" and ends in a sequence that is all cliché. But Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune, while finding numerous faults with the film, says that he nevertheless regards it as "the best of the Batman series since director Tim Burton moved on after 1992: a violently kinetic, eerie portrait of a revenge-driven, two-faced hero ... waging pathological warfare against the fiendish master criminals who have turned Gotham City (partly recreated in Chicago) into hell on Earth." His Chicago colleague, Roger Ebert, also finds much to praise about the film, concluding: "This is the Batman movie I've been waiting for; more correctly, this is the movie I did not realize I was waiting for, because I didn't realize that more emphasis on story and character and less emphasis on high-tech action was just what was needed. The movie works dramatically in addition to being an entertainment. There's something to it." Christian Bale is also receiving much positive notice for his performance in the title role. "Bale is by far the best of Hollywood's Batman corps," writes Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News. "The former child actor (Empire of the Sun) has as strong a screen presence as Michael Keaton, George Clooney or Val Kilmer, and -- as we discover here -- he is a better actor." The question remains, however, whether this new Batman will rescue the box office. Several reviewers, including some who praise the movie, express their doubts that it will attract a mass audience. Detroit Free Press critic Terry Lawson comments: "his is a grown-up comic book movie, with no comedy. ... While I greatly prefer this approach, with its life-sized performances from excellent actors and its morally ambiguous sobriety to the smash-cut alternative, it cannot be denied that Batman Begins is heavy going." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 17 June:  Some 65 Hollywood stuntmen, or, in the words of today's Los Angeles Daily News, "people who cheat death for a living," staged a demonstration outside the offices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences yesterday, demanding that the work be recognized with an Oscar® for the best stunt coordinator. The protest was organized by Jack Gill, who told reporters, "I am baffled why all these other categories -- production, design, special effects, wardrobe -- are included and we are left by the wayside." The academy reportedly will consider adding a stunt category at a meeting of its board next week, but spokesman John Pavlik told Daily Variety that it was unlikely that the new category would be added. -- IMDb
Use this link to visit the stunt players' petition for recognition by the Academy.
 Los Angeles, 22 June: The American Film Institute has devoted its annual top-100 list to movie quotes this year, topping it with Rhett Butler's scornful, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," to Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. The latest list, like those that came before it, is certain to touch off much water-cooler debate in Hollywood. (The GWTW phrase, spoken by Clark Gable to Vivien Leigh, may have seemed scandalous in its day, when "damn" was a verboten word in movies, but it would probably be considered commonplace today.) Other phrases topping the list: 2. "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse," from The Godfather. 3. "You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am," from On the Waterfront. 4. "Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore," from The Wizard of Oz. 5. "Here's looking at you, kid," from Casablanca. -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 23 June: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said yesterday that it intends to limit the number of Oscars® that will be presented to winners in the best picture category. After failing to persuade the studios to limit the number of nominated producers, the Academy board said that it will give the Producers Guild of America full power to decide who qualifies as a legitimate producer for Oscar® recognition. "The PGA has set up a very thorough and conscientious process of vetting producer credits," said Academy executive director Bruce Davis. "The Academy isn't an investigative body, and it seems silly for us to set up an elaborate mechanism to do something one of the guilds is already doing."
In further Academy news, despite recent demonstrations by Hollywood's stunt people, the board of the Academy yesterday turned aside a proposal for an Oscar® award for stunt coordinator. "At a time when the Academy is trying to find ways to reduce the numbers of statuettes given out and looks at categories with an eye more focused on reduction than addition, the board is simply not prepared to institute any new annual awards categories," Academy President Frank Pierson said. Stunt coordinator Jack Gill, who has been leading the fight for a stunt category, expressed disappointment and said that he would attempt to appeal the academy board's decision. -- IMDb
Beverly Hills, 24 June: Drawing attention to what an exclusive club the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences actually is, the academy has released the names of the 112 individuals it has invited to join this year. They include Paramount chief Brad Grey, Sony Pictures chief Michael Lynton, Pixar chairman Steve Jobs and DreamWorks cofounder Paul Allen. Some of the actors invited to join the academy include Will Ferrell, Paul Giamatti, Ziyi Zhang and Charlotte Rampling, as well as recent acting nominees and winners Jamie Foxx, Thomas Haden Church, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Sophie Okonedo, Clive Owen and Imelda Staunton. The Writers Branch has extended membership to, among others, Paul Haggis, Keir Pearson and Jose Rivera. (Your humble webmaster was overlooked for yet another year.) New members will be welcomed into the organization at an invitation-only reception on Wednesday, September 21, at the Academy's Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study in Beverly Hills. Use this link to view the entire list of new invitees on the A.M.P.A.S. web site.
Toronto, 28 June:  Deepa Mehta's Water, which triggered violent protests and death threats when it began filming in India five years ago, will open the Toronto International Film Festival, organizers said yesterday. The film, which is set in the 1930s and deals with Hindu child widows, beat out movies by better known Canadian filmmakers Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg for the prestigious opening slot. Water gained notoriety in 2000 after hard-line Hindu protesters burned its sets in India's northern state of Uttar Pradesh, saying the film distorted Indian culture. Mehta, an Indian-born Canadian citizen, received death threats and had to abandon the production. After taking a break, during which she made romantic comedy Bollywood/Hollywood, she filmed Water in Sri Lanka. The film completes a film trilogy that includes Earth and Fire. Fire, which portrays a lesbian relationship between two Indians, was temporarily pulled from distribution in India after theaters showing it were attacked.
The director said she was shocked and thrilled when she found out on this past weekend that the world premiere of Water would kick off the Toronto festival, often ranked with Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Sundance as one of the world's most influential. It runs from 8 September to 17 September. "I'm in good company. Atom and David are filmmakers I respect and admire deeply, so I feel doubly thrilled," she said. Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies and Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which stars Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris, will screen as gala presentations. Both movies were shown in competition at the Cannes festival in May. -- Reuters
 New York, 29 June: Movie executives hoping that Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise, would pull the box office out of a record 18-week slump, are likely to read today's reviews of the movie with some consternation. Although minor critics had unanimously praised it in early reviews posted on the Rotten Tomatoes website, several reviews by the major critics are about as cold as the Martian ice cap. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times begins his review by remarking: "War of the Worlds is a big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg." But Ebert's remarks seem delicate compared with those of the New York Post's Lou Lumenick, who particularly assails "the lamest ending yet to a Steven Spielberg movie," which he says is "so cheesy it was greeted with gales of laughter at a screening the other night -- and this disappointing War of the Worlds limps to a conclusion that mercifully insures there will not be a sequel." The scene in question takes place in a destroyed Boston, and Boston Globe critic Ty Burr says that the audience that he saw the movie with also burst into laughter. "Then the crowd fell silent -- more silent than I've experienced in a packed theater in many moons -- as the smoking ruins of our city came into focus. War of the Worlds, it turns out, is serious stuff, at times more so than it knows how to handle." Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun pins the blame on Cruise, comments that "the actor's relentless drive to be taken seriously pushes this escapist apocalypse past its tipping point, into irredeemable weightiness." A more charitable comment on the movie comes from A.O. Scott in the New York Times, who writes that while this may be a "lesser Spielberg movie," it nevertheless "succeeds in reminding us that while Mr. Spielberg doesn't always make great movies, he seems almost constitutionally incapable of bad moviemaking." Indeed several critics are dishing out high praise. "If you must see just one Steven Spielberg movie in a lifetime, see War of the Worlds," writes Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe & Mail. Bruce Westbrook in the Houston Chronicle calls the movie "a towering accomplishment -- the most thrilling and action-packed Spielberg film in the director's broad legacy." Acknowledging "occasional flaws and misjudgments," Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post remarks that the film is nevertheless "a brilliantly told tale. It really rips along; it seizes you in its first seconds, holds you spellbound for two short hours and expels you, breathless and spent. It's your best summertime movie rush in many years." And then there's the review by Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News, who suggests that War of the Worlds might well be the best and worst of Spielberg films. He writes: "Fantastic and banal, terrifying and occasionally dull, pure Spielberg and yet at times anonymous, War of the Worlds delivers multiple viewing experiences." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 6 July: Ernest Lehman, best known for his screenplays of such classics as Sweet Smell of Success, North by Northwest, West Side Story, The Sound of Music and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, died Saturday, his wife Laurie disclosed Tuesday. He was 89. In an interview appearing in today's Daily Variety, writer/producer Mel Shavelson remarked, "Ernie Lehman was one of the last and greatest screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age. The only special effects in his brilliant screenplays were human beings." -- IMDb
New York, 8 July:  Most critics have concluded that Fantastic Four is something less than fantastic. "Underwhelming," is how Roger Ebert describes the movie in the Chicago Sun-Times. He concludes: "The really good superhero movies, like Superman, Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins, leave Fantastic Four so far behind that the movie should almost be ashamed to show itself in the same theaters." Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer is harsher, commenting: "Lacking wit, lacking style, and just plain lacking, Fantastic Four offers a series of noisy confrontations, ho-hum special effects, and a post-action-scene mantra repeated ad nauseam: One of the Fantastics, dusting off debris, checks with another and inquires, 'Are you OK?'" Lou Lumenick in the New York Post is harsher still, describing the film as "the smelliest dead-on-arrival would-be franchise since The Hulk. A perfect storm of wooden acting, hackneyed direction, inane scripting and laughably cartoonish special effects." On the other hand A.O. Scott in the New York Times apparently has concluded that all of that was intentional. "In an era when movies based on comic books have become increasingly solemn and serious, this one is content to be trashy," he writes. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post calls it "a funky, fun film version of the famous Marvel superhero concoction." And Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News takes a middle position -- calling it "neither here nor there." So does Geoff Pevere in the Toronto Star, who remarks: "Because 'The So-So Four' would never do for a quartet of weirdly gifted comic-legend superheroes, Fantastic Four is somewhat misnamed. Fantastic it ain't, but not bad it sort of is." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 8 July:  Critics, who rarely give positive reviews to horror flicks, have mostly fine things to say about Walter Salles' Dark Water. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times even includes a little essay on the sentiments of film critics in his review: "I have been criticized recently for giving a pass to films of moderate achievement because they accomplish what the audience expects, while penalizing more ambitious films for falling short of greater expectations. There may be some truth in such observations, but on the other hand, nobody in the real world goes to every movie with the same kind of anticipation. If I see a film by Ingmar Bergman, as I recently did, I expect it to be a masterpiece, and if it is not, Bergman has disappointed me. If I attend a horror film in which Jennifer Connelly and her daughter are trapped in the evil web of a malevolent apartment building, I do not expect Bergman; if the movie does what it can do as well as it can be done, then it has achieved perfection within its own terms." He gives Dark Water three stars. Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer also writes positively about the movie, saying that it "pushes every button on the parental-fear keypad: Divorce, loss of custody, loss of child, loss of domicile, loss of mind. Salles doesn't tap a horror gusher, but trickles a steady panic drip. While his movie lacks the psychological resonance of Rosemary's Baby or The Sixth Sense, it easily equals their creep-out quotient." The film also draws some negative reviews, but, for a horror film, none of them is horrible. For example, Gene Seymour writes in Newsday: "Dark Water is all suggestion and moody inference setting you up for a payoff that seems itself like an apparition." And Claudia Puig writes in USA Today: "Dark Water has more substance and a more interesting look than many horror films, but the familiar elements of the story disappoint." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 14 July: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which already has a rule in place barring its members from endorsing Oscar-nominated films unless they are directly connected with them, added a new rule Wednesday that bars members from hosting screenings for the nominated films unless they are involved in their production. -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 15 July:  Critics generally seem to agree that there are things to like and to dislike about the two new films opening today, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Wedding Crashers. In the case of the former, most conclude that the bad outweighs the good. In the case of the latter, good prevails. Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal is one of several critics who conclude that the opening charm of Charlie "gradually gives way to a peculiar state that I can only describe as engagement without enjoyment." Likewise Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post comments that "the film's strenuous efforts at becoming a camp classic eventually begin to wear thin." Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News predicts that the movie will "delight children, annoy fans of the 1971 version ... and perplex everyone else." A. O. Scott in the New York Times calls the newest adaptation of Roald Dahl's novel, "wondrous and flawed." And Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times begins his review of the movie by remarking: "When it comes to confections, Tim Burton has confessed, his preference is 'dark, bitter chocolate.' Which is not exactly a surprise. The director's visionary, phantasmagorical version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is equally dark and, if not exactly bitter, unapologetically, relentlessly strange. Burton's gifts ensure you won't be able to take your eyes off the screen, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be happy with what you're seeing." -- IMDb
 New York, 15 July: Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal is one of several critics who conclude that there are a lot of misfires in Wedding Crashers. Nevertheless, he concludes, "There's a lot here to laugh at and to enjoy." He particularly cites one line of dialogue, delivered by an angry wife during a divorce mediation: "You shut your mouth when you're talking to me!" Comments Morgenstern: "This tidbit of skewed logic is only one bright moment of many in a film ... that is blessed with a surfeit of sharply-honed zingers, and a flow of language that's both raunchy and uncommonly rich." Chris Kaltenbach in the Baltimore Sun agrees, saying that the first two thirds of the movie is "very funny, a classic guilty pleasure that revels in its basest elements. If only it didn't get all mushy and profound in the third act, this movie could have been a classic, period." And Chris Vognar in the Dallas Morning News also remarks, "It would help if the story didn't run off to the punch bowl with about 30 minutes left, but this case of cold feet can be forgiven." Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times concedes that the film is "far from bullet proof." However, she writes, "Witty, unhinged and fearless, it's exactly the kind of movie we need now; if only to give James Dobson something to get exercised about after a long day of focusing on the family." Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post compares the ending with "that deflating moment in the classical Don Rickles canon when, after tearing the world collectively a new nether passage, he'd turn to Johnny and say, 'But you know, we're really all brothers under the skin blah blah blah blah.' Ugh." Nevertheless, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are given high marks for their portrayals of two men who crash wedding parties looking for dates. "Vaughn's overbearing slacker-wiseguy and Wilson's blissed-out surfer dude blend into the ultimate patty-melt of slob-comedy personas," writes Gene Seymour in Newsday. And Kyle Smith concludes in the New York Post: "Vaughn and Wilson do cool insincerity as well as anyone since Chevy Chase and Bill Murray chased skirt. Hollywood should keep pairing them until we get sick of them." -- IMDb
New York, 15 July:  Critics have found La Marche de l'empereur (March of the Penguins) to be as wondrous as word-of-mouth has it. Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News concludes: "It will make you want to bill and coo with your mate, cuddle your young and maybe even go for a swim." Nancy Churnin in the Dallas Morning News calls director Luc Jacquet's description of the emperor penguins of Antarctica "stirring profiles in courage." Michael Booth in the Denver Post remarks that the emperors will leave audiences "energized, mesmerized and stupefied by the possibilities of life." The Baltimore Sun's Michael Sragow describes the movie as "eloquent and stirring." Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls it "an often-miraculous movie." Although the film is attracting families, the Los Angeles Times warns that it may be too intense for small children. But Wesley Morris comments in the Boston Globe: "Kids might blanch at some of the more upsetting images, but ultimately the movie will delight and uplift more families than it will scare."
Luc Jacquet, the director of the documentary, has expressed surprise over the striking success of the film in U.S. art houses since it opened three weeks ago. For the past two weeks, the film has earned more on a per-theater basis than the two blockbuster hits, War of the Worlds and Fantastic Four. It is expected to expand to about 150 theaters today and to about 500 theaters by next week. In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Jacquet said, "Although the film opened well in Europe, I'm surprised. ... People are liking the film, and I know how difficult it is for a French production to cross over into American theaters." He said that aside from having to film the movie in below-zero weather in the Antarctic, he and his crew also had to complete the film in six months or else they would run out of money. "It's not the kind of movie that you can pitch on paper," he said. "You can't just tell someone, 'OK, I'm going to make a film about penguins, and it's compelling, etc.' It has to be seen. The film, in order to survive and find an audience, had to be shown to get the finishing funds." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 22 July: Not only are movie exhibitors confident that the box-office slump is over, but some are now predicting that a strong fourth quarter will put the year's receipts ahead of 2004's. In interviews with Reuters, the exhibitors indicated that they have strong hopes for King Kong, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc., told the wire service: "It looks very, very good for the end of the year but again we have a lot of ground to make up." Thus far this year, the box office is down 7 percent from last year. -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 5 August:  Most reviews for The Dukes of Hazzard are predictably scathing. "So loud, so long, so dumb," mourns Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. How dumb? Well, Jack Mathews writes in the New York Daily News: "If the person who came up with the idea of a film version of the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard were caught in a bear trap, he'd chew off his foot to get free then wonder why one leg was shorter than the other. That is to say, he might have survival skills but not much sense." Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times merely dismissing it as "a lame-brained, outdated wheeze." But then, many critics observe that the original television show, which ran from 1979 to 1985, was hardly any role model. As Gene Seymour comments in Newsday: "A feather-headed, scruffy old TV show deserves nothing less than a feather-headed, scruffy movie version. And The Dukes of Hazzard meets such low expectations." A.O. Scott in the New York Times remarks that the movie serves as "the latest evidence that, for Hollywood studios at least, there can never be too much of a mediocre thing." Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal puts it this way: "The Dukes Of Hazzard turns a sow's ear into a bigger sow's ear." Chris Kaltenbach in the Baltimore Sun notes that there's not much of a script evident here and that in fact "the dominant line of dialogue" in the movie is "Yeeeeeee-haaaaaa." And Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, writing from Hazzard-land in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, sums up: "It's every bit as bad as you thought it'd be. Only worse." -- IMDb
Northeast Harbor, ME, 8 August:  Award-winning actress Barbara Bel Geddes, best known for her role as Miss Ellie on "Dallas" from 1978-89 (she dropped out of the series in 1984 because of health problems but returned the following year), has died of lung cancer in Northeast Harbor, Maine at age 82. Bel Geddes received three Emmy nominations and one win during the "Dallas" run. She had a distinguished career on Broadway and films in the late '40s and received a best-supporting-actress Oscar® nomination for I Remember Mama in 1949. Her career was interrupted for seven years in 1951, however, when she was blacklisted after director Elia Kazan, in congressonal testimony, named her as a fellow member of the Communist Party. -- IMDb
 New York, 12 August: There's a shoot-out between critics over John Singleton's Four Brothers that rivals anything seen in the movie itself. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times bestows three stars on the movie and remarks that while it "wants basically to be an entertainment ... it deliberately makes the point that in an increasingly diverse society, people of different races may belong to the same family." (The point is embodied by the four brothers of the title, two white and two black, raised by a white foster mother who is murdered at the outset of the film.) Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News describes it as "a rousing revenge flick that delivers the goods with a mixture of tight action, vivid performances and an old-school soundtrack that evokes the best of blaxploitation cinema." Lisa Kennedy in the Denver Post remarks that the film might be criticized as old-fashioned, then adds: "Listen up: If old-fashioned is just code for leaving the theater smiling, sign me up." Like several other critics, Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer thinks of the film as a kind of contemporary B-movie. "It's your basic patter, car chase and shootout. No big budget, stars, or computer-generated tricks. Like cheap booze, it does the job," she writes. But Stephen Holden in the New York Times describes the movie as an "atmospheric, propulsive and ultimately preposterous melodrama." Ty Burr blames Singleton for the film's problems. "Grubby to look at and edited with a rusty knife, it's a bumptious, low-rent ride and further proof that Singleton, for all his status and acclaim, doesn't have impressive filmmaking chops," he comments. Kyle Smith in the New York Post is less guarded in his review, writing "Four Brothers? Ringling Brothers is more like it, because John Singleton's latest stinks like something the elephants left behind." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 12 August:  Horror movies are rarely critics' cup of tea, but some are saying that The Skeleton Key may be their bag of popcorn. Jan Stuart in Newsday writes: "Gothic horror is just the ticket for August, a time when those of us who are not at the beach working on our skin cancer may be looking for the movie equivalent of the beach read." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times describes it as "one of the most enjoyably inane movies of the season." Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times writes that it "is tightly plotted and suspenseful enough to keep you guessing until the satisfying, unexpected end, which is worth suspending disbelief for." Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer calls it "stylishly spooky" and says that the movie, set in Louisiana, "offers a rich gumbo of menace, mystery and magic -- and then lets it go cold and mushy." And Bruce Westbrook in the Houston Chronicle dismisses it as a "formulaic fear-fest with a bare-bones plot ... more moody than scary." -- IMDb
 Los Angeles, 19 August: On the heels of the best buzz any movie has generated this year, critics are gushing with praise for The 40-Year-Old Virgin, co-written by and starring Steve Carell. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, who calls the comedy, "charmingly bent," observes that nothing Carell has done in the past -- including his regular appearances on "The Daily Show" and his starring role in the U.S. version of "The Office", conveys "his sheer likability [or] his range as an actor, both crucial to making this film work as well as it does." Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News writes that Carell "gives a breakout performance in the title role, creating a character who would be downright pathetic if he weren't so darn lovable." Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer marvels that the "film succeeds in having its virginity and losing it, too. Like Wedding Crashers, it purges its cynicism with romanticism." As for the title, Chris Kaltenbach in the Baltimore Sun writes: "People see the name of this movie and get defensive. What's wrong with being a virgin? they ask. Absolutely nothing, and that's part of the point of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, probably the most sweet-spirited sex comedy ever made. It's pretty funny, too." On the other hand, Lou Lumenick in the New York Post isn't buying any of that "sweet-spirited" stuff. "Like the somewhat less smutty Wedding Crashers, it panders to that crowd by wrapping envelope-pushing sex gags -- garnished with yards of misogynistic, homophobic and racist quips -- around a sweet love story between the innocent title character ... and a divorced young grandmother." And Geoff Pevere concludes in the Toronto Star: "The 40 Year-Old Virgin is overlong, meandering and pedestrianly executed (by first-time director [Judd] Apatow), and it leaves you wishing someone had pointed out economy and comedy aren't necessarily mutually exclusive." -- IMDb
 Los Angeles, 25 August: Sid Ganis has been named president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. He succeeds writer-director Frank R. Pierson, who had served four consecutive one-year terms, the maximum allowed under Academy rules. Ganis is a former studio chief of Paramount Pictures and vice chairman of Columbia Pictures. In 1996, he founded Out of the Blue Entertainment, which is currently wrapping up production of Akeelah and the Bee, starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, and is working on a movie version of I Dream of Jeannie. With several studio executives in recent days blaming the overall poor quality of Hollywood's output this year for the summer slump at the box office, Ganis sounded positively upbeat when interviewed by today's Los Angeles Times following his election: "I think the motion picture business is safe and sound," he told the newspaper. "Through it all, good films are there and will always have a presence." -- IMDb
 New York, 26 August: Terry Gilliam, the American member of Monty Python who gave the group its quirky graphic designs but who did not perform with them, is back with The Brothers Grimm, and several critics are remarking that Gilliam is still providing more design than content with his films. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post remarks that Gilliam's films, which include Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), "are jammed with stuff and all but empty of drama." In The Brothers Grimm, he writes, "The art director has replaced the director. Yes, it looks terrific, yet it remains essentially inert." Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times makes a similar point, praising the film as "a work of limitless invention," but noting that "the movie seems like a style in search of a purpose." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times suggests that Gilliam badly serves his two stars, Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, who are required to "shout their lines and run circles around each other as they try to advance the plot." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post observes that the movie has rested on Miramax's shelves for more than a year, becoming "just one of a series of duds [Co-chairmen Bob and Harvey Weinstein] are dumping before they leave Miramax next month." The movie does receive a few left-handed plaudits. Ty Burr in the Boston Globe calls it "an absurd mess that's more entertaining than it has any right to be." Similarly, Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News describes it as "a bit of a mess: sometimes delightful, sometimes tedious, always creative." Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles Daily News says that the problem with the film can be boiled down to two words: "Excessive imagination." But Jim Fusilli in the Wall Street Journal gives it an all-out rave, calling it "a wildly wondrous reinvention of the story of the chroniclers of dark, occasionally horrific, child-pleasing fairy tales ... a celebration of the power of stories." -- IMDb
Venice, 31 August:  Hong Kong martial arts spectacular Qi jian (Seven Swords) will open the Venice Film Festival today, underlining the prominence organizers have given Asian cinema this year. The line-up at the world's oldest cinema competition was slimmed down to just 56 films after organizers came under fire for overloading the 2004 edition. But directors say they have stayed faithful to the festival's tradition of variety, with offerings that include a retrospective to commemorate 100 years of Chinese cinema and a tribute to Venice's legendary lover Casanova.
Some of Hollywood's biggest stars are expected to grace the Lido's red carpet, including Russell Crowe and Renée Zellweger. George Clooney's black-and-white McCarthy-era film Goodnight and Good Luck will lead the line-up of major pictures vying for the Golden Lion with its Thursday premiere. But the honor of stepping out first on to the pine-fringed, beachside walkway will be granted to the flag carrier of Hong Kong action movies, Tsui Hark, with his out-of-competition adventure extravaganza. Seven Swords, part of a revival of the "wuxia" or martial chivalry genre, is an intense, action-packed tale of morality and heroism Chinese-style, full of brutal sword-fights, elaborate acrobatics and improbable weaponry. More bloodthirsty than Ang Lee's successful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Seven Swords uses sweeping shots of bleak north western China and galloping music to keep pulses racing over a battering two and a half hours. Tsui, who has said his movie is a homage to Akira Kurosawa's 1954 classic The Seven Samurai, said the picture was the first in a series of up to six epics.
Seven Swords kicks off a series of Asian offerings this year, including Korean director Park Chan-wook's Chinjeolhan geumjassi (Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) and Stanley Kwan's Everlasting Regret, starring pop diva Sammi Cheng. Out of competition, Peter Ho-sun Chan will present Perhaps Love. European films featured at the 62nd edition of the festival include the latest film from 96-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira and movies starring France's Juliette Binoche and Russia's Nikita Mikhalkov. Italy's own filmmakers have three films in competition, vying for the country's first top prize on home soil since 1996. This year's jury is led by production designer Dante Ferretti, who won an Oscar® this year for his work on Martin Scorsese's The Aviator -- Reuters
Los Angeles, 31 August:  After a summer of mostly second-rate movies, the fall movie season gets off to an early start today with the release of the movie version of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener, directed by Fernando Meirelles and starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post praises it as "an adult pleasure: Never cheap, wise in the ways of the heart, able to keep a number of balls in the air without letting them blur into incoherence, evocative of a hellish, desperately damaged place and gripping as a pinched nerve." Equally enthusiastic is Claudia Puig in USA Today, who writes that the film is "a masterwork of suspense, romance and political intrigue. It is a taut and gripping thriller that dazzles the eyes and engages the brain in a way that few recent films have come close to approaching." A. O. Scott comments in the New York Times: "This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience." Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News calls it: "a slick, fast-paced production with first-rate performances and an emotional punch you won't soon forget." Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun begins his review this way: "A thriller from the inside out, a romance from the outside in: that's the double-edged brilliance of The Constant Gardener." And Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times ends his this way: "This is one of the year's best films." But Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe and Mail begs to differ, writing: "Yes, the cast is certainly seductive, and the direction often beguiling, yet ultimately we're left with a distinct sense of abandonment, of a story insufficiently told. That's because there's too much to tell, too much material squeezed into a two-hour running time. So the fault lies in the scope -- it's a rare film, these days, that suffers from a surfeit of ambition." -- IMDb
London, 1 September: Pinewood Shepperton, which operates Britain's two largest film studios, has reported a loss of $204,000 for the first half of 2005 versus a profit of $2.11 million during the same period a year ago. The company said that uncertainty over whether Britain would continue tax breaks for film producers and the weakness of the dollar against the British pound had discouraged Hollywood producers from selecting the site for productions. It noted that only two "significant" Hollywood productions were shooting at the studio during the period: Sony's The Da Vinci Code and Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction. -- IMDb
London, 6 September:  Gone With the Wind remains the most successful film of all time at the U.S. box office, according to the British film journal Screen Digest, which adjusted the actual grosses of the movies for inflation. Oddly, not a single film from the 1940s, when movie attendance reached its peak, made the top-ten, which include: 1. Gone With the Wind (1939); 2. Star Wars (1977); 3. The Sound of Music (1965); 4. E. T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial (1982); 5. The Ten Commandments (1956); 6. Titanic (1997); 7. Jaws (1975); 8. Doctor Zhivago (1965); 9. The Exorcist (1973); 10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). -- IMDb
 Venice, 7 September: Tim Burton's animated Corpse Bride, which screened at the Venice Film Festival tonight received a "thunderous reception" at an earlier press preview, according to Reuters. The wire service said that it took 10 years for Burton to bring the project to the screen, since he relied on stop-motion animation using clay models, a time consuming process that allows only a few seconds of footage to be shot in a single day (although a gearing mechanism inside the puppets' heads to achieve changes of expression speeded up the process somewhat). "It can be tedious work," said co-director Mike Johnson in the production notes. "It's just the kind of thing that you have to be passionate about and willing to commit to completely." -- IMDb
Toronto, 8 September:  The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off its 30th edition on Thursday with movies about violence, sexuality and the stress of a post-9/11 world set to share a stage with some of Hollywood's biggest stars. The 10-day event, which film critic Roger Ebert calls the start of Hollywood's "Oscar season," will screen more than 250 features on subjects as diverse as female miners, gay cowboys, would-be suicide bombers, child brides and Japanese emperor Hirohito.
Johnny Depp, Charlize Theron, Steve Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Cameron Diaz, Viggo Mortensen and Jackie Chan are just some of stars expected at the festival, which ranks with Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Sundance as one of the world's most influential.
The festival begins on Thursday evening with the world premiere of Water, a controversial film about the plight of an eight-year-old Hindu child widow by Indian-born director Deepa Mehta. The movie sparked controversy before it was even made. Angry Hindu fundamentalists threw its sets into the river and burned the director in effigy when Mehta first tried to make the film in India in 2000, even though she had government permission.
Closing the festival on September 17 will be gritty crime drama Edison featuring the unlikely pairing of Academy Award winners Kevin Spacey and Morgan Freeman with pop star Justin Timberlake and rapper LL Cool J.
The movies shown in between will come from more than 50 countries, with over 100 being shown for the first time before any audience. Last year's festival offerings -- including Ray, Hotel Rwanda, Being Julia, Sideways and The Sea Inside -- became major contenders in the Oscar® race and critics will be on the lookout for next year's award winners. Philip Seymour Hoffman's starring role in the biography Capote and director Ang Lee's revisionist Western Brokeback Mountain are already being spoken of as likely nominees.
But festival organizers said a string of lower profile films, many dealing with anxiety that followed the terror attacks in New York, Washington, London and Madrid, would offer equally worthy viewing. Sorry, Haters tells the story of an Arab immigrant cab driver whose brother has been caught up in America's security net after the attacks. Paradise Now follows the lives to two young Palestinian men in the days before they are called up to become suicide bombers, a theme also taken up in a U.S. setting in The War Within.
Documentaries The Smell of Paradise, a study of Islamic extremism, and Why We Fight, about U.S. military policy, both examine issues at the heart of the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The festival's director of communications, Gabrielle Free, said the selection of several films along these same themes was not deliberate, given that they were picked by a variety of programmers. "September 11 is now four years behind us, and I think that's about the amount of time you would expect for some thought-provoking films (to emerge)," she said.
Equally provoking will be the latest films from Canada's two most famous directors, both of which debuted in competition at Cannes. David Cronenberg's A History of Violence tells the story of the manager of a small town diner whose life is thrown into chaos after thwarting an attempted robbery. And Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies revolves around a scandal that drives apart a pair of entertainers played by Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth. The movie has already been slapped with a NC-17 rating for its explicit sexuality. -- Jeffrey Hodgson (w. Arthur Spiegelman), Reuters
Venice, 10 September:  Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, a tale of homosexual love in the mountains of Wyoming, won Venice's Golden Lion on Saturday, beating film festival favorite George Clooney in the race to take the top prize. The latest movie by the director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hulk is adapted from a story by Annie Proulx and stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as love-struck cowboys whose forbidden affair begins in 1963 and ends 20 years later. Taiwan-born Lee described Brokeback Mountain as a story of love against adversity. Independent and low-budget, like several U.S. entries at the festival, it was filmed in Canada to save money.
Critics had predicted Clooney's black-and-white tale of 1950s broadcasting courage, Goodnight and Good Luck, would win the Golden Lion, beating the 19 other films in competition. Clooney, adored in Venice, did not go home empty-handed, winning an award for best screenplay with co-writer Grant Heslov. His star, David Strathairn, won the best actor prize for his intense portrayal of journalist Edward R. Murrow, who used television to expose the bullying tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy in his anti-communist crusade.
Italy took home a consolation prize thanks to Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who won the best actress award for her role in Cristina Comencini's La Bestia nel Cuore (Don't Tell), a moving tale of adult siblings scarred by child abuse. She beat France's Isabelle Huppert, a front-runner for her role in the emotionally intense Gabrielle, and Gwyneth Paltrow, a contender for her performance as the daughter of a mentally unstable mathematician in John Madden's Proof. Huppert was instead given a rarely awarded special Lion for her "outstanding contribution to cinema," her third accolade at Venice.
Asia was feted as the honoured guest of the 62nd edition of the Venice festival, but its productions won none of the top prizes. Korean director Park Chan-wook was seen as a front-runner for his beautifully shot Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Instead, U.S. director Abel Ferrara took the special jury prize for Mary, starring Juliette Binoche as an actress haunted by the figure of Mary Magdalene after having played her on screen.
France's Philippe Garrel won the Silver Lion prize for best director with his nouvelle vague-inspired Les Amants Reguliers (Regular Lovers), an austere story of love between disaffected young people in bohemian Paris after the May 1968 riots. The moody three-hour film with only bare dialogue was well received by critics but got mixed reactions from the public at the Lido. It also won an accolade for its striking photography. Another French offering, Laurent Cantet's gritty Vers le sud (Heading South), took home an acting prize for best newcomer thanks to Haitian Menothy Cesar, cast as the lover of white women paying for affection in 1970s Port-au-Prince. -- Clara Ferreira-Marques, Reuters
Los Angeles, 14 September:  Robert Wise, who won four Oscars® as producer and director of the classic 1960s musicals West Side Story and The Sound of Music, has died. He was 91. Wise died Wednesday of heart failure after falling ill and being rushed to the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Center, family friend and longtime entertainment agent Lawrence Mirisch told The Associated Press. Mirisch said Wise had appeared in good health when he celebrated his 91st birthday Saturday.
Wise was nominated for seven Oscars®, including the four he won, during a career that spanned more than 50 years. The other nominations were for editing the 1941 Orson Welles classic Citizen Kane, directing 1958's I Want To Live! and producing 1966's The Sand Pebbles, which was nominated for best picture.
More recently, he served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Directors Guild of America.
Wise directed 39 films in all, ranging from science fiction (The Day the Earth Stood Still) to drama (I Want to Live!) to war stories (Run Silent Run Deep) to Westerns (Tribute to a Bad Man).
"I'd rather do my own thing, which has been to choose projects that take me into all different kinds of genres," he once told The Associated Press. "I don't have a favorite kind of film to make. I just look for the best material I can find." With the big-budget productions West Side Story and The Sound of Music, he helped create two of the most critically acclaimed and popular musicals of all time. "A big part of a director's job is done if he gets the right actors in the right roles," he once said. "That doesn't mean you don't help actors, but once we thought about Julie (Andrews) and Chris(topher Plummer), we didn't seriously consider anyone else." He also credited Orson Welles, for whom he edited The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane, as a major influence, adding that the actor-director-writer was "as close to a genius as anyone I have ever met."
Wise moved up from film editor to director almost by accident when he was assigned to finish The Curse of the Cat People after the original director fell too far behind schedule on that 1944 film. Pleased with his work, horror film producer Val Lewton assigned Wise to direct The Body Snatcher the following year.
Other films Wise directed include The Set-Up in 1949; Destination Gobi in 1952; Executive Suite in 1954; Two for the Seesaw in 1962; The Haunting in 1963; The Andromeda Strain in 1971; and Star Trek - The Motion Picture in 1979.
Born Sept. 10, 1914, in Winchester, Ind., Wise dropped out of college during the Depression after his brother, an accountant at RKO, helped get him a job at the studio. He worked his way up to film editor or co-editor on such movies as The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Devil and Daniel Webster (a.k.a. All That Money Can Buy).
In addition to his four Oscars®, Wise was awarded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, a special Oscar® for sustained achievement, in 1966. He also received the Directors Guild of America's highest honor, the D. W. Griffith Award, in 1988. -- Bob Thomas, Associated Press Writer
Los Angeles, 15 September:  Guy Green, who won an Academy Award for cinematography for the 1946 film Great Expectations, died Thursday of heart and kidney failure at his Beverly Hills home. He was 91.
Green, who also directed more than two dozen films, lapsed into a coma about 10 hours before his death, his wife of 57 years, Josephine Green, told The Associated Press on Thursday night. "He was a gentleman in every sense of the word," his wife said. "There's not many around anymore. He was a man of integrity. Complete integrity. I've never known him otherwise."
Green, who began his film career in his native England, was a founding member of the British Society of Cinematographers. In 2004, he was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire for his lifetime of work in the British cinema.
He was the cinematographer on nearly two dozen films before switching to directing in the mid-1950s. He moved to Hollywood in the 1960s. Two of his best known directing efforts were the British films Sea of Sand (1958) and The Angry Silence (1960), both of which starred Richard Attenborough.
Green was nominated for Golden Globes for writing and directing the 1965 film A Patch of Blue, which starred Sidney Poitier as a black professional who befriends a blind, white woman. Shelley Winters won the Oscar® for best supporting actress for her portrayal of the girl's mother. A Patch of Blue was Green's proudest work because he not only directed but also wrote and co-produced the film, his wife said.
His other directing credits included Pretty Polly (1967), Diamond Head (1963), The Mark (1961) and Jacqueline Suzann's Once Is Not Enough (1975). His cinematography credits included Oliver Twist (1948), Carnival (1946), The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), The Dark Avenger (1955), Captain Horatio Hornblower RN (1951) and I Am a Camera (1955). -- Gary Gentile, Associated Press Writer
Melbourne, 16 September:  British cartoon favorites Wallace and Gromit have made their big screen debut in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in Australia, and initial reviews and audience reaction have been excellent, the BBC reported today (Friday). The Melbourne newspaper The Age described the film as "a lot of fun and true to the original spirit." Australian Broadcasting Corp. critics Margaret Pomeranz and David Strattan gave the film 4.5 stars and 4 stars respectively out of a possible 5 on their Ebert and Roeper-like show. A 13-year-old interviewed by a BBC reporter, who said she had grown up watching the characters, pronounced the film "magical and better than I could have imagined." The film is distributed by DreamWorks SKG and is scheduled to open in the U.S. in three weeks.
This latest offering from Aardman Animations' Steve Box and Nick Park features the voices of Peter Sallis as Wallace, Ralph Fiennes as Victor Quartermaine, and Helena Bonham Carter as Lady Capanula Tottington. Five years in the making, each character needed several versions to cover a range of emotions and poses. There were 43 versions of Gromit, 35 Wallaces, 16 Victor Quartermaines and 15 Lady Tottingtons, as well as 20 differently shaped mouths. A single line of dialog of only a few words could take a whole day to animate. -- IMDb
 Toronto, 17 September:  Tsotsi and Look Both Ways won the top awards at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, while David Burke's Edison got set to close out the 30th edition of the event often seen as the kickoff to Oscar® season.
"Tsotsi, a joint UK/South African production about a Johannesburg gangster who steals a car and finds an infant in the back seat, won the People's Choice award, voted on by regular moviegoers at the September 8-17 event. The prize is often an indicator of future Academy Award nominations, with past recipients including Oscar® winners American Beauty, Life Is Beautiful and Chariots of Fire. Last year's winner was Oscar®-nominated Hotel Rwanda.
The movie narrowly edged out the Finnish/Swedish film, Mother of Mine, and more high-profile entrants Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, and Brokeback Mountain, which has received Oscar® buzz for its telling of a taboo love affair between two cowboys.
Australian film Look Both Ways won the event's Discovery award. The prize is chosen by the hundreds of journalists who attend the festival, which ranks with Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Sundance as one of the world's most influential.
The event screened 335 films, 84 percent of which were either world, international, or North American premieres. Festival director Piers Handling noted more than 1,000 sales delegates from 47 countries made the trek to Toronto, considerably ahead of last year's pace and welcome news for an industry reeling from a slow summer at the box office.
Other prizewinners included Sa-kwa, a South Korean film about a woman who tries to rebuild her life after being abandoned by her fiance. It won the Fipresci prize given by a jury to an emerging filmmaker. Canadian film prizes went to Familia, "The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico, and C.R.A.Z.Y., a tribute to the pop culture of the 1970s.
The festival will take its bow later on Saturday with the gala screening of Edison, a police thriller featuring dramatic turns by pop star Justin Timberlake and LL Cool J, as well as Oscar® winners Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey. The film follows a naive young reporter, played by Timberlake, as he tries to unravel a police corruption scandal, all the while guided by Freeman's grizzled veteran journalist. -- Full story: Cameron French, Reuters
Los Angeles, 21 September:  Setting the stage for a contentious jurisdictional dispute between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) West and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the WGA on Tuesday elected animation writer Patric Verrone as its president. Verrone campaigned on a platform that included a vow to organize animation writers, cable-TV writers and broadcast reality-show writers. Verrone's efforts are likely to clash with those of IATSE who are looking to organize the same writers. In an interview with today's (Wednesday) Los Angeles Times, Verrone said that he hoped to improve relations with IATSE. "At the end of the day, it's not a fight among the unions, it's an attempt to get better wages and working conditions ... for the talent in this town," he said. -- IMDb
 Paris, 22 September: Cléopatre, a short film made in 1899 by pioneer French director Georges Méliès that was long believed "lost," has turned up in France, Agence France Presse reported today, citing information provided by the director's descendants. The wire service described the two-minute film as "a groundbreaking classic in the early history of cinema." Méliès is credited with being the filmmaker to introduce the fade-in and -out, the dissolve, and stop-motion special effects. He is believed to have made over 500 films during his career. -- IMDb
Paris, 23 September: Don't be surprised if penguins start ordering freedom fries to go with their krill. The French version of the hit documentary March of the Penguins has been bypassed as the Gallic nation's entry in the Foreign-Language category at next year's Academy Awards. The snub was first reported by the European site ScreenDaily.com. The Academy confirmed Friday that France had not nominated La Marche de l'Empereur, the film's proper French name. Instead, the country gave its blessing to Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas), a World War I drama that premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival.
On ScreenDaily.com, French-based Penguins coproducer Jean-Francois Camilleri sounded as if he thought his countrymen had missed a golden opportunity in not backing his birds -- "finally a foreign film that Americans love... It just proves the stupidity of French politics in this profession," Camilleri told the Website. "No one has seen [Joyeux Noel] except the people at Cannes, what good does that do?"
All is not lost, however, for the sharp-dressed Arctic creatures. The American version of March of the Penguins, featuring narration by Morgan Freeman, has been submitted for consideration in the Best Documentary Feature race by its U.S. distributor, Warner Independent Pictures, the Academy said. Though the tale of feathery love is considered a frontrunner for the Oscar®, it was passed up this week by the Los Angeles-based International Documentary Association, which nominated 13 films for its top year-end award, but not Penguins. The group, however, is not exactly in sync with Academy voters. As the Hollywood Reporter pointed out, only one of the group's nominees last year made the cut at the Oscars®. (The pick was a good one, though -- Born into Brothels prevailed with both the association and the Academy.) Nominations for the 78th Annual Academy Awards will be announced Jan. 31.
The Freeman-fronted version of Penguins showed some of the strongest legs at the summer box office. Through Thursday, the film had grossed $71.1 million at U.S. theaters, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. Worldwide, its total stands at a hefty $86.6 million. Penguins began its journey in France, premiering there in January. The redubbed version with Freeman arrived in the United States in June. The birds will continue their migration to DVD, beginning Nov. 29th. -- Joal Ryan, E! Online
Los Angeles, 27 September: For the first time in 10 weeks, the Warner Bros. Classics documentary March of the Penguins fell out of the top ten, slipping to 11th place with $1,747,832. Its total gross, which now stands at $72,846,145, makes it the second-highest earner among documentaries of all time, behind only Fahrenheit 9/11. Recent reports indicated that conservative "family values" groups have been instrumental in keeping the film alive at the box office, booking large blocks of seats and asserting that the film provides proof of "intelligent design." On the other hand London Times film writer Caitlin Moran observed last week, "To be honest, this is good news. If American Christians want to go public on the fact that they're now morally guided by penguins, at least we know where we all stand." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 29 September:  Although screeners to promote movies for Oscar® awards among members of the movie academy are generally not sent out until after Thanksgiving -- nominating ballots are due to be mailed on Dec. 29 -- Sony Pictures Classics has already mailed out screeners of Junebug, which opened in limited release last month and stars Embeth Davidtz and Alessandro Nivola. SPC Co-president Michael Barker told today's Daily Variety, "It made sense for us to do an unconventional strategy and send out the film before the onslaught." -- IMDb
 New York, 30 September: In one of the few negative reviews of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun suggests that the title of the history course ought to be changed to Carnage for Art Houses 101. And clearly most other critics have indeed embraced this film not only as art, but as a lesson about the artless commerce of the movie business. Indeed, as Manohla Dargis points out in her review in the New York Times, Cronenberg sets his story "in a copy of the world that looks -- wouldn't you know it -- a lot like a movie. Mr. Cronenberg, a Canadian, is taking aim at this country, to be sure. But he is also taking aim at our violence-addicted cinema, those seductive, self-heroicizing self-justifications we sell to the world." Dargis's observations are hers alone. Each critic seems to have a different take on the movie. Compare her remarks to those of Lou Lumenick in the New York Post, who writes that the film is "a high-minded crowd pleaser that revels in the kinesthetic pleasures of the shootouts it's so busy deploring." To Steven Rea of the Philadelphia Inquirer, this is no piece of "art" at all but a "creepy gem of a thriller" that is "eerily compelling and darkly humorous. And chilling -- to the bone." But to Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, it's a "a gripping, incendiary, casually subversive piece of work that marries pulp watchability with larger concerns without skipping a beat. ... It's the gift of Violence ... that it manages to do all these things without seeming to make a fuss. That's how strong and compelling its dead-on plot is." But Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times writes: "This is not a movie about plot, but about character. It is about how people turn out the way they do, and about whether the world sometimes functions like a fool's paradise." But perhaps the film's greatest gift is that people will -- if the critics are any example -- come away from it with their own take on what makes it a compelling movie. Chris Vognar in the Dallas Morning News settles for calling it "shrewd, penetrating and, yes, entertaining. It's also one of the best films of the year." -- IMDb
 New York, 7 October: George Clooney's Goodnight and Good Luck opens in a limited release today after being well-received at the festivals in Venice and New York last month. Co-written by Clooney and producer Grant Heslov, the film features David Strathairn as CBS broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow as he strives to bring down Senator Joseph McCarthy. Peter Travers wrote in the 29 September 2005 issue of Rolling Stone: "In ninety-three tight, terrifically exciting minutes, Clooney makes integrity look mighty sexy. With the help of cinematographer Robert Elswit and editor Stephen Mirrione, Clooney turns the CBS newsroom into a hothouse of journalistic risk-taking. It's exhilarating to watch as Murrow decides to use his CBS news show See It Now (it ran from 1951 to 1958) to call McCarthy's bluff. Murrow persuades network boss Bill Paley (Frank Langella is a marvel of scary, seductive command) to hold the sponsors at bay while he and producer Fred Friendly (a subtly forceful Clooney) lay out a battle plan... For a paltry $8 million, Clooney has crafted a period piece that speaks potently to a here-and-now when constitutional rights are being threatened in the name of the Patriot Act, and the American media trade in truth for access. 'We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason,' said Murrow. Amen to that, brother. Good night, and good luck."
Los Angeles, 7 October:  Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as the famed writer and raconteur Truman Capote in Capote, opening today in limited release. In Holcomb, Kansas, on November 14th, 1959, two men (Clifton Collins Jr. and Mark Pellegrino) break into the farmhouse of a well-known family, murdering four of its members. The renowned writer of Breakfast at Tiffany's, Capote decides that this subject will be perfect to test his theory about narrative non-fiction and takes his childhood friend, Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, with him to Holcomb to investigate. When the killers are caught, Capote becomes deeply involved with their trial, changing his life and theirs. Chris Cooper and Bob Balaban co-star. -- IMDb
New York, 7 October: Use this link to view the IMDb synopses of reviews for these newly-released features: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Goodnight and Good Luck, Two for the Money, The Gospel, Waiting... and In Her Shoes.
 Bristol, England, 10 October: Almost as if it had been struck by a curse, Aardman Animation was engulfed in flames early today that destroyed what the company called its "entire history." The fire struck as Aardman employees were preparing to celebrate the successful opening of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which opened at the top of the U.S. and overseas box offices, with $16.1 million and $9.2 million respectively. Company spokesman Arthur Sheriff told the BBC: "It couldn't have come on a worse day -- we were supposed to be celebrating, but instead our history has disappeared in a couple of hours. Everything has gone. ... Everyone is devastated." Aardman founder Nick Park put a different perspective on the loss. "Even though it's precious stuff and nostalgic -- and it's dreadful news for the company, in the light of other tragedies it's not a big deal," he said. No one was apparently in the building when the fire broke out at about 6:00 a.m. local time. However, the fire was so intense -- at times flames shot 100 feet into the air -- that firefighters were unable to enter the building and were forced to fight the blaze from the outside. A Bristol fire department official said, "All three floors inside have collapsed and the exterior walls are unstable." -- IMDb
Paris, 13 October: After shortening the run of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival by one day in order to allow overseas film execs to get back to their offices by Monday, festival president Gilles Jacob said yesterday that the 2006 edition will once again end on a Sunday, rather than on Saturday. (Opening ceremonies are set for May 17; closing ceremonies, for May 28.) The additional day will allow for more screenings. "People attending the festival complained that the competition schedule was too tight a squeeze," Jacob told Daily Variety in Paris. -- IMDb
Stockholm, 14 October:  Although Harold Pinter, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, is mostly identified with stage plays -- particularly The Caretaker, The Homecoming and Betrayal -- he also wrote prolifically for both the big and small screen. He was nominated for an Oscar® in 1982 for The French Lieutenant's Woman and again in 1984 for the screen version of Betrayal. His 1965 screenplay for The Pumpkin Eater and his 1970 screenplay for The Go-Between won him BAFTA awards. Nevertheless, most of his plays have been seen on British television or heard on British radio -- dozens of them. (He directed four.) Indeed, so prolific has Pinter -- who turned 75 on Monday -- been that BBC Radio once aired readings of several of his unproduced movie scripts. Pinter is also probably the first Nobel laureate to have worked as an actor, appearing in 21 films and television dramas. In 2000 he co-starred with Sir John Gielgud (who played a corpse) in a six-minute short, The Director, in the title role. It was directed by David Mamet from a play by Samuel Beckett. When he received word on Thursday that he had won the award, Pinter said that he was so surprised that he was at a loss for words -- a condition that frequently strikes his characters. -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 14 October: Use this link to view a synopsis of reviews from the IMDb for two films opening this weekend: Elizabethtown and Domino.
Los Angeles, 18 October: Only seven weeks before the scheduled premiere of his remake of King Kong, Peter Jackson has dumped Howard Shore's score for the movie and plans to replace it with a new one by James Newton Howard. Shore had written and conducted the score of Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Howard's credits include the scores for Batman Begins, The Village, and Waterworld. In a statement, Jackson said: "During the last few weeks, Howard and I came to realize that we had differing creative aspirations for the score of King Kong. Rather than waste time arguing with a friend and trying to unify our points of view, we decided amicably to let another composer score the film." -- IMDb
London, 20 October: The 49th annual London Film Festival is scheduled to open tonight (Thursday) with a screening of The Constant Gardener. More than 180 films from 50 countries are due to be shown between now and Nov. 3, when the festival closes with a screening of George Clooney's Goodnight and Good Luck. More than 100,000 people are expected to attend.
London, 20 October:  For the first time, a Harry Potter movie has been classified 12A by British censors, barring children under 12 from seeing it unless accompanied by an adult. "Younger viewers could be frightened by some of the more intense scenes" in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the British Board of Film Classification ruled. The rating is stronger than the U.S. PG-13 -- the rating Goblet of Fire received in the U.S. -- which merely warns parents that the film may be inappropriate for children under the age of 13 but does not prevent them from seeing it. -- IMDb
 New York, 21 October: They're talking about a possible second Oscar® for Charlize Theron for her performance in North Country as one of the first Minnesota female mine workers following a consent decree in the 1970s that forced the mine companies to hire women. Theron's character is based on one of the Minnesota women who eventually filed the first sexual harassment class-action suit in the United States. (The film is being compared with Norma Rae, Silkwood and Erin Brockovich.) Ann Hornaday writes in the Washington Post: "Theron, who won an Oscar® last year for completely transforming herself to play the prostitute Aileen Wuornos [in Monster], once again proves to be a remarkable character actress, submerging her almost superhuman beauty." Likewise Roger Ebert remarks in the Chicago Sun-Times: "Here is another extraordinary role from an actress who has the beauty of a fashion model but has found resources within herself for these powerful roles about unglamorous women in the world of men." Peter Howell in the Toronto Star puts it more succinctly: "She's nothing short of spectacular here," he writes. Nevertheless, the movie itself, by and large, does not come off as well as the actress who stars in it. Kenneth Turan remarks in the Los Angeles Times that while the events in the movie actually occurred, they feel "relentlessly contrived." He concludes: "While it's a truism that movies have to take dramatic license to make complex stories fit into finite time frames, it is depressing to come across a movie whose over-eagerness to convince us makes us reject rather than embrace it." And Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal laments that the film winds up as "a long, slow slog through what could have been, and should have been, a more absorbing story." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 21 October: Use this link to check out the IMDb's synopsis of reviews for the other major films opening this weekend: Doom and Dreamer.
Los Angeles, 21 October:  Steve Martin's Shopgirl, adapted from his novella and also starring Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman, is scheduled to open in limited release today. The film, directed by Anand Tucker (whose last feature was 1998's Hilary and Jackie), was successfully shown at the Toronto and Chicago Film Festivals during the last two months. If you're looking for a well-crafted romantic comedy, read Peter Travers' review in Rolling Stone.
London, 24 October:  Mobsters in the 1990 film GoodFellas have beaten a fear of heights in Vertigo and the great white shark of Jaws to help the Martin Scorsese film clench the mantle of greatest movie of all time in a survey of UK film experts.
GoodFellas, which featured Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and an Oscar® winning supporting role from Joe Pesci, topped the list of 100 movies in a survey of film critics by Total Film. "GoodFellas has everything, in terms of its technical brilliance, its huge influence on modern film-making and its spikiness and rewatchability," Total Film features editor Jamie Graham told Reuters.
Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 classic Vertigo took second place, while third went to Steven Spielberg's 1975 classic Jaws, the tale of a coastal town terrorised by a great white shark.
GoodFellas, which was based on the story of real-life mobster Henry Hill, also beat Citizen Kane, the 1941 Orson Welles film that tops many critics lists but which finished in sixth position in the Total Film poll.
The 10 ten films in the list included two made in the last decade, the 1999 film Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy directed by Peter Jackson. Fight Club took fourth position ahead of other classics such as Tokyo Story and Taxi Driver. "By no means were we trying to be perverse, but we were setting out to make a list that was a bit more modern," Graham said. -- Reuters
Use this link to view the Total Film Top Ten list.
Beaune, France, 24 October:  MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman has warned that his organization intends to wage a legal battle against a UNESCO convention passed last week that would allow countries to protect themselves against what they regard as a cultural invasion by America. "If countries start passing laws that are in contravention of World Trade Organization rules, there will be conflict," Glickman told a film industry conference in Beaune, France on Friday. He expressed concerns that some nations will use the UNESCO "cultural exception" to impose limitations on the number of U.S. films that can be distributed in their countries or to impose special taxes on films from abroad. Earlier, however, French Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres told the convention that nothing less than his country's identity was a stake. "Our battle has nothing to do with [economic] protectionism," he said, pointing out that U.S. films already account for 85 percent of movie ticket sales worldwide. -- IMDb
 Los Angeles, 24 October: Signaling a more aggressive stance by the Screen Actors Guild towards producers, the union on Sunday fired its national executive director, Greg Hessinger, as Hessinger was preparing to lead SAG's negotiating committee on a basic cable contract and on a commercials contract next year. Hessinger had been hired only six months ago. His firing, along with that of three former executives from AFTRA that he recently hired, marked the first significant action of SAG's board since it was taken over by the activist Membership First faction, headed by Alan Rosenberg, who became the union's president last month. In a statement, Rosenberg said, "The recent election made clear that our membership expects concrete results, particularly in our collective bargaining and our nationwide organizing efforts." He said that the firings "will allow us to focus our resources more intensely in these areas." Daily Variety reported that the board also decided not to pay Hessinger the $1.4 million he's owed for the remainder of his contract. In response, Hessinger said, "SAG members, who depend upon the enforcement of their own contractual protections for their very livelihood, should understand the sanctity of a contract. If their elected leaders choose not to do so, I will take all steps necessary to enforce my rights." In an interview with today's (Monday) Los Angeles Times, Paul Christie, head of SAG's New York branch, called Hessinger's firing "probably the most unethical and dishonorable thing I've ever seen done here." -- IMDb
London, 25 October: After already witnessing such "quintessentially British" stories as Oliver Twist, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen being filmed in Prague, the British film industry may next see the next Harry Potter and James Bond movies shot in the Czech capital, unless the government acts swiftly to provide tax incentives to Hollywood filmmakers, the Associated Press reported Monday. The wire service said that British officials are consulting with the film industry about a new tax-credit plan due to be implemented next April but that many in the industry are concerned that the tax break may not be large enough to help the British film industry compete satisfactorily against its counterparts in other European countries. -- IMDb
Beverly Hills, 25 October: A record fifty-eight countries from four continents, including new entrants Costa Rica, Fiji and Iraq, have submitted films for consideration in the Foreign Language Film Award category, Academy President Sid Ganis announced today. The 78th Academy Award® nominations will be announced on Tuesday, January 31, 2006, at 5:30 a.m. PST, in the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater. Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements for 2005 will be presented on Sunday, March 5, 2006, at the Kodak Theatre and televised live by the ABC Television Network beginning at 5 p.m. PST, preceded by a half-hour arrival segment. -- AMPAS
New York, 27 October:  Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong for Universal will have cost $207 million by the time it hits the screens and run more than three hours, published reports said today (Thursday). (By contrast, the original RKO film, produced in 1933, ran half as long and cost $650,000, or $8.8 million in today's dollars; Paramount's 1976 remake ran two hours 14 minutes and cost $24 million, or $82 million in today's dollars.) Universal executives told today's (Thursday) New York Times that they agreed to the extra length -- they originally required director Jackson to bring it in under two and a half hours -- and cost -- it originally was budgeted at $175 million -- after screening it at Jackson's New Zealand studios last month. Universal Vice Chairman Marc Shmuger told the Times: "This is a three-hour feast of an event. ... I've never come close to seeing an artist working at this level." Universal Chairman Stacey Snider remarked similarly to Daily Variety: "We loved it. It's a brilliant movie, an epic feast." Questions remain about who will pay the additional costs. The Times quoted Snider as saying that they will be split between Universal and Jackson. But Variety reported that Jackson had agreed to swallow the overage. And in an email message to the Times Jackson said that in an effort to support the three-hour length, "we offered to pay for these extra shots ourselves. That's what we're doing." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 28 October: Due for release today -- Prime, The Weather Man, The Legend of Zorro and Saw II. -- IMDb
 New York, 28 October:  Director Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now goes into limited release today. The film, which chronicles events as two Palestinian friends are recruited for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, has been extremely well received on the international film festival circuit, winning prizes at the Berlin and Netherlands festivals. Peter Travers, in Rolling Stone, writes: "It's not surprising that emotions run high in this movie powder keg about two Palestinian suicide bombers -- Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) -- on a mission to Tel Aviv. What does amaze is the humane and nonpartisan treatment of the topic by Palestinian director and co-writer Hany Abu-Assad. By detailing two days in the lives of these young mechanics -- they've been friends since childhood -- as they prepare to sacrifice their future for a cause they barely understand, the director puts a human face on the headlines. Shot in the West Bank, the film radiates authenticity. Even when he plays the action like a thriller, Abu-Assad is in search of a deeper truth."
 New York, 28 October: Also going into limited release in the U.S. today is Three... Extremes, a 2004 collection of three horror pieces by directors from Hong Kong, Korea and Japan. The first segment is called "Dumplings," directed by Hong Kong's Fruit Chan. It concerns an aging TV actress who goes to a woman who serves food that makes one appear younger. Critics warn that the final scenes of this short film are definitely not for the squeamish. Audience members have walked out of the theatre rather than continue to view the extremely disturbing images.
Korean Chan-woo Park (whose Oldboy created a stir on the festival circuit last year) directs the second segment, "Cut." In this story, a horror film director recovers from unconsciousness to find his wife, a pianist, suspended in mid-air above her piano by an arrangement of piano wires. A young child is bound and gagged on the sofa. The director is tied at the end of a tether allowing him to move only so far.
Finally, "Box" is the most complex of all. Made by the Japanese director Takashi Miike, it involves small twin girls who work with their father in a magic act. Their trick is to fold themselves into impossibly small boxes.
For a more detailed review of Three... Extremes, read Roger Ebert's article in the Chicago Sun-Times.
Los Angeles, 28 October: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences plans to host a bakeoff for the best original song Oscar® this year for the first time, a spokeswoman confirmed Friday. In the recent past, the prenomination show-and-tell process has applied only to the visual effects, sound editing and makeup branches, but this year will involve the Academy's music branch as well. It is unclear how the contenders for best song Oscar® noms will present their work to the music branch, but a source familiar with the situation said the branch is considering having one performer a night present a song in mid-January. Still, the logistics could become quite complicated, particularly in the case of any composer-performers who are vying for a nomination. Although the Academy would not confirm the specifics, a spokeswoman said that the deadline for submissions is Dec. 1. -- Sheigh Crabtree, The Hollywood Reporter
Boston, 3 November:  Boston has become the second U.S. city ever to screen the controversial documentary Winter Soldier, made in 1972 and featuring Vietnam veterans participating in a public hearing in Detroit at which they claimed that they witnessed or participated in atrocities during the Vietnam War. In a review appearing in today's Boston Globe, critic Wesley Morris writes that the film "is infuriating, its testimonies depressingly surreal. The searing first-person accounts reach each branch of the American military, creating a harrowing oral indictment." The film was initially screened at a Lincoln Center theater in New York but in recent weeks has been cropping up at numerous local film festivals, often accompanied by one of the soldiers who appeared at the hearing. However, it has been vigorously attacked by conservatives who claim that many of those who testified lied and that several never even served in Vietnam. -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 4 November: Use this link to view the IMDb synopsis of reviews for Chicken Little and Jarhead, the two main features opening this weekend.
 Los Angeles, 7 November: Two-time Academy Award®-winning movie legend Olivia De Havilland is to return to Hollywood from her home in France to be honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences next summer. The Gone With the Wind star will be the subject of a feature film tribute in Beverly Hills, California in the weeks leading up to her 90th birthday. Film fans attending the event will be treated to clips of her most-admired performances and a discussion with colleagues from throughout her career. De Havilland made her film debut as Hermia in Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1935, and went on to star with Errol Flynn in Captain Blood and another seven films. She was nominated for five Oscars®, and won two Best Actress awards for To Each His Own and The Heiress. -- IMDb
London, 7 November: The first British reviews are in for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire following Saturday night's London premiere, and if they are any indication of how the film will be received elsewhere, Warner Bros. executives will have reason to raise a goblet or two of their own to their future box-office success. "The passage of Harry and his friends into their teenage years has come off smoothly," James Christopher writes in the London Times. "Adolescence is Harry's new foe. And it brings the kind of challenges that most parents hate." Christopher credits director Mike Newell for a "considerable triumph" in keeping "the thrills up to exhilarating scratch." David Edwards in the Daily Mirror calls the fourth Potter film "the best yet -- a magnificent, magical and truly mesmerising fantasy epic that reminds you just how great a kids' movie can be." -- IMDb
New York, 10 November: Scheduled for general release this weekend -- Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, directed by Shane Black and starring Robert Downey, Jr., Val Kilmer and Michelle Monaghan; Zathura, directed by Jon Favreau and starring Jonah Bobo and Josh Hutcherson and featuring Tim Robbins; Mikael Håfström's Derailed, with Clive Owen and Jennifer Anniston; and The Shadow Dancer, with Joshua Jackson and Harvey Keitel, directed by Brad Mirman. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is scheduled to premiere in New York City on Saturday, 12 November.
St. Louis, 10 November:  The 14th annual St. Louis International Film Festival kicks off its 11-day run today. Among its offerings: Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto; Minh Nguyen-Vô's award-winning Mua len trau (Buffalo Boy) (2004); Pjer Zalica's Gori Vatra (Fuse) (2003); Park Chan-wook's Gongdong gyeongbi guyeok JSA (Joint Security Area) (2000); Richard Shepard's The Matador, with Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear; Gabrielle Savage Dockterman's Missing in America, with Danny Glover, Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton; Stephen Frears' Mrs. Henderson Presents, with Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins; Sequins (Brodeuses a.k.a. A Common Thread), directed and written by Éléonore Faucher (2004); Jun Ichikawa's Tony Takitani (2004); and Duncan Tucker's Transamerica.
The Festival also features a screening of Sam Wood's 1922 feature Beyond the Rocks, starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino. Thought for over 80 years to be lost forever, a print of this magnificent silent classic was found several years ago by the Nederlands Filmmuseum.
 Los Angeles, 11 November: Anthony Hopkins mocked Tom Cruise's boyish enthusiasm, and admitted that he had no idea what their collaboration, Mission: Impossible 2, was about, as Britain's film industry honored the American actor, along with Elizabeth Taylor in Beverly Hills on Thursday. Also honored at the annual Britannia Awards hosted by the Los Angeles branch of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts were English directors Ronald Neame, famed for The Poseidon Adventure and Great Expectations, and Mike Newell, the man behind the upcoming Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Hopkins bestowed the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for excellence in film on Cruise, having declared, "I don't actually know Tom that well." He recounted that when he turned up to the Australian shoot of Mission: Impossible 2, Cruise embraced him and lifted him off the ground, and asked him about the nonexistent script while eating an enormous club sandwich. "I still don't know what the film was about because all I remember is a whole lot of technical dialogue about a body in a suitcase," Hopkins said.
But Hopkins praised Cruise as a pure Hollywood star in the mold of icons like James Cagney, Paul Newman and Gregory Peck. "Everyone today is so laid-back and cool and it's kinda boring, but Tom is the opposite of that," Hopkins said.
Despite such a set-up, Cruise played it straight as he accepted the award. He paid a lengthy tribute to Kubrick, who died in 1999 just after finishing work on Eyes Wide Shut, in which Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman starred, and said the award was "a recognition of the magnificent power that films possess to effect positive change in the world."
Taylor, 73, making a second rare appearance in five days, cracked jokes as she received the Britannia Award for artistic excellence in international entertainment. From her wheelchair, to which she is confined because of severe back problems, she admitted that it had been a long time since she considered herself a "serious actress," and that one of the proudest moments of her life was being able to help shift the spotlight to AIDS awareness. But before things could get too maudlin, she requested a handkerchief -- preferably lace -- and said she loved her English royal title of Dame, since "I've been a broad all my life."
After Taylor pointed out that two-time husband Richard Burton never received an Academy Award® despite being nominated seven times and that something should be done about it, New Age actress Shirley MacLaine, who introduced her, said, "I'll talk to him tonight."
Neame, clocking in at a sprightly 94, attributed his longevity to "a very large vodka at lunchtime, and two very large scotches in the evening ... sometimes three very large scotches." -- Dean Goodman, Reuters
New York, 11 November: Use these links to view the IMDb's synopses of reviews for Zathura and Derailed.
London, 15 November:  A poster for the classic German 1920s film Metropolis has been sold for a world record US$690,000 to a private collector from the United States, the London gallery which arranged the sale said on Tuesday. The sale beat the previous record for a movie poster of $453,500, set in 1997 by a poster for the 1932 film The Mummy, the Reel Poster Gallery said.
Graphic artist Heinz Schulz-Neudamm designed the sepia-coloured poster featuring the futuristic skyline which helped make Fritz Lang's film famous. The art deco poster is one of only four known copies in existence. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and Berlin's Film Museum have one each while another is in a private collection.
The poster was bought by California-based collector Ken Schacter from British businessman Andrew Cohen, chairman of mail order firm Betterware, a spokeswoman for the gallery said. -- Reuters
Beverly Hills, 15 November: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced the list of films that will continue on in the voting process in the category of Best Documentary Feature for the 78th Academy Awards. Eighty-two films had been eligible in the category.
The 15 films from which the five nominees will be selected (in alphabetical order): After Innocence; The Boys of Baraka; Darwin's Nightmare; The Devil and Daniel Johnston; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; Favela Rising; Mad Hot Ballroom; March of the Penguins; Murderball; Occupation: Dreamland; On Native Soil: The Documentary of the 9/11 Commission Report; Rize; Street Fight; 39 Pounds of Love; and Unknown White Male.
Eligible documentaries were screened by the Documentary Branch Screening Committee, made up of members of the branch who serve on a volunteer basis. The above films were chosen after a preliminary round of screenings. The nominated films will be announced along with nominations in 24 other categories on Tuesday, January 31, at 5:30 a.m. PST. -- A.M.P.A.S.
Rome, 15 November:  One of Italy's best-known screenplay writers, Agenore Incrocci alias "Age," has died at the age of 86 . The Brescian-born writer passed away in a hospital in Rome on Tuesday. In 1949, he teamed up with Furio Scarpelli and together they built up a reputation as one of the best screenwriting couples in Italy .
They worked with some 45 directors over the years, writing some of the most popular Italian comic masterpieces as well as collaborating with neorealist great Pietro Germi and spaghetti Western legend Sergio Leone. The prolific partnership also included some of the best-loved films starring Neapolitan comic genius Totó such as Totó Sceicco (1950) and Totó e le Donne (Totó and the Women) (1952). They co-penned Mario Monicelli's Oscar®-nominated comedies I Soliti Ignoti (a.k.a. The Usual Unidentified Thieves and Big Deal on Madonna Street) (1958), La Grande Guerra (The Great War) (1959) and Casanova '70 (1965) as well as the director's 1966 hit L'Armata Brancaleone featuring Vittorio Gassman.
Dino Risi was another acclaimed Italian director they worked with, co-writing the 1962 film La Marcia su Roma (The March on Rome) and the 1963 movie I Mostri. The pair helped write a string of acclaimed films for Germi including the 1961 Oscar-winning Divorzio all'Italiana (Divorce - Italian Style) starring Marcello Mastroianni and the 1964 comic drama Sedotta e Abbandonata (A Matter of Honour). They also collaborated on Sergio Leone's 1966 cult Clint Eastwood Western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. -- Wikipedia
Los Angeles, 17 November: Due for general release this weekend -- Walk the Line, with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon; and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Mike Newell's take on the fourth in the series. Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto goes into limited release.
 Beverly Hills, CA, 17 November:  It's shaping up to be the Year of the Penguin at the 2006 Academy Awards®. The shortlists in the Feature Animation and Documentary Feature Oscar® categories have been released, with the penguin-centric 'toon Madagascar and doc March of the Penguins making the initial cut in the respective races. Madagascar, the celeb-laden DreamWorks pic that has banked $193 million domestically since its opening in May, has some stiff competition in the animation category.
Among its high-profile, big-money-making competitors are the Zach Braff-voiced Chicken Little, the Robin Williams vehicle Robots, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, the twisted take on Little Red Riding Hood tale Hoodwinked (due out Dec. 23) and the clay-animated Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which has been tabbed the early favorite by the Internet oddsmakers. The Wallace & Gromit shorts have already accounted for two Oscars®. The other films jockeying for a nomination are Gulliver's Travel, Hauru no ugoku shiro (Howl's Moving Castle), Steamboy and Valiant.
The Best Animated Feature award has been around for five years, and at least eight films must pass muster in order for the category to be activated. To qualify, a film must be a minimum of 70 minutes, contain more than 75 percent animation and utilize one of three styles: traditional cel drawing, stop-motion or computer-generated animation. The film must also open theatrically in Los Angeles prior to Dec. 31. Of the 10 'toons announced Thursday, three will ultimately vie for Oscar® when nominations are unveiled Jan. 31.
Meanwhile, while March of the Penguins was passed over by France for consideration for Best Foreign-Language Film, the U.S. version, featuring narration by Morgan Freeman, is among the favorites for Best Documentary. While there were no major snubs in the Animated Feature race, there were a couple of eyebrow-raising omissions in the Documentary field, notably Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, about an animal-rights activist's fatal encounter with the bears he loved, and the dirty joke-dropping The Aristocrats.
Last year, The Incredibles beat out Shark Tale and Shrek 2 in the Animated Feature category. Born Into Brothels was named Best Documentary Feature. And if the prognosticators are correct, expect to see the tuxedoed birds waddle down the red carpet at the 78th Annual Academy Awards Mar. 5, 2006, at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. -- Julie Keller, E! Online
London, 21 November:  A German fighter attack on a civilian plane carrying British film star Leslie Howard in 1943 may have been intended as an assassination attack on Prime Minister Winston Churchill, according to a British documentary set to air tonight (Monday). Howard, best known for his role of Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, died in the crash of the plane in the Bay of Biscay. According to the documentary, based on the recently discovered writings of Churchill's bodyguard, Walter Thompson, the cracking of Germany's Enigma Code revealed that the Nazis had planned an attempt on Churchill's life. It notes that on the night Howard's plane was shot down, Churchill's plane, which had been grounded by bad weather, had been scheduled to fly over the same route as the one carrying Howard. -- IMDb
New York, 23 November: Scheduled for general release during the Thanksgiving holiday week and weekend: Yours, Mine and Ours, with Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo; Harold Ramis' The Ice Harvest, with John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Connie Nielsen, Randy Quaid and Oliver Platt; Chris Columbus' film version of the Pulitzer and Tony Award winning musical Rent; Usher and Chazz Palminteri in In the Mix; and the latest version of Jane Austen's saga of the Bennett sisters, Pride & Prejudice. Stephen Gaghan's Syriana, with George Clooney, Matt Damon and Chris Cooper, is scheduled for limited release.
Hollywood, 29 November: With six nominations, Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, the autobiographical tale of two boys dealing with their parents' divorce, led the list of nominees for Film Independent's 2006 Independent Spirit Awards, which were announced Tuesday morning. It will compete for best feature with Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Goodnight and Good Luck and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which all picked up four nominations each. Selected from more than 200 submissions, winners of the Independent Spirit Awards, which recognize American independent features, made for less than $20 million, will be presented March 4 in Santa Monica. -- Gregg Kilday, Hollywood Reporter (Full story and all nominations).
Berlin, 1 December:  Veteran British actress Charlotte Rampling, who made her film debut in 1965 in The Knack ... and How to Get It and who went on to appear in some 68 TV and theatrical film dramas, has been named head of the Berlin Film Festival's (Berlinale) 2006 jury. In a statement, festival director Dieter Kosslick remarked that Rampling "has come to stand for unconventional and memorable cinema." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 2 December: Opening in theatre across the USA this weekend: Karyn Kusama's Aeon Flux, starring Charlize Theron with Frances McDormand and Pete Postlethwaite. In limited release: Duncan Tucker's Transamerica, with Kevin Zegers, Felicity Huffman, Graham Greene, Fionna Flannagan, Elizabeth Peña and Burt Young (Los Angeles and New York); Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, with Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea (Los Angeles); and Dan Ireland's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, with Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend (New York).
 Berlin, 3 December: The French thriller Caché (Hidden), featuring videotapes, obsession and the pain of facing up to one's past, swept the 18th European Film Awards in Berlin on Saturday. Sharing the limelight was Scottish actor Sean Connery, who received a lifetime achievement award. Caché, directed by Michael Haneke, won six awards, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor. Many critics felt the film, starring Daniel Auteuil as a TV presenter and Juliette Binoche as his wife, should have won the prestigious Palme d'Or it was nominated for at this year's Cannes Film Festival, but the prize eventually went to the Dardenne brothers' L'Enfant. A total of 47 films were judged by 1,600 European Film Academy (EFA) members representing a broad spectrum of the industry. While they have yet to gain the prestige of high-profile European film festivals in Cannes, Venice and Berlin, the awards are widely respected in the film industry and sometimes seen as Europe's equivalent to the Oscars®.
 The biggest star of the evening was Connery, who received an EFA lifetime achievement award. Sporting a tartan dinner suit, he was cheered and applauded as he accepted the silver statue. "To sustain a long period in acting, you have to have a simplicity in life, you need to be almost childlike," he told journalists later. Connery found fame and fortune as the suave and sophisticated British secret agent James Bond, a role he played six times. He also worked as a producer and director and won an Oscar® as veteran Chicago cop, Jim Malone, in The Untouchables in 1987.
While the EFA backed Caché, cinemagoers voted in favor of Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tagen (Sophie Scholl - The Final Days), the story of a German student and anti-Nazi campaigner. In the People's Choice category, in which viewers cast their vote over the Internet, Scholl won best director for Marc Rothemund and best actress for Julia Jentsch. The film follows six days in the life of Scholl, who, together with her brother and friends, founded the resistance group "White Rose." Jentsch, who also received the EFA's best actress prize, said she was moved by the reaction she had received from people around the world.
The Best Non-European film category was won by Goodnight and Good Luck directed by George Clooney, and Best Composer went to Rupert Gregson-Williams and Andrea Guerra for Hotel Rwanda. French composer Maurice Jarre received the European Achievement in World Cinema prize from the EFA. The father of French pop musician Jean-Michel Jarre wrote music for more than 170 films, amid them David Lean's epic sagas including Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, and has won three Oscars® for his work. -- Karin Strohecker, Reuters
New York, 6 December:
International reviewers scrambled Monday night to post reviews of Peter Jackson's King Kong after it premiered on 38 screens at two Times Square multiplexes. All appeared to agree that the film will pack 'em in. John Hiscock wrote in the London Daily Telegraph: "Hokey and clichéed in parts, thrilling and dramatic at other times, King Kong is reminiscent of both Jurassic Park and Titanic. And like those two record-setting epics, it is certain to be a huge hit." Baz Bamigboye in Britain's Daily Mail described it as "jaw-droppingly brilliant: the most entertaining blockbuster movie this year." Kevin Maher in the London Times commented: "That Jackson's King Kong upgrades the now hammy original with wit, heart and humor is a pleasant surprise. That it does so by reinventing the action blockbuster, in form and emotional impact, is nothing less than an act of cinematic alchemy." But several writers also noted that the film will have to become one of the top-ten box-office earners of all time in order to be considered a success. Geoffrey Macnab of Britain's Independent, who noted that director Peter Jackson poured $32 million of his own money into the film to cover budget overruns, commented, "Even with Jackson opening his check book, King Kong remains a monumental risk." The New York Daily News is running reviews from each of its lead film critics, Jami Bernard and Jack Mathews. Bernard calls it, "the most thrilling, soulful monster picture ever made. At last, it can be said without irony -- I laughed, I cried. ... It's brilliant." Mathews concludes that it "will further Jackson's reputation as the leading visionary among fantasy filmmakers and it restores the Empire State Building to the stately glory of its past." -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 7 December:  It took C.S. Lewis five years to write Chronicles of Narnia, one of the best-loved children's series of all time, and a half-century for his heirs to get it to the big screen but positive early reviews indicate the old fashioned yarn made the journey safely. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens on Friday in North America and widely in Europe in what the Walt Disney Co. and Walden Media hope will be the first of a series based on Lewis' seven books.
Los Angeles Times reviewer Carina Chocano described the film as "real by the logic of childhood" and noted that the book's much-discussed Christian themes do not overwhelm the simple tale of four children's adventures in Narnia. "As a Christian primer, it's terrible. As a story, it's timeless," Chocano wrote in a review on Wednesday. Television's Ebert & Roeper praised the cutting-edge special effects and called it "a fantasy that has charm ... beauty and enchantment." Reviewers also praised the film for hewing faithfully to the novel's plot about four children who escape the World War II London Blitz to a country house owned by an old professor. They discover a magical wardrobe that leads to a wintry world inhabited by talking animals, a white witch and a Christlike lion named Aslan.
There was a lot of room for invention in Lewis' loosely written 1950 novel. Director Andrew Adamson (Shrek &
Shrek 2) said he was surprised that the detailed battle scene he loved as a child occupied only a page in the book. "I didn't want to make the book as it was, I wanted to make the book as I remembered it," Adamson said. But in some respects, that vision clashed with that of Lewis' stepson, Douglas Gresham, a born-again Christian who manages the writer's estate and oversaw the making of the film. As a result, there was much discussion before changes were made.
Tilda Swinton, who plays Jadis the White Witch, added her own spin on the book's villain, whose mission was to kill the children to prevent her prophesied downfall. "I wanted to shake up the stereotype of the witch," Swinton said in a recent interview. "We wanted to make her as Aryan as possible. These are children of World War II and the Nazis would be the thing they were most afraid of."
Disney played on Lewis' identity as a Christian author and on the book's religious themes to market the film heavily to Christian groups. Lewis once said that the idea for the Chronicles of Narnia began not with an intention to write Christian fables, but with the images of a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge and a magnificent lion. "At first there wasn't anything Christian about them. That element pushed itself in of its own accord," he wrote.
After his 1931 conversion to Christianity following a famous nighttime walk with fellow fantasy writer and Oxford don J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis went on to write some of the most famous 20th century Christian tracts, including "The Screwtape Letters." Christian viewers will see parallels between scenes in the film involving the death and rebirth of Aslan, in which the two girls spend a night weeping over his dead body before he returns to life and the New Testament's description of the resurrection of Jesus. -- Gina Keating, Reuters Full article
Hong Kong, 7 December:  Yu guo. Oi (Perhaps Love), the first Chinese musical to be produced in more than 40 years, is setting box-office records on the Chinese mainland, China Daily reported today (Wednesday). The film, which reportedly cost $10 million to produce, earned $2.2 million in its first weekend -- $332,000 in Shanghai alone. The film, which closed the Venice Film Festival in September, was produced and directed by Hong Kong director Peter Chan Ho-sunis and stars Hong Kong singer Jacky Cheung, South Korean actor Ji Jin-hee, Taiwanese-Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro, and Chinese actress Zhou Xun. Hong Kong has submitted the film for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar® nomination. -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 8 December: As the deadline for consideration for this year's Academy Awards approaches, several writers have begun their analyses of the probable nominees. Tom O'Neil looks at the front-runners for each of the major categories at The Envelope, the new home for GoldDerby.com. Here are links to his articles -- Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress. AP movie writer David Germain surveys probable nominees in the Best Picture, Director, Actor and Actress categories on Yahoo. And, back at The Envelope, Steve Pond keeps Academy voters (and the rest of us) up on the latest at Oscar Beat. Check 'em out, and bookmark The Envelope for the most recent updates.
New York, 8 December: Due for release in theatres across the US this weekend -- The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Ang Lee's revisionist Western Brokeback Mountain and Stephen Gaghan's Syriana. King Kong, Peter Jackson's remake of the 1933 classic, is scheduled to swing into theatres December 14.
Los Angeles, 10 December: Chris Rock won't be back to hand out Oscars® next year, according to reports. The comedian's publicist, Matt Labov, told the New York Times Friday that Rock did not want to do the show "in perpetuity" but would "like to do it again down the road." He did not elaborate. Rock took over as host for the first time last year. He drew younger viewers, but his barbs skewering stars like Jude Law, Tobey Maguire and others alienated some members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. -- Reuters, Hollywood Reporter
Los Angeles, 11 December:  Brokeback Mountain and happy endings don't go together -- except on Saturday night, when the drama about cowboys in dangerous love was named Best Picture by the Los Angeles Critics Association. And so began award-show season...
With the National Board of Review delaying its picks until Monday, the Los Angeles critics are the first out of the gate as the run-up to the 78th Annual Academy Awards commences. Overall, Brokeback Mountain, which opened in theaters Friday, won two awards, including one for director Ang Lee. The L.A. critics showed the most love to Capote, a biopic about Truman Capote's struggles and deceptions during the writing of his landmark nonfiction crime title, In Cold Blood. The movie won a total of three awards for Philip Seymour Hoffman (Best Actor), ex-"Judging Amy" star Dan Futterman (Best Screenplay, an honor shared with Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale) and Catherine Keener (Best Supporting Actress, an honor shared with herself for her work in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and The Interpreter).
In other top awards, William Hurt was named Best Supporting Actor for A History of Violence; and Vera Farmiga, heretofore not a usual suspect for Oscar buzz, was tapped Best Actress for Down to the Bone, a drama a drug-addicted housewife that has "grossed" $19,723, per BoxOfficeMojo.com, since opening last month. The obscure Farmiga might be regarded as a quintessential L.A. critics pick. In 30 previous award-show events, the association's Best Picture winners have gone onto claim the Academy Award only seven times. Rather than serve as a bellwether for the Oscar®, the L.A. awards serve as a booster. Last year, Sideways began its unlikely drive for five top Oscar® nominations by claiming a Best Picture win from the L.A. Critics Association. (In the end, though, Sideways lost out for the top Academy prize to Million Dollar Baby.) The coming days, meanwhile, will bring much award-show business. The NBR and New York critics are due to unveil their year-end awards on Monday; nominations for the Golden Globes are due out Tuesday.
Other winners of the 31st Annual Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards were Caché (Foreign Language Film); Grizzly Man (Documentary); 2046 (Production Design); Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Animation); Hauru no ugoku shiro (Howl's Moving Castle) (Score); and Terrence Howard (New Generation). -- Full story: Joal Ryan, E! Online
Los Angeles, 12 December:  Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen apparently have a price. And it's about $1.6 billion. DreamWorks SKG, the movie, television and music empire conceived by those Hollywood moguls 11 years ago, has been sold to Paramount Pictures for the whopping sum. According to the announcement released from both studios, Paramount will cough up around $775 million in cash and will assume $825 million in debt and other obligations. The deal was brokered in about a week, undermining a year of talks between DreamWorks and longtime distribution partner NBC Universal.
-- Full story: Julie Keller, E! Online
 New York, 12 December: Cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain won three of the top four awards from the New York Film Critics Circle on Monday, building momentum as the critics' favorite for Hollywood's top honors, the Oscars®. Earlier the National Board of Review, a New York group of 150 film professionals, academics and students, announced its annual awards, naming George Clooney's McCarthy-era drama Goodnight and Good Luck as best film of 2005.
The awards presented by the New York Film Critics Circle are among a string of second-tier awards leading up to the March 5 Academy Awards. The slew of awards announced in December traditionally helps narrow the field for the Oscars®.
Director Ang Lee's film Brokeback Mountain is shaping up as the critics' favorite, despite concerns that its depiction of a love affair between two men may have trouble winning over audiences in more conservative parts of the country. The New York Film Critics Circle gave the film its awards for best film, best director and best actor, for Heath Ledger. Brokeback Mountain already won best film from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association on Saturday, and it earned eight nominations for the Critics Choice Awards on Sunday.
The National Board of Review's prize for directing went to Lee for Brokeback Mountain. "A lot of people among critics are responding to it because it is so daring," said Gene Seymour, chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle. "It has all the sweep of what we have come to know as a major Hollywood romance, but it carries within it such a grand departure," he said.
The New York Film Critics named Reese Witherspoon best actress for her role in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. Their awards for best supporting actor and best supporting actress went to William Hurt and Maria Bello for their roles in A History of Violence. Critically acclaimed Capote, directed by Bennett Miller, won an award for best first film, while Werner Herzog will be honored for two non-fiction films Grizzly Man and White Diamond, the group said. Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai's 2046 was named best foreign language film and Japanese film-maker Hayao Miyazaki's Hauru no ugoku shiro (Howl's Moving Castle) won best animated film.
 The National Board of Review, which has sometimes raised eyebrows for its esoteric picks, appeared not to have gone too far out on a limb this year. It picked Philip Seymour Hoffman as best actor for Capote and "Desperate Housewives" star Felicity Huffman as best actress for Transamerica.
The National Board of Review also listed its 10 best films of the year in a selection that included many of those named by the Critics Choice Awards on Sunday. The list, which was not ranked in order, included independents such as Brokeback Mountain, Crash and Capote as well as A History of Violence, the political thriller Syriana and big studio productions Walk the Line and Memoirs of a Geisha. Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen made the list for Munich and Match Point, respectively. Paradise Now, about Palestinian suicide bombers, was named best foreign-language film, and March of the Penguins was given best documentary by the National Board of Review.
The National Board of Review's picks have traditionally been closely watched because it has been the first to announce its awards, but its announcement was delayed this year amid controversy over its voting procedures. -- Full article: Claudia Parsons, Reuters
Los Angeles, 12 December: The American Film Institute has released its list of the top 10 films for 2005: (in alphabetical order) Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Good Night, and Good Luck, A History of Violence, King Kong, Munich, The Squid and the Whale and Syriana. -- Full article: Joal Ryan, E! Online
Beverly Hills, 13 December:  The Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced its nominees for the 2006 Golden Globe Awards today. Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain led the pack with seven nominations, including best film drama, best director (Lee), best actor in a dramatic movie (Heath Ledger) and best supporting actress (Michelle Williams). The movie, which has won several critics' awards and is now a front-runner for Academy Awards, was followed by the George Clooney-directed drama Goodnight and Good Luck, Woody Allen's Match Point, and the film adaptation of Broadway musical The Producers, all with four nominations each. -- Full story: Bob Tourtellotte, Reuters
Use this link to view all the nominees at the IMDb.
Los Angeles, 14 December: Peter Jackson's 3-hour-and-seven-minute epic King Kong is set to swing into town today in 3,568 theaters in North America and more than 6,000 in overseas territories -- the biggest worldwide opening for any motion picture in history. It has set the critics raving. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times gives it four stars and calls it "...a magnificent entertainment." In the New York Times, A.O. Scott marvels at Jackson's showmanship and credits him with a "gargantuan, mightily entertaining remake." Claudia Puig in USA Today remarks that King Kong reaffirms Jackson's position as "a visionary filmmaker who is not only a technical wizard but also a master storyteller." And if all of that sounds like a movie too good to be true, Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News assures his readers, "It cannot be oversold." -- IMDb
Beijing, 15 December: Walt Disney Co. is making its first movie in China, an adaptation of a local children's book, joining a growing field of Hollywood studios seeking access to the nation's tightly controlled media and entertainment markets. Disney said on Wednesday its Walt Disney Studios was co-producing The Secret of the Magic Gourd with local investors Centro Digital Pictures and The China Film Group Corp. "We feel their participation is exactly what's required in ensuring that this film lives up to the expectation of generations of Chinese audiences," said Mark Zoradi, president of Disney's Buena Vista International distribution arm.
Centro's work may be familiar to Western audiences because it created visual effects for such films as Kill Bill, Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. China Film is, among other things, the only government-authorized importer of foreign movies and therefore works regularly with Hollywood studios. -- Full article: ChinaView.cn
 Los Angeles, 15 December:  With just over two weeks left in 2005 to make the deadline for Oscar® consideration, three features open this weekend -- one nationally and two in limited release. Thomas Bezucha's Christmas family reunion comedy The Family Stone rolls out across the country. Featuring Claire Danes, Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Dermot Mulroney, Craig T. Nelson, Sarah Jessica Parker and Luke Wilson, writer-director Bezucha's film has received mixed reviews. From Asia comes Kaige Chen's Mo gik (The Promise), a period piece in which, empowered by the love of a slave (Dong-kun Jang), a royal concubine (Cecilia Cheung) is given the chance to make an extraordinary decision. The film has been nominated for a Golden Globe. Finally, bringing the Tony-Award winning musical back to the big screen, The Producers tells the story of a down on his luck producer (Nathan Lane) and his accountant (Matthew Broderick) and their get rich quick plan to stage Broadway's biggest flop. Supporting the Broadway leads, director Susan Stroman has called upon Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell, Roger Bart, and Gary Beach. (Bart and Beach are also bringing their Broadway characters to the screen.) Reviewers have been less than kind.
Los Angeles, 15 December: King Kong, Peter Jackson's remake about the giant ape in love, took in $9.8 million domestically in its first day, solid for a Wednesday debut but far below the king-size premieres of other action epics. Distributor Universal called it a good beginning that will generate audience word-of-mouth on top of stellar reviews for King Kong. "My little monkey's doing great," said Nikki Rocco, Universal's head of distribution. "We're convinced with all the information we have that this is the big guy, and he's going to be around for a long time."
The first of Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films, The Fellowship of the Ring, opened on a Wednesday in December 2001 with $18.2 million, nearly double the take of King Kong. The second installment, The Two Towers, debuted on a Wednesday a year later with $26.2 million, while the final chapter, The Return of the King, opened with $34.5 million the next year, a record for a Wednesday debut until Spider-Man 2 broke it six months later with $40.4 million. The Lord of the Rings flicks opened closer to Christmas, when college students generally were off for winter break and free to hit the theaters.
The $9.8 million gross puts King Kong at No. 21 on the all-time list of best Wednesday debuts, just behind Catch Me If You Can (2002) and ahead of Armageddon (1998). Most other films ranking above it were summer blockbusters or franchise films such as The Matrix Revolutions. Still, expectations have been huge for King Kong, though analysts say it could follow the long-haul pattern of Titanic (1997), which had a comparatively modest $28.6 million opening weekend but stayed afloat to become the biggest-grossing modern film at $600 million domestically and $1.8 billion worldwide. -- Full story: David Germain, AP
New York, 19 December:
Far more surprising to box-office watchers than the tame debut of King Kong over the weekend was the performance of Brokeback Mountain, which packed the 69 theaters in 21 cities that it played in. In such cities as Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles, the take was more than $70,000 at each theater. Nationally, it averaged a sensational $34,194 per theater, which Daily Variety said was a record for any film released on more than 50 screens (except for those released in IMAX theaters, where ticket prices are substantially higher). Generally described as a gay cowboy romance, the film reportedly played well in some smaller test markets. Today's (Monday) Los Angeles Times observed that the film fared well in the "closely watched" city of Plano, TX. Jack Foley, Focus Films' distribution chief, told the Times that its debut there "was a revelation about the accessibility of this movie. ... This is not gay-dependent. Attendance at those theaters indicates the film has the attention of suburban moviegoers." -- IMDb
Use this link to see metacritic.com's synopsis of reviews for Brokeback Mountain
Berlin, 20 December:  The first Competition films of the 56th Berlin International Film Festival have been selected. Festival director Dieter Kosslick says he is pleased that he can show both new films by renowned directors as well as productions by young filmmakers. Among the films selected so far are two German productions: new works by Oskar Roehler (The Elementary Particles) and Hans-Christian Schmid (Requiem). Six of the confirmed films will celebrate their world premiere at the Berlinale. The eagerly awaited new film by master director Terrence Malick, The New World, will be also be shown in the section but will not compete. Other films in this initial selection include Syriana (US), Candy (Australia), Snowcake (UK-Canada), Invisible Waves (Thailand), and Mo gik (Wu ji, The Promise, Hong Kong-China). A total of 26 films will be chosen for the Competition, and the selection will be finalised by mid-January. The Berlinale is the first of Europe's three major festivals in the new year and considered after Cannes and alongside Venice to be one of the world's most prestigious film showcases. -- Berlinale.de
Los Angeles, 21 December: Two new features open on screens nationwide today -- Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (with Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt and Eugene Levy) and Fun with Dick and Jane (with Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni). The final Merchant-Ivory production, The White Countess, with Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave and John Wood, opens in limited release today. (Links are to metacritic.com, a web site that offers a survey of several critical reviews.)
Monterey, 21 December: Animated films represented the most lucrative genre of films released between 2000 and 2004, earning an average of $194.5 million in gross profit each, according to a study by Monterey, CA-based Kagan Research. In the study, entitled "Economics of Motion Pictures 2006," the entertainment industry research film concluded that sci-fi/fantasy films were the second most profitable and family films were the third. The study further concluded that the most costly films to produce were also the biggest box-office earners. -- IMDb
Beverly Hills, 21 December: Oscar®-winning composer Bill Conti will return to the Oscar podium as musical director for the 78th Academy Awards, telecast producer Gil Cates announced today. This will be the 18th time that Conti has conducted the Academy Awards Orchestra. -- A.M.P.A.S.
Los Angeles, 22 December: Tommy Lee Jones' Cannes favorite The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada gets its LA release today. The Cannes Festival recognized the film for Best Actor (Jones) and Best Screenplay (Guillermo Arriaga).
Chicago, 23 December: Roger Ebert has released his list of the 10 best films for 2005, including "Jury Prizes" and "Special Jury Awards." Check 'em out at RogerEbert.com.
New York, 23 December: This weekend sees the release of several films as the eligibility year ends for Oscar® 2005. Opening across the country today are Memoirs of a Geisha and Munich; Transamerica (now in LA & NYC) goes into limited release, and Caché opens in LA & NYC. On Christmas Day (Sunday), Rumor Has It..., Casanova and Wolf Creek will roll out nationally, while The New World and Mrs. Henderson Presents open in limited release.
Los Angeles, 23 December: Use this link to view metacritc.com's list of the 20 films that received the best weighted reviews on their web site this year. You might be surprised at some of the listings!
Washington, DC, 27 December: The US Library of Congress had added a new batch of films to its National Film Registry. Among the films selected by James H. Billington for inclusion in the registry are the 1933 Barbara Stanwyck film Baby Face, whose racy content inspired the Hays Production Code, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which took audience participation to another level, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which gave us "gnarly buds." The 25 titles added today (in alphabetical order): Baby Face (1933); The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man (1975); The Cameraman (1928); Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort, S.C., May 1940 (1940); Cool Hand Luke (1967); Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982); The French Connection (1971); Giant (1956); H2O (1929); Hands Up (1926); Hoop Dreams (1994); House of Usher (1960); Imitation of Life (1934); Jeffries-Johnson world championship fight (1910); Making of an American (1920); Miracle on 34th Street (1947); Mom and Dad (1944); The Music Man (1962); Power of the Press (1928); A Raisin in the Sun (1961); The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975); San Francisco earthquake and fire, April 18, 1906 (1906); The Sting (1973); A Time for Burning (1966); and Toy Story (1995). -- Full article: Brooks Boliek, Reuters
Beverly Hills, 28 December: The totals are in, and 311 movies are in the running for best picture at the 78th annual Academy Awards. The full list will be mailed to Academy members along with nominating ballots tomorrow, but A.M.P.A.S. released the number this morning. This marks the first time in 32 years that more than 300 films have been eligible. For the past five years, the number of qualifying films has ranged from a low of 242 in 2000 to a high of 279 in 2002. The Academy attributes this year's boom to the large number of qualifying feature documentaries: 35 in 2005, as opposed to 14 last year. Of those 311 eligible films, of course, about eight have a realistic chance of a nomination. -- Steve Pone, The Envelope
New York, 28 December: David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, starring Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello, has been named best film of 2005 in the Take Seven critics poll conducted by New York's The Village Voice. The survey of over 100 film critics writing for alternative weeklies, online publications and film journals, also named Cronenberg best director. Heath Ledger was named best performer for his work in Brokeback Mountain, while Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale was voted best screenplay. -- IMDb
Los Angeles, 28 December: Woody Allen's latest film, Match Point, opens in LA and NYC today. Friday sees the limited release of The Matador.
London, 29 December:  Rank, once one of Britain's most prolific and prestigious filmmaking groups -- whose films opened with a muscular man striking a gigantic gong -- is making its final exit from the film business. Reports said today that the company, founded by J. Arthur Rank more than 70 years ago, will sell its Deluxe Film holdings for $750 million to billionaire Ron Perelman, head of Revlon. (Reports failed to note the irony of a company, which once operated Britain's top film studio, selling out to a makeup man.) Rank said it planned to focus its business efforts on expanding its gambling casinos and its chain of Hard Rock restaurants and hotels. Deluxe is one of the world's largest film labs, producing prints for major studios and independents in Hollywood, Rome and London. It is not the first time that Perelman, through his investment company, MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, has purchased a major Hollywood film processor. In 1983, her purchased Technicolor, Deluxe's main rival, then sold it five years later to Carlton Communications, which went on to buy the Rank library and film distribution business in 1997. -- IMDb
Beverly Hills, 29 December: Nomination ballots for the 78th Academy Awards® -- 5,798 of them -- were mailed today to voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Completed ballots must be at PricewaterhouseCoopers by 5 p.m. on Saturday, 21 January, 2006. Ballots received after the deadline will not be counted. All nomination and final award ballots are tabulated by PricewaterhouseCoopers to ensure that all aspects of the balloting process are conducted with fairness and accuracy. Prior to mailing, the PricewaterhouseCoopers staff administers a thorough verification process to make sure there are no duplicate ballots and that none are missing. In addition to being counted and sorted, each ballot is numbered to guarantee that it goes to the correct Academy voter. Nominations for the 78th Academy Awards will be announced on Tuesday, January 31, 2006, at 5:30 a.m. PST, in the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater. Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements for 2005 will be presented on 5 March, 2006, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland, and televised live by the ABC Television Network beginning at 5 p.m. -- A.M.P.A.S.
New York, 30 December: The top 15 films of 2005 performed as well at the box office as the top 15 films of 2004; however, every film below the top 15 performed worse, Daily Variety reported today (Friday) in a year-end analysis of the top 100 films at the box office. The trade publication pegged the total for the year at around $8.75 billion, down 5 percent from $9.2 billion a year ago, while admissions dropped 11 percent to 1.32 billion from 1.48 billion. (It marked the third consecutive year of declining attendance.) Variety observed that only two studios, Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox, posted higher box-office earnings this year than last. It pointed out that Fox had received a big boost from Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, which earned $380 million, making it the year's top grosser. It failed to point out, however, that Lucasfilm, which fully funds its productions, also takes all of the profits, paying the studio only a flat distribution fee. -- IMDb
updated 7 January 2007, 1800 GMT
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11 January, Tennessee, USA --