Film festivals come in various shapes, sizes, formats and orientations. The currently ongoing 22nd installment of the Santa Barbara Film Festival is a bit off-beat in certain aspects. Lasting eleven days and presenting some 200 films it is certainly not small -- more like "medium to large."
In terms of importance, however, while it is not considered to be quite in the same class as the North-American majors, Sundance, Telluride, Chicago, New York, Toronto and Montreal, it can nevertheless ce...
Friday, October 6----The Woodstock Film Festival will open next Thursday with the East Coast Premiere of the docudrama INFAMOUS, the highly ancticipated biopic of legendary writer Truman Capote.
The film, which stars British actor Toby Jones in a remarkable incarnation of the capricious Capote, was written and directed by UK director Douglas McGrath (NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, EMMA). The film, which also stars Sandra Bullock, Daniel Craig, Peter Bogdanovich, Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, Gwyneth Paltrow,...
With a couple of hours still left to go until the official kick-off of this "Mother of all Film Festivals" activity is feverish along the short stretch of the Lido known as Viale Marconi, the actual location of this oldest of all world film festivals --Now that was rather a mouthful, calling for a bit of elucidation. The first Venice film festival took place way back in 1932 when the Fascist government under Benito Mussolini, taking a page from Lenin, realized that film was a powerful propaganda...
The 63rd edition of the Venice film festival has opened with a salvo of noir or noirish films during which the 'dark horse' "Hollywoodland" has upstaged the odds-on favorite "Black Dahlia" which arrived with far more ballyhoo. While Dahlia, with its high-powered cast, name director Brian De Palma, and big time writer James Ellroy all on hand, was rather tepidly received at various screenings, "Hollywoodland” or 'the Death of Superman’ as the press has dubbed the film, was roundly applauded...
The Italian press on the morning after Opening Night was was, as expected, politely dismissive of De Palma's "Black Dahlia" and seemed to be much more concerned with the late arrival on the red carpet of the film's heroine, new American Diva -- (or should we say "Divette") -- Scarlett Johansson. For whatever reason, La Scarlett was more than half an hour unfashionably late for the opening ceremony which had to start without her. Nevertheless, all the papers, including the two largest national d...
The crush to get a gander at HOFFMAN AS CAPOTE was so great yesterday that an extra press screening had to be improvised a half hour after the initially scheduled one in the Cinemaxx multi-screen theatre complex. Presumably, the half hour decollage allows reels of the film to be switched from one hall to the other without missing a beat. Unfortunately, the press conference time remained unchanged, so that those condemned to the later viewing (like myself), found the conference already well unde...
