The Venice Biennale got off to a strong start with The Ides of March, reports London-based TOH correspondent David Gritten:How perfect a choice was George Clooney’s The Ides of March to open the Venice Film Festival today? Let us count the ways. Firstly, this political thriller fits Venice like a si...
Read More »Oscar Talk is back. The first podcast of the fall season with In Contention's Kris Tapley runs for a good hour, so gird your loins, Oscar mavens, listen and weep. We cover the Cannes films, the summer releases, the Fall Festival entries and the end-of-year possibilities. We talk Meryl and Glenn and ...
Read More »In advance of the coming festival season, the Gurus 'O Gold have made their first picks of the ten top contenders for best picture nominations. Here's my top ten list--with many of the films sight unseen (the Gurus list is on the jump). 1. The Artist2. Jane Eyre3, Midnight in Paris4. The Tree of Lif...
Read More »In Roman Polanski's upcoming Carnage, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly portray two sets of Manhattan couples who try to debrief a fight between their eleven-year-old sons. As their discussion continues, things take a turn for the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and f...
Read More »A lot of folks expected Working Title's John le Carre thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to wind up with a key New York Film Festival slot. In fact, it was in the running for opening night, but Focus and the NYFF weren't able to come to terms on exactly who (Gary Oldman and Tom Hardy are both curren...
Read More »Now we know what the 49th New York Film Festival opener on September 30 will be: Roman Polanski's Carnage. It's an odd choice, because needless to say, the director himself will not be able to attend, given his status as an exile. (That's what satellite feeds are for.) Based on Yasmina Reza's 2009 T...
Read More »Kris Tapley and I reconvened over Skype for a mid-summer Oscar Talk (below). We covered quite a bit of ground. New Academy rules affect the top ten best picture ballot, VFX, documentaries and animation, but not foreign eligibility. New members may tip the scale as well on a more mainstream selection...
Read More »Spike Lee can’t get financing for his films, even with Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster joining a follow-up to Lee’s most successful feature, Inside Man. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Lee griped about everything from Do the Right Thing’s Academy snub in 1989 and making a film with LeBron James to his hesitancy about acting and Obama’s reelection. Lee's difficulties acquiring backers are countless, but he's particularly peeved that due to his 2008 financial disaster, the World War II period piece Miracle at St. Anna, even though Inside Man was his most successful film, "we can’t get the sequel made. And one thing Hollywood does well is ...
Read More »As promised, Kris Tapley and I break our post-Oscar silence with a special Cannes edition of Oscar Talk with In Contention's London correspondent Guy Lodge. We cover the films in contention for the Palme d'Or, from Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt, and censured filmmaker Lars v...
Read More »Mel Gibson walked the red carpet at Cannes, shunned the press conference, but sat down for his only U.S. Cannes interview with a friendly interlocutor, Variety editor Tim Gray (on video below).
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