If there is any movie this year at Cannes that is absolutely brimming with promise on paper, it's Guillaume Canet's "Blood Ties." With an extended cast featuring Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, Mila Kunis, Matthias Schoenaerts, Zoe Saldana, James Caan, Marion Cotillard, Noah Emmerich and Lili Taylor among...
Read More »A definite highlight of tonight’s Weinstein 2013 slate preview at Cannes, which we ran through in large part here, was one of the films that is one of our most anticipated of this whole festival -- James Gray’s “The Immigrant.” With Gray uncharacteristically confident about the film in its unfinishe...
Read More »We were only just talking about Playlist favorite James Gray, and his new secret sci-fi project, earlier this morning, and there's clearly something in the water, because the first tantalizing, albeit brief, clip from the "We Own The Night" director's new film, "The Immigrant," has arrived.
Read More »The culinary arts and filmmaking don't seem to go together that often. You get the occasional great picture set in the restaurant world -- "Big Night" and "Ratatouille" spring to mind -- but more often than not, you end up with films more like "No Reservations" when you try to put cooks on screen. B...
Read More »Given the difficulty in characterising a single year in film, even through a specific prism such as gender, I have opted for the catalogue format of an A-Z review.
Read More »James Gray's 'Low Life' With Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner & Marion Cotillard Aims To Start Shooting In January 2012Given the Hollywood-friendly slickness of his directorial efforts to date, it was only a matter of time before French actor Guillaume Canet made a film in the U.S. The star of "The Be...
Read More »While she's certainly gone Hollywood with appearances in "Inception," "Midnight In Paris," "Contagion" and "The Dark Knight Rises," Academy-Award winning actress Marion Cotillard has not forgotten her French roots.
Read More »Disaster -- an eternally popular obsession of film. Audiences have turned up in droves over the last century or so to watch mankind against their own extinction in the form of meteorites, earthquakes, alien invasions, exploding suns, planetary collisions, and whatever it was that was happening in "T...
Read More »When you have big names like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, plus acclaimed figures like Emmy-winner Bryan Cranston and Oscar-nominee John Hawkes in your film, most studios would plaster their faces all over the one-sheet. Warner Bros has, a...
Read More »Teaming up on three films -- "The Yards," "We Own The Night" and "Two Lovers" -- there hasn't been any director/actor pairing in recent American cinema as rewarding as that between James Gray and Joaquin Phoenix. However, circa the actor's stunt during the press rounds for "Two Lovers" where he grew a Will Oldham-esque beard and declared he was starting a rap career, many wondered if that relationship was over. And despite what reports may have surfaced, Gray wasn't worried, saying as early as February 2009 that he was confident he would work with Phoenix again. Then in September of last year, it was revealed that he was in on the joke from t...
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