Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void,” a three-hour melange of bad-trip imagery, medium-core sex and approximately 1,736 swooping crane shots, has hovered in distribution limbo since last year’s Cannes festival, and no wonder: these days, it’s hard enough for perfectly innocuous foreign festival fare to find American friends, let alone a film that chucks a graphic […]

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Costume design in many ways represents much about the Oscars: glitz, glamor, beauty. But obviously threads do much more than make movie stars look attractive.  They build character, set mood, define period and serve as a defining design aspect of a film. Like art direction, the nominees for here overwhelmingly fall into one of two […]

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*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars. Hey kids! How about that terrifying photo to the right? Make you want to see cats and dogs brutally fighting to the death voiced by Nick Nolte and Joe Pantoliano? While Chris O’Donnell looks on confused? Of course it does. We’ve got three new releases this […]

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Oh, okay then. I’ve held out longer than most, but with the summer mostly played out, and newly unveiled schedules for Venice and Toronto signifying that the fall film season is already breathing down our necks, now is as good a time as any to go on the record with some Oscar predictions. In years […]

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Okay, for “home,” read “resting place.” Scrap those sweet-but-always-unlikely reports that the high-end company would be returning to the warm embrace of its parents, the finally outbiddenBrothers Weinstein. The story has a less sentimental ending, but an ending nonetheless — Disney has sold Miramax to one Filmyard Holdings Llc, run by non-film businessmen Ronald Tutor […]

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This trailer has been hanging around for a few days, but since Stephen Frears’s countryside romp was recently tapped for the Toronto Film Festival, it seems appropriate to feature it now. I reviewed the film out of Cannes and found it singularly strained and irritating — the kind of thing described as “quintessentially English” by […]

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UPDATE: The festival website has a list of out-of-competition selections, which include two directorial efforts from the Brothers Affleck: Ben’s “The Town” and Casey’s Joaquin Phoenix doc “I’m Still Here.” EARLIER: Before you ask: no, “The Tree of Life” is nowhere to be seen. Not that that’s a surprise by this point. There is a […]

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At Comic-Con, director Guillermo Del Toro announced that one of his next projects would be a remake of Disney’s “The Haunted Mansion.” Del Toro would be co-writing and producing, though, not directing (and boy did that news get a split reaction from movie-goers).  He said his next directorial gig would be announced shortly, and today, […]

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Catch up with the idea behind this series here. The Beatles weren’t the only British invasion happening around 1963 as “Tom Jones” took the big prize at the Academy Awards and British talent racked up no less than 9 of the 20 acting nominations. It also became one of the few comedies to win, slaying […]

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Those who followed my Cannes coverage will know that “Certified Copy,” Abbas Kiarostami’s first film shot outside his native Iran, was comfortably my favorite film of the festival — and one of my favorites of the year, period. The Guardian posted the British trailer yesterday; they’re claiming an “exclusive,” though it’s actually been in UK […]

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The full lineup  for the Venice Film Festival is due shortly, but several pieces are already falling into place. We know that “Black Swan” and “The Tempest” will be bookending the proceedings, while yesterday’s Toronto festival list indirectly gave away several of the titles we’ll be seeing on the Lido. Now comes a slightly less […]

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(NOTE: This week’s Page to Screen text is the source material for David Fincher’s upcoming film “The Social Network.”) If, with its short, sketchy chapters and preponderance of surface-level description, Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires” resembles less a work of literary non-fiction than a treatment for a more substantially developed screenplay, that’s probably precisely what […]

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Kind of.  Click for a larger image (courtesy Last Exit to Nowhere, via Collider):

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Toronto International Film Festival organisers unveiled a typically cluttered lineup of galas and premieres for this year’s edition — including, as usual, a number of films pencilled in as 2010 awards contenders. Of the 50 titles announced thus far, half will be world premieres: those include such highly anticipated works as Mark Romanek’s “Never Let […]

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Warner Bros. turned quite a few heads with its presentation of “Sucker Punch” at Comic-Con.  The crowd was treated to an extended trailer featuring Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” which, of course, won’t likely ever be seen outside those walls given the rights issues with such a track.  But the new trailer has been […]

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I’m yanking this from Devin Faraci’s Comic-Con wrap-up column because, as I mentioned Friday, it was one of those so-cute-I-could-kill-myself moments.  Had to share:

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One of the year’s most mysterious projects for me is Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go.” I haven’t read the book (though I’m wondering whether I should), the trailer left me bewildered, I didn’t read Guy’s Page to Screen column on the source material and I’ve basically just kept my nose out of it for […]

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The most recent predictions update substituted “The Last Airbender” (which failed miserably with critics) with “Salt” in the sound categories, and it wasn’t blind speculation. After all, the sound crew consists of such multi-lauded talents as Scott Millan and Greg P. Russell. Russell, as you know, has racked up some 13 nominations without a win. […]

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