Features
If you can believe it, it’s been since Halloween that we kicked the dust off this feature at In Contention. We made it all the way through the Oscar season without feeling compelled to go there. Odd. So, with Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” opening in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, before […]
THE LISTS: Top 10 performances in Terrence Malick films
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 9:40 am · May 24th, 2011
Filed in: The Lists
OSCAR TALK: Ep. 39 — ‘Megamind,’ ‘The Way Back,’ Oscar’s actress contenders and more
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 9:00 am · November 5th, 2010
Welcome to Oscar Talk. In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty […]
Filed in: Oscar Talk
‘The Way Back’ again
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 9:51 am · October 27th, 2010
I took in a second screening of Peter Weir’s “The Way Back” last night after seeing and loving it at the Telluride Film Festival last month (enough to write about it a second time while I was there, in fact). What was confirmed for me was that the majesty of the film and the overall […]
Filed in: Daily
Peter Weir and ‘The Way Back’ set to enter the race
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 10:19 am · October 5th, 2010
Good news for Peter Weir fans. I’m hearing a press release announcing that the Aussie director’s first film in seven years will be given a fighting chance in this year’s film awards season is imminent. The film, of course, is “The Way Back.” Newmarket Films was announced as the distributor on opening day of this […]
Filed in: Daily
INTERVIEW: Peter Weir
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 10:49 am · September 7th, 2010
Telluride Film Festival For director Peter Weir, the pacing of his output has become almost as measured as his brand of cinema. The Australian has built a career around art house grandeur, but his work has slowed to a handful of films per decade, in stark contrast to the frequency of the 1970s and 1980s. […]
Filed in: Interviews
TELLURIDE: ‘The Way Back,’ ‘The King’s Speech’
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 5:09 pm · September 4th, 2010
The second day of Telluride has brought treat after treat. I decided early this morning to skip the world premiere of Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours” in favor of Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech” because I could slide two films in rather than the one. Peter Weir’s latest, “The Way Back” (which didn’t generate many reviews […]
Filed in: Reviews
PAGE TO SCREEN: “London Boulevard” by Ken Bruen
Posted by Guy Lodge · 7:39 pm · July 13th, 2010
When Oscar-winning screenwriter William Monahan (“The Departed”) brings Irish crime writer Ken Bruen’s 2001 novel “London Boulevard” to screen in his directorial debut, he won’t be adapting the text so much as returning it to its natural source. A short, sharp, deliciously black-hearted thriller that reads not unlike a readymade screenplay in its brisk, dialogue-dominated […]
Filed in: Page to Screen
PAGE TO SCREEN: “The Long Walk” by Slavomir Rawicz
Posted by Guy Lodge · 5:15 pm · June 15th, 2010
In one of the year’s more groan-worthy feats of movie marketing magic, Disney recently slapped their plucky horse ’n’ housewife drama “Secretariat” with a paradox of a tagline in “The Impossible True Story.” No sooner had they done so than assorted sniggering blogger types responded with a perfectly reasonable question: if the story is impossible, […]
Filed in: Page to Screen
‘Crazy Heart’ has the goods
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 2:31 pm · November 4th, 2009
It’s not just Jeff Bridges who leaps onto the Oscar landscape with Scott Cooper’s “Crazy Heart.” It’s possible in a few months that we’ll be talking pretty seriously about Maggie Gyllenhaal in the supporting actress race and, most certainly, T Bone Burnett’s contributions as the film’s music supervisor. Fox Searchlight screened the film this morning […]
Filed in: Daily
Fox Searchlight looks to salvage season with potential 2009 release for ‘Crazy Heart’
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 10:23 am · November 4th, 2009
Just when you thought last year’s Best Picture victor was down for the count, Fox Searchlight goes and shakes things up in November. First, some background… When we kicked off our coverage of the 2009-2010 Oscar season a year in advance, one of the more anticipated titles was Scott Cooper’s “Crazy Heart,” based on the […]
Filed in: Daily
Mann subs Robert Capa for Robert Jordan
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 9:15 pm · October 4th, 2009
Director Michael Mann has been trying to get an adaptation of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” off the ground for a while now. As far back as October 2006 (when I interviewed Mann for an Eric Roth profile), the film was mere days from being announced. I’m not a sleuth like the Anne Thompsons or […]
Filed in: Daily
9/14 Web Round-up
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 7:49 am · September 14th, 2009
• Overture angles for the domestic rights to Antoine Fuqua’s “Brooklyn’s Finest,” perhaps giving a leg up to Ethan Hawke in the Best Actor race. [Variety] • Is Charles Darwin too controversial for American multiplexes? [CHUD] • Christopher Plummer at 80, busy as ever. [The Toronto Star]
Filed in: Daily
Gilliam talks completing ‘Parnassus’ without Ledger and his defining film moment
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 11:45 am · August 5th, 2009
At Comic-Con last month, Motion/Captured’s Drew McWeeny was fortunate enough to sit down with director Terry Gilliam for a solid 60 minutes, allowing the conversation to drift from actors like Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt to the Criterion Collection to Gilliam’s latest, the still domestic distributor-less “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” and everything in between. […]
Filed in: Daily
Searchlight backs Bridges’s “performance of a lifetime”
Posted by Guy Lodge · 10:13 am · July 22nd, 2009
When I first began compiling my Oscar nomination predictions back in May, I took a wild-card Best Actor punt on Jeff Bridges in a little, then distributor-less indie called “Crazy Heart.” In truth, I had little basis for the guess other than the strong reputation of the 1987 source novel, and the fact that Bridges […]
Filed in: Daily
Golden Globes: Feeling the love
Posted by Guy Lodge · 1:06 pm · January 12th, 2009
As I curled on the couch in the wee small hours of the morning, watching last night’s Golden Globes telecast with only a hot toddy and a handful of chatty IC commenters for company, it occurred to me that I was hearing an awful lot of one word as the evening unfolded. And that word […]
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Golden Globes: ‘Slumdog,’ ‘Button’ steady…whither ‘Milk?’
Posted by Guy Lodge · 6:20 am · December 11th, 2008
Well, I said yesterday one should always expect oddities with the Golden Globes … but even with that in mind, they never fail to pull out some genuine “WTF” moments. Tom Cruise’s goofy Best Supporting Actor nod for “Tropic Thunder” may have been the most eccentric revelation of the morning, but surely the most significant […]
Filed in: Daily
With love from me to you
Posted by Guy Lodge · 9:53 am · December 2nd, 2008
I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed Variety’s recent series of articles in which prominent actors champion some of their personal favourite performances of 2008, including many of the most discussed contenders of the season. It’s a simple idea, but executed with real thought and sincerity. The pieces are interesting not just because of the more […]
Filed in: Daily
Looking for comedy in the awards world
Posted by Guy Lodge · 4:12 pm · November 16th, 2008
Over at his OscarWatch column, Dave Karger recently asked a question that has been bothering me for some time regarding this year’s awards race. Namely, how the hell are the Golden Globes going to fill out the ballot in the Comedy/Musical races? Best Actress looks solid enough. So far, we have two clear-cut frontrunners — […]
Filed in: Daily
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