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Eat, pray, love. Then sell out to the forces of materialism
Guy Adams: Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling book is opening on the big screen. But has its message been lost?
Inside News
Blockbuster hits send profits soaring at Disney
Thursday, 12 August 2010
A string of smash-hit movies, including Toy Story 3, helped to boost Disney's profits by 40 per cent to $1.3bn (£830m) in the three months to 3 July. The US entertainment giant said it increased its revenues by 16 per cent to $10bn in the second quarter.
Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal dies aged 84
Monday, 9 August 2010
Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal, whose life was marred by tragedy, has died at the age of 84, her family said.
Eastwood makes plea to save Film Council
Monday, 9 August 2010
Clint Eastwood has urged George Osborne to reconsider the Government's decision to close the UK Film Council.
Stars voice anger over film council axe plan
Thursday, 5 August 2010
More than 50 leading actors and actresses hit out today at government plans to scrap the UK Film Council.
The return of a man called Perkins
Thursday, 5 August 2010
John Walsh: The literary editor behind the greatest works of Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald is to feature in a new biopic
Stallone joins US invasion of French ghettoes
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
The actor Sylvester Stallone will venture tomorrow to a place where even his tough-guy alter-egos Rambo and Rocky might fear to tread: the suburbs of greater Paris.
Veteran Italian screenwriter Cecchi D'Amico dies
Sunday, 1 August 2010
Screenwriter Suso Cecchi D'Amico, who emerged from the male-dominated post-war Italian cinema to become a celebrated artist and contribute to such milestones as "Bicycle Thieves" and "The Leopard," died yesterday at the age of 96.
Disney dumps Oscar stalwart Miramax to focus on the family
Saturday, 31 July 2010
The Walt Disney Co. has agreed to sell Miramax Films to an investor group for about $660m (£420m), ending a 17-year association with the studio and a six-month bidding process.
How a Hollywood computer made the stick of celery redundant
Friday, 30 July 2010
For more than 70 years, Foley artists have knocked coconut shells together, snapped vegetables and stamped in gravel pits to provide films with their sound effects
Disney to sell £423m Miramax films
Friday, 30 July 2010
Miramax is to be sold to a group of private investors in a move that ends a 17-year association with Walt Disney.
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FIVE BEST FILMS
Down Terrace
(15, Ben Wheatley, 89mins)
Ben Wheatley’s debut feature is low-key, observant and delights in character quirks, coming across like vintage-era Mike Leigh doing a gangster film, with a naturalism that feels closer to The Office than to crime drama. It’s the portrait of a Brighton-based family whose humdrum domesticity makes the Sopranos look positively imperial.
Limited release
Beautiful Kate
(15, Rachel Ward, 101mins)
This intricate, painful drama of an unhappy family beguiles almost to the last frame. Ben Mendelsohn plays Ned, returning after 20 years away to the family farmhouse in remote southern Australia, his sulky, sarky girlfriend in tow, to make peace with his dying father, a failed politician. An actor herself, Ward gets superb performances from the cast, Mendelsohn and Rachel Griffiths in particular, responding to a script whose truthfulness and humour seem to rise as naturally as dust off the desert yet clearly required serious effort.
Limited release
Leaving
(15, Catherine Corsini, 86mins)
Kristin Scott Thomas’s tour-de-force performance, as a woman who abandons her bourgeois family life for a passionate love affair with an immigrant builder, gives what might otherwise seem an over-familiar melodrama real heft and emotional intensity.
Limited release
Splice
(15, Vincenzo Natali, 104mins)
Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley star as husband-and-wife genetic engineers working for a US pharmaceuticals company who decide to splice human DNA with that of an animal, to see what would result. “What’s the worst that can happen?” she asks, not for the last time. Cue the birth of H50 – half human, half unspecified animal, all dangerous. The film does something quite remarkable in the SF genre: it appeals to your emotions as much as your mind, taking the idea of genetic mutation and working out its ramifications with perfect logic, while also tugging at the heartstrings.
Nationwide
Toy Story 3
(U, Lee Unkrich, 108mins)
Its “U” certificate belies the fact that this is a heart-rending meditation on ageing, impermanence and mortality, yet it’s also a dizzyingly funny romp that honours and extends the glorious invention of the first two films. Scriptwriter Michael Arndt (who penned ‘Little Miss Sunshine’) gets full value from the old favourites, and hardly a sequence goes by without something that delights, or exhilarates, or amuses.
Limited release