All articles by Colin Brown – Page 6
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News
American Splendor wins top dramatic prize at Sundance
Films populated by socialoutcasts and misfits, both real and imagined, claimed the top honours at thisyear's Sundance Film Festival that ended over the weekend in Park City.The Grand Jury Prize forbest dramatic feature went to American Splendor, a docu-drama hybrid that used actors, real-lifevideo footage and animation sequences to tell ...
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Miramax tracks down Station Agent at Sundance
Marking its first Sundance Film Festival acquisition this year, Miramax Films beat out several other rivals to pick up all English speaking territories and Italian rights to The Station Agent, a small, intimate character study from first-time director and screenwriter Tom McCarthy that appears in dramatic competition here.Although no price ...
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Gaga strikes Sundance deal for drag comedy
Gaga Communications has acquired Japanese rights to comedy Girls Will Be Girls from Cinetic Media for a mid-six figure sum. The deal confirms Sundance's growing importance as a foreign rights-trading arena and precedes any domestic or worldwide-rights deal closed by Cinetic on the film.Directed by Richard Day, the film, which ...
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Sundance teen drama Thirteen baits Fox Searchlight
Fox Searchlight Pictures isin final negotiations to take all worldwide distribution rights outside the UKto Thirteen, one of only a smallhandful of dramatic competition films to have excited buyers during the firstfew days of this year's Sundance Film Festival.Although no distributiondeals had been formally announced by the end of the ...
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Globes circle round Chicago, The Hours
The dark and sometimes twisted streak running through so many of this year's Golden Globe nominations confirms what the pundits have been declaring for weeks now: that the awards pendulum has swung firmly back towards more rarefied audience tastes and away from the popcorn entertainment most often identified with Hollywood. ...
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News
Screen International votes for its top 10 movies of 2002
Screen International has voted Pedro Almodovar's Talk To Her as its favourite film of 2002 in a global poll of its staff and correspondents. It was a poll that by and large favoured small, personal stories that were toast of festivals this past year over the big budget spectacles that ...
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Kaurismaki, Almodovar lead European Film Award nominations
Local box office hits line up against several of this year's festival prize-winners as the eight nominees for the 2002 European Film Award, to be handed out by the European Film Academy in Rome on Dec 7.Leading the way in nominations for Europe's own answer to the Oscars is Aki ...
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Reviews
The Sea (Hafid)
Dir: Baltasar Kormakur. Iceland/France/Norway. 2002. 109minsThe wicked sense of humour that helped make his sprightly debut feature, Reykjavik 101, an off-the-wall delight is all but submerged in Baltasar Kormakur's follow-up, which offers an even bleaker portrait of Icelandic desperation and dysfunction. As a roiling family psychodrama, The Sea brings to ...
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Reviews
White Oleander
Dir: Peter Kosminsky. US. 2002. 109 minsThe term 'chick-flick' has been rightfully criticised for denigrating women-orientated pictures since it implies an off-putting touchy-feeliness and some sugar-coated sentiment. But in the case of White Oleander, a florid melodrama about a teenage girl's journey of painful self-discovery as she is bounced from ...
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News
Almodovar tips 'anti-clerical' movie as his next
Spanish auteur PedroAlmodovar hinted yesterday that his next film will likely be BadEducation (LaMala Educacion) a "profoundly anti-clerical movie" abouttwo boys in a Catholic school forced to contend with sexual abuse by thepriesthood.The highly chargedsubject-matter is liable to present yet another public relations headache forthe Catholic hierarchy which has spent ...
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News
Kaurismaki boycotts New York festival in anti-American protest
The New YorkFilm Festival suffered the loss of yet another top-flight internationaldirector from its 40th anniversary edition as world politicsintruded on the prestigious event.After learning that Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami hadbeen prevented from attending the festival last week because of US visaproblems, Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki decided against flying in ...
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News
Toronto Comment - Seoul Survivors
Perhaps it will come as no great shock to learn that of all the commercial products that the US so successfully exports around the globe, only its film industry enjoys the dominant market share in virtually every country that has opened its doors to outside trade. What may be more ...
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Toronto Comment - The Battle For Screens
It is one the aggravating paradoxes of the cinema business that even as internationally flavoured film festivals keep growing in popularity in every corner of this globe, the films they show are finding it ever harder to secure a distribution toehold in even the most adventurous of commercial theatres. The ...
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Toronto Comment - September 11
On the evening of Sept. 10, at about this time last year in Toronto, a filmmaker and his posse of producers and sales representatives could not have been more euphoric. Gregor Jordan's Eurobacked festival film, Buffalo Soldiers, had just secured a US distribution deal through Miramax Films and there was ...
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News
New York festival line-up draws heavily on Cannes favourites
The full line-up has beenannounced for the prestigious New York Film Festival, whose 40thedition will kick off on Sept 27 with the North American premiere of AlexanderPayne's About Schmidt, for whichactor Jack Nicholson is already drawing considerable Oscar buzz, and close onOct 13th with Talk To Her, the latest film ...
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News
Screen International re-teams with Toronto festival daily
Although it is not a competitive event like Berlin or Venice, the Toronto festival has arguably become the festival that has the most industry clout after Cannes. For the second year, Toronto has asked Screen International to contribute to its official ...
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News
Fledgling US digital cinema circuit targets foreign film suppliers
Foreign films that arestruggling to find a theatrical footing in the US may soon be able to accessthe American marketplace via a budding new exhibition circuit that is thebrainchild of a New York digital film studio.Manhattan's EmergingPictures is targeting international producers and film exporters as potentialsuppliers to an alternative chain ...
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News
Ethan Hawke & Fisher Stevens among new director Gotham nominees
Six film-makers have been nominated for the Open Palm Award for outstanding directorial debut at this year's Gotham Awards which will be presented in New York City on Sept 29. The awards, presented by IFP/New York, celebrate outstanding achievement in New York's film-making community.Nominees for the $10,000 award are Bertha ...
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MacCabe laments his old place
Among the more interesting films of the Cannes festival this year is a film essay by Anne-Marie Mieville and Jean Luc Godard called The Old Place. By all accounts it is a beautiful and intriguing meditation on the relations between painting and film. But for one of the executive producers, ...
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Cannes gets first glimpse of Gangs Of New York
After months of media attention over the fights that supposedly went into the making of Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York, the film's key figures settled their score with the press at yesterday's footage screening. "This is real art, unlike half the shit in this goddam Hollywood" declared executive producer ...