All articles by Geoffrey Macnab – Page 187
-
News
UK financiers gear up to cash flow new tax credit
Nobody yet knows how the UKfilm tax credits (introduced last month) will work in practice, but there isalready evidence of a mini-stampede among British film financiers to cash flowthe new credit. This promises to be a highly lucrative, if short-term,business.One new company, IvanMcTaggart's Meteor Films, is being set up specifically ...
-
News
Haneke plans English remake of Funny Games
Revered Austrian auteurMichael Haneke is to take his English-language bow, it was announced in Cannesyesterday. He is remaking his 1997 film Funny Games, but the setting will now be the Hamptons. NaomiWatts is to star.The film is about amiddle-class family on holiday who are terrorised by two young men.Chris Coen ...
-
News
Bondarchuk Jr to complete his father's And Quiet Flows The Don
Like father, like son. Fyodor Bondarchuk announced yesterday that he iscompleting his late dad's Sergei Bondarchuk's unfinished epic film And QuietFlows The Don.''Actor-director Sergei Bondarchuk, one of the legendary figures inpost-war Soviet cinema, originally shot And Quiet Flows The Don in 1992, twoyears before his death. An English-language adaptation of ...
-
News
Roeg's IFS adds London To Brighton to Cannes slate
Luc Roeg's Independent FilmSales (IFS) announced in Cannes that it will handle sales on London To Brighton,a British thriller about a runaway girl caught up in an undergroundprostitution ring. Vertigo will be releasing the film (currently in post-production)in the UK following its debut at an autumn festival later in the ...
-
News
Weinsteins ring in Bell love story
The Weinstein Co will produce produce $20m love story,Alec & May - the US-set story ofthe Scottish inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell.The project, developed by the UK's Headline Pictures,follows the romance between Bell, then a 28-year-old teacher and a 16-year-olddeaf girl."The telephone was the direct consequence of theirrelationship," ...
-
News
Intandem on board for sales of new Carry On film
Bawdy British comedyfranchise Carry On is beingrevived. Here in Cannes, London-based Intandem Films is introducing buyers to CarryOn London, the 32nd and latestinstalment in the long-running series that began way back in 1958 with CarryOn Sergeant.The film, now inpre-production, is being produced by Chris Chrisafis and directed by PeterRichardson. Shane ...
-
Reviews
An Inconvenient Truth
Dir: Davis Guggenheim. US. 2006.98mins"I'm Al Gore. I used to be the next president of theUnited States... I don't find that particularly funny," former vice-presidentAl Gore declares early on in Davis Guggenheim's fascinating documentary,bounding on stage before one of his multi-media lectures about global warming.Gore is a contradictoryfigure, aloof and ...
-
News
Act, Knatchbull acquire UK distributor Artificial Eye
In a further shake-up to the UK distribution market,Artificial Eye Film Company, for 30 years the UK's leading distributor of arthouse and foreign language films, has been acquired byAct Entertainment Group, owner of Curzon Cinemas, andKnatchbull Communications Group.Terms of the acquisition were not released.The deal comes just as Artificial Eye ...
-
News
StudioCanal deal will help Optimum become bigger
Furtherdetails have emerged of how UK distributorOptimum Releasing is going to expand following its acquisition by French major,StudioCanal. Optimum'smanaging director Will Clarke refused to say how much StudioCanalpaid for the company he founded in 1999, but rival distributors werespeculating that it could have been as much as $31.7m (Euros 25m). ...
-
News
Optimum deal marks shift in UK distribution
Studio Canal's acquisition of Optimum, just a few months after Lionsgate's takeover of Redbus,marks a major shift for the UK indie distributionbusiness. Not so long ago, it was a side of the industry that waswidely seen as over-stretched, cash-strapped and scrambling to stay afloat. Distributors were invariably to be heard ...
-
Reviews
Confetti
Dir: Debbie Isitt. UK.2006. 100mins.A good-natured but uneven farce, Debbie Isitt's Confettipokes fun at the marriage industry, using a mockumentarystructure borrowed from Christopher Guest's BestIn Show - but with engaged couples instead of dogsin the limelight. Meanwhile, the deadpan humour and low-key acting style aredistinctively British, with a cast that ...
-
News
Da VInci Code backer pulls out of film business
InvictaCapital is to quit the UK film business, says managing director Niall Bamford.TheLondon-based company, one of the powerhouses behind the sale andleaseback-driven production boom in the UK in recent years, is estimated tohave raised over $2.2bn (£1.25bn) for the film industry in the last five years.Recentprojects the company has backed ...
-
News
Da Vinci Code backer pulls out of film business
InvictaCapital is to quit the UK film business, says managing director Niall Bamford.TheLondon-based company, one of the powerhouses behind the sale andleaseback-driven production boom in the UK in recent years, is estimated tohave raised over $2.2bn (£1.25bn) for the film industry in the last five years.Recentprojects the company has backed ...
-
News
Chadha to shoot JR in Dallas remake
Gurinder Chadha has confirmed that she is to direct Twentieth Century Fox's screen adaptation of TV series Dallas(which ran from 1978-1991.)Thefilm, scripted by Robert Harling (Steel Magnolias), will star JohnTravolta as Texas oil magnate JR Ewing and Jennifer Lopez as hishard-drinking wife, Sue Ellen. Luke Wilson and Shirley Maclaine are ...
-
News
UK distributor sets eyes on Lights In The Dusk
In the run-up to Cannes, UK distributorArtificial Eye has taken UK rights to Aki Kaurismaki's Lights In The Dusk (Laitakaupungin Valot).The film,strongly tipped for a Cannes competition berth, is the third part ofKaurismaki's trilogy that started with Drifting Clouds(1996) and continued with The Man Without A Past (2002.) Thetheme of ...
-
News
New UK Film Council measures embraced by producers
British producershave given an enthusiastic response to two new measures that the UK FilmCouncil (UKFC) is putting into place with effect from April 15.The first is totry to ensure that producers using funding from UKFC do not defer "theirindividual fees and/or production company overheads." Stating that the UKFCwould do all ...
-
News
Stephen Fry teams with Dev Benegal for Ramanujan
British actor, filmmakerand novelist Stephen Fry is to join forces with leading Indian auteur Dev Benegal in making Ramanujan, a biopic about the "genius" Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The film isgearing up just as the UK-India co-production treaty is on the verge of beingsigned.The idea is that Fry willdirect the ...
-
News
UK gets more detail on new film tax system
As the UK Government'slong-awaited Finance Bill was finally published on Friday, accountants andlawyers went into over-drive to analyse what implications the Bill holds forthe UK film industry. With 26 film-related pagesand 62 pages of explanatory memo in the 489-page Bill, this was not an easydocument to digest. Even some experts ...
-
Reviews
Alien Autopsy
Dir: Jonny Campbell UK.2006. 95minsFitfully entertaining, but undermined by its owninanity, Alien Autopsy is muddled anduneven fare which shows yet again how difficult it is for the best Britishcomic talent to make the transition to the big screen. Its stars Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, hugely popular TVpersonalities in the ...
-
News
Pernille Fischer Christensen's A Soap sold to the US
Pernille Fischer Christensen's Silver Bear winning debutfeature A Soap has been acquired byStrand Releasing for US and by Theodora Films for Italian rights. The US deal was struck between Jon Gerransof Strand Releasing and Natja Rosnerof Trust Film Sales."We're thrilled to be working with Nimbus Filmand Trust Film Sales again, ...