NEBRASKA IMPRESSES AT CANNES

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska immediately entered the frontrunner ranks at the Cannes Film Festival competition — a portrait of a Montana family in which the patriarch, played by Bruce Dern, is showing repeated signs of dementia and his son, played by Will Forte, wants to connect with the man before he loses it completely. Manohla Dargis […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: CLOUD ATLAS

Many of the early reviews for Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas seemed downright lofty. The latest ones from the major critics are mixed — often in the same reviews. Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal, for example, allows that the film is “beautifully photographed, elegantly crafted and adventurously cast.” But that’s not […]

KODAK’S MOMENT MAY BE OVER IN HOLLYWOOD

The Eastman Kodak Company, whose iconic brand name once appeared in the credits of virtually every motion picture released in Hollywood, appears to be slowly fading to black, the victim of the modern digital age when film is being replaced by digital recording and cameras by mobile phones. Now, the familiar announcer’s intonation “Live from […]

LOCATION FILMING DROPS IN L.A. — DESPITE TAX INCENTIVES

Location production of feature films in the city of Los Angeles and nearby parts of the county declined 5.3 percent in the first quarter versus last year, according to FilmL.A., the one-stop permit facilitator for the area. In a statement issued on Tuesday FilmL.A. pointedly noted that the decline in filming came despite tax incentives […]

SUED FILMMAKERS WIN ATTORNEYS FEES

A group of Swedish documentary filmmakers who had to defend themselves against a defamation lawsuit by the Dole Food Co. have been awarded $200,000 for their attorneys fees and costs by a Los Angeles judge. The filmmakers, Fredrik Gertten and Margarete Jangard, had produced a documentary titled Bananas! that looked into charges filed by Dole […]

JOLIE CUTS SHORT PRODUCTION IN BOSNIA

Unable to extinguish one of the most inflammatory controversies to hit the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia since the assassination of an Austrian archduke in that city plunged Europe into World War I, Angelina Jolie has canceled plans to film scenes for her new movie there. The thus-far-untitled film concerns a love affair between a […]

FAIR GAME, 127 HOURS OPEN STRONG

Opening in limited release, Doug Liman’s Fair Game, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, performed reasonably well, averaging about $15,200 in each of the 46 theaters where it was screened. The political drama, which made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival last May, is being rolled out cautiously by the studio, in the hope […]

JOLIE WINS FILMING PERMIT IN BOSNIA

The Bosnian government has reversed itself and will now allow Angelina Jolie to shoot parts of her currently untitled film in Bosnia, Reuters reported today (Monday). Cultural Minister Gavrilo Grahovac had canceled permission for Jolie to film in the country after meeting with an association of female victims of the Bosnian war who claimed that […]