Wednesday, September 30, 2015

The Little Rock Film Festival Set to End After 9-Year Run

READ MORE: 2015 AFI FEST Selects Will Smith Awards Vehicle 'Concussion' as Centerpiece Gala In a piece of sad news for film fans, the Little Rock Film Festival has just announced that it will end its run after 9 years. The festival aimed to showcase both the state of Arkansas and its burgeoning filmmaking community. In a statement, the festival runners said, "We are proud of the Arkansas filmmaking community that we have helped to inspire and promote, and pleased to have brought hundreds of the top independent filmmakers from around the world to central Arkansas each year to share their work directly with audiences." The final edition of the Little Rock Film Festival took...

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'Re-Percussions PAN! Our African Odyssey' Wins at Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival

Directed by Kim Johnson and Produced by Jean Michel Gibert of Maturity Productions and Barthélémy Fougea of WINDS, "Re-Percussions: Our African Odyssey" is a film about the cultural identity of African people and the diaspora told through the history a unique musical instrument. Johnson's film recently screened at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, one of the most important film events in the Caribbean, where it was awarded the award for Best Trinidad and Tobago Documentary Feature Film. The festival took place September 15-19. "Re-Percussions: Our African Odyssey" is the story of the steelpan, which evolved from the drum, an instrument...

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'The Second Mother' Director Anna Muylaert Speaks Out About Film-Festival Sexism

"Men think it’s lovely if a woman makes a lovely film that nobody sees." That's the scathing highlight of the interview writer-director Anna Muylaert gave to Women and Hollywood when her film "The Second Mother" was released back in August. Since then, the drama, which Muylaert has said was a project two decades in the making, became Brazil's submission to the Oscars -- and just might be a frontrunner in the Best Foreign Language Film category. "The Second Mother" stars Regina Casé, Brazil's answer to Oprah, as a live-in servant to a wealthy, dysfunctional family whose complacency with her lot in life is challenged by her ambitious, estranged...

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AFI FEST Adds Will Smith Drama 'Concussion' as Centerpiece Gala

The World Premiere of Sony Pictures’ "Concussion" (December 25), starring Will Smith in a bid for a third Oscar nomination, written and directed by Peter Landesman will be the Centerpiece Gala of AFI FEST (November 5–12, 2015) on November 10.  Produced by Ridley Scott, Giannina Scott, David Wolthoff, Larry Shuman and Elizabeth Cantillon, "Concussion" is an American immigrant story about an aspirational outsider from South Africa who at great professional risk takes on a corporate goliath: American football.  The Opening Night Gala will be the World Premiere of "By the Sea" directed by Angelina Jolie Pitt on Thursday,...

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Star Sightings

The hottest celebrity photos, coast to coast and around the world, for the week of September 28, 2015.
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London Film Festival Adds Simon Chinn and Louis Theroux to LFF Connects Talk Series

READ MORE`: London Film Festival Adds Game Designer Alistair Hope to LFF Connects Talk Series The BFI London Film Festival has announced a new addition to the LFF Connects Series that is sure to make documentary fans celebrate. Academy Award-winning producer Simon Chinn ("Man On Wire," "Project Nim," "Searching for Sugarman" and "The Green Prince") will join BAFTA-winning TV broadcaster Louis Theroux ("Weird Weekends" and "When Louis Met...") for a discussion on television's intersection with film on Monday, October 12th. Both Chinn and Theroux's work has led them to deal with the same dilemmas: "Do certain...

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Is an Icelandic Film a Good Investment?

This past weekend the Icelandic feature "Sparrows" from director Rúnar Rúnarsson won the main prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival. This caps off an impressive 12-month period for Iceland's film industry. Last year, director Benedikt Erlingsson won the festival's best director award for his oddball ode to equine-human relationships "Of Horses and Men" and went on to win the Nordic Council’s Film award – the first Icelandic feature to take home the prize.  This followed a string of successes. "Virgin Mountain" from director Dagur Kári won three prizes at the Tribeca Film Festival; Best Narrative Feature, Best Screenplay and Best...

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Tuesday, September 29, 2015

'The Voice' Season 9: The Coaches

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'The Voice' Season 9: The Contestants

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'Girlfriends' Guide To Divorce': Cast Portraits

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'Girlfriends' Guide To Divorce': Scenes From Season 2

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'Spotlight' and 'The Danish Girl' to Open 38th Mill Valley Film Festival

READ MORE: Review: How Michael Keaton Saves 'Spotlight' Returning for its 38th year, the Mill Valley Film Festival has selected a pair of awards contenders to be its Opening Night films for 2015.  Focus Features' "The Danish Girl," which depicts the love story inspired by the lives of Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener, will play at 7pm and 7:15pm on Thursday, October 8 at Century Larkspur Landing. The film stars Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander, both of whom have been thrown into the Oscar race following the film's hearty reception at festivals in Venice and Toronto. Director Tom Hooper will be in attendance for the film's Mill Valley screening. Open Road's acclaimed...

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NYFF: Laura Poitras Launches 'Asylum' and 'Field of Vision' Segments (VIDEO)

Like a flashback from the dramatic unveiling of eventual Oscar-winner "Citizenfour" at the New York Film Festival a year ago, Laura Poitras returned to the stage Sunday night to unveil three short episodes (accompanied by music from Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails) from her work-in-progress "Asylum" (2016). This time instead of Edward Snowden, she's up close and personal with controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as he gets on the phone with a lawyer in Hillary Clinton's State Department in 2010 to alert them of a massive dump of State Department documents on his site. When he hangs up the phone, he tells his co-worker the...

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Monday, September 28, 2015

'Dancing With The Stars': Highlights From Season 21

Highlights from 'Dancing with the Stars' Season 21.
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Here's How to Shoot a Sci-Fi Film on a Low Budget

Before the introduction of CGI in the early '90s, robots, aliens, monsters and other inhabitants of science fiction depended on the clever solutions and meticulous work of set designers, prop masters and make-up artists. It's still where the true artistry lies, for some filmmakers, at least. One of them is Teemu Nikki, the director and co-writer of "Lovemilla," a Finnish science-fiction-fantasy-comedy-musical. Indiewire spoke to the director in his native Helsinki at the annual Love and Anarchy film festival at the start of the film's festival path that will continue at the end of this month at the Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas.  READ MORE: Here's How a Group of Students...

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'Blindspot': Character Portraits

The stars of NBC's 'Blindspot.'
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40th Anniversary of 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore' to Close Inaugural Tucson Festival of Films

The Tucson Festival of Films (TFOF) will close its inaugural edition with a 40th Anniversary screening of Martin Scorsese’s film "Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore" on Saturday, October 10, 2015. Starring Ellen Burstyn in her Academy Award-winning role, "Alice" was filmed in Tucson and surrounds. Martin Scorsese said recently “'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore' was my first studio picture. Ellen Burstyn had seen 'Mean Streets' and admired it, and that’s how I came to the project. I was intrigued and excited by the challenges of working in wide open spaces, something completely new to me; dealing with a way of life that was so different from what...

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