Philip Seymour Hoffman’s characters are not easily erased from memory. The half-dressed loner making sex calls to strangers in Happiness or the nurse tending to Jason Robards in Magnolia would, on paper, be supporting roles. Hoffman, though, has a way of filling out ordinary folks until they burst with the hidden facets of their ordinariness—shame, […]

 
Behind the scenes of blockbuster movies like “Transformers,” “The Matrix” and “Braveheart” is the foley stage — a cluttered studio full of noisy knick-knacks and a soft-spoken woman named Mary Jo Lang.
Lang is one of the few female foley mixers in the world, recording sound effects created by foley artists and then mixing them to […]

 
Film sets — even the permanent ones — are by definition artifice. Sure, they look real enough from the outside, but inside, the fantasy evaporates into a maze of fake walls and uninhabitable spaces. But the make-believe reality of movie sets may soon merge with realty at Britain’s iconic, 70-year-old Pinewood Studios.
As part of a […]

Crash, the movie which unexpectedly won best film at the Oscars two years ago, is being turned into a TV series.
Thirteen one-hour programmes will be made US cable channel Starz. The show is expected to premiere in August.
Crash focused on racial and ethnic tensions in Los Angeles and was made with a relatively small […]

 
British screen legends Daniel Day-Lewis and Julie Christie bolstered their positions as Oscar frontrunners last night by clinching top acting honours at the Day-Lewis, who won a Golden Globe earlier this month, was named best actor for his role as a tyrannical oil prospector in There Will Be Blood.
He used his acceptance speech to pay […]

While you won’t yet find a clear front-runner among Best Picture nominees, it’s never too early for Oscar observers to pile on the movie they don’t want to win. Crash and Little Miss Sunshine kept the bile churning in 2005 and 2006, respectively, and it appears now that Juno is bracing itself for this year’s […]

The top two American winners at the Sundance Film Festival put faces on at least three political hot buttons: Hurricane Katrina as it becomes something more than an act of nature, the collapse of the economy and illegal immigration.
Both Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water, which won the documentary Grand Jury prize, and […]

 
He made spelling cool when he directed the hit documentary Spellbound in 2002 and earned an Oscar nomination for his efforts. Now Jeffrey Blitz is back and taking on the English language from a different angle with the coming-of-age comedy Rocket Science. A hit at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, the story of a high […]

 
When the director of ‘La Vie en Rose’ cast a virtual unknown as Edith Piaf he struck gold - for the mesmerising Marion Cotillard looks set to add an Oscar to the string of awards she’s already won for the role. Not bad considering this particular Little Sparrow decided to wing it without so much […]

 
So here I am, sitting in an overstuffed leather chair, next to four other guys in matching chairs, holding a microphone in my hand, bantering with one of the nation’s best-known and most outspoken movie critics: Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly. 
And in the back of my head, a little voice was singing the David Byrne […]