Outside the Carlton Hotel, workmen have pasted a giant poster of Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, promoting his part in the upcoming Ben Stiller comedy, Tropic Thunder. The garish image is a reminder that Cannes is in the business of selling what most people call movies as well as what cinephiles call cinema.
Each year, headlines […]

 
Blindness, a thriller starring Julianne Moore, is to open the Cannes Film Festival in France next month.
Based on a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago, the movie focuses on a town which is hit by a sudden epidemic of sight-loss.
The comedy drama What Just Happened, starring Robert de Niro, Bruce Willis, and Sean Penn, […]

 
Film festivals can be a rollercoaster of highs and lows.
A premiere can be an ecstatic experience, but there’s a bit of a hangover the next day. Now what? Will the movie get in more festivals or is this it? Is this movie going to sell? Will we make our money back?
Similarly a documentary film festival […]

 
The Coen brothers’ “Burn After Reading” will open the 65th Venice Film Festival.
World preem of the dark spy comedy, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton, will launch from the Venice Lido Aug. 27, ahead of its U.K. release Sept. 5 via Universal Pictures.
Pic goes out Stateside via […]

 
Steven Soderbergh’s two pic Che bio and Clint Eastwood’s “The Changeling” look like potential standouts at a 61st Cannes Film Festival that may be a touch lighter on Yank Palme d’Or contenders but is heavy on Hollywood glam, thanks to multiple U.S. pics, both studio and indie, packing out many out-of-competition slots.
Soderbergh’s inclusion — […]

The image of the French daredevil Philippe Petit, dancing across a high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in James Marsh’s exhilarating documentary “Man on Wire,” is as rich a metaphor for the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival as you could imagine.
On Aug. 7, 1974, Mr. Petit, then 24, tiptoed onto a […]

When it kicked off March 7, the South by Southwest Film Festival wasn’t necessarily in line for a watershed moment. The easygoing, jeans-and-beer atmosphere, which will come to an end Saturday, made for a casual set of films, interactive panels, a trade show and several raucous days of concerts.
But 2008 will long be marked as […]

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 […]

Morgan Spurlock’s left hand is bandaged up, the result of a snowboarding accident on his first day at the snow-covered Sundance Film Festival. Suffice it to say, that’s the only thing that’s gone wrong for him lately.
The charismatic “Super Size Me” star/ director/ guinea pig touched down in Park City knowing that his April film, […]

 
Dublin-born heart-throb Colin Farrell says he was pleased to get a few laughs in his first dark comedy, which opened the Sundance Film Festival this week.
“I’m not known for having a funny bone in my body,” he told reporters the morning after the world premiere of award-winning playwright Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, about gangsters on […]