Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, the cowriters of the indie drama Before Midnight, which Sony Pictures Classics released to rave reviews on May 24, will receive the Hollywood Screenwriters Award at the 17th annual Hollywood Film Awards -- the first awards show of the 2013 season -- on Oct. 21 at the Beverly Hilton, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. (The Hollywood Film Awards is owned by affiliates of THR parent company Guggenheim Partners.) This is the third film in the Before series, which spans 18 years, and each installment of which was directed by Linklater and stars Delpy and Hawke as Jesse and Celine at different phases of their relationship as they walk-and-talk their way through one major city or another. Linklater and Kim Krizan co-wrote the first, Before Sunrise (1995). Linklater, Delpy and Hawke co-wrote the second, Before Sunset (2004), and received a best adapted screenplay Oscar nomination for their efforts. STORY: 'Before Midnight': Ethan … [Read more...] about Hollywood Film Awards to Honor ‘Before Midnight’ Writers Linklater, Delpy and Hawke (Exclusive)
Hollywood film review
‘306 Hollywood’: Film Review | Sundance 2018
A Swiss Army knife of favorite documentary subgenres, Elan and Jonathan Bogarin's Sundance NEXT competition entry 306 Hollywood feels simultaneously like the sort of heartfelt little film that often slips through the cracks without finding an audience and like one of the more universal and relatable films you're ever likely to see.306 Hollywood is a personal essay! It's a tone poem! It's a biographical collage! It's an embrace of the banal kitschy! It's magic realism! It's such a little story you may wonder why it's being told at all, except that it's a story likely to touch anybody who has ever lost a loved one, which makes it a very big story.The title refers to the house at 306 Hollywood Avenue. It's a nondescript white house in a nondescript suburban New Jersey neighborhood. You could drive by it for years and never notice it, but it's the address that the Bogarin siblings' beloved grandmother lived at for 67 years, including 30 years of regular Sunday visits from her family. A … [Read more...] about ‘306 Hollywood’: Film Review | Sundance 2018
’12 Strong’: Film Review
This is the closest thing to a John Wayne movie since The Duke hung up his holster. Although set in Afghanistan in the days just after 9/11 when a dirty dozen American Special Forces operatives — the Green Berets, no less — were dropped in to off some of the Taliban and Al Qaeda perpetrators, 12 Strong is a both entertaining and mildly risible real-life-inspired yarn that comes off as much like a Western as a modern war film, right down to having some of the Americans ride into battle on horseback.This may be the first big studio release that feels like it was made by and for Trump's America, which should translate into muscular business in red states at least. Here at last is a modern Hollywood film that would be suitable viewing under current management at the White House.Quite apart from the Pirates of the Caribbean and National Treasure sequels, not to mention the continuing cascade of TV series, this is also the first feature that feels like a real Jerry … [Read more...] about ’12 Strong’: Film Review
‘Blur Circle’: Film Review
That its central character elicits both our sympathy and irritation is but one of the many intriguing elements of Chris Hansen's low-budget regional drama Blur Circle. She's Jill (Cora Vander Broek), who's obsessed with the disappearance of her young son two years earlier. A natural and normal reaction, to be sure, and definitely worthy of the audience's empathy. But Jill takes it to extremes. She accosts male strangers in the park merely because she finds it suspicious that they're there alone in the middle of a work day, and then takes their pictures and presents them to the clearly exasperated detective working on the case. She lashes out at everyone around her and she wears the same clothes every day, an unflattering jogging suit, because it was what she wearing when her son went missing and she wants him to be able to recognize her when he reappears.In a similar vein, Jill confronts a man in a laundromat who appears to be photographing people without their permission. They get … [Read more...] about ‘Blur Circle’: Film Review
‘Ayla: The Daughter of War’: Film Review
The touching real-life tale of a Turkish sergeant who saves a small Korean girl becomes long, heart-tugging fiction in Ayla: The Daughter of War, directed by Can Ulkay. The story is well-known both in South Korea and in Turkey, and was told in the 2010 South Korean doc Kore Ayla, which inspired the present film. A documentary feeling still persists in Yigit Guralp’s screenplay, which struggles to stay focused while faithfully recounting a passel of real-life incidents.Ismail Hacioglu headlines a professional Turkish cast as the patriotic, level-headed but warm-hearted young officer, with little Kim Seol (who made her bow as a toddler on South Korean TV) in the role of the adorable Ayla and a cameo by a distinguished Eric Roberts as Lt. Gen. John Breitling Coulter, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Korea. Turkey proposed the film for the foreign-language Oscar, a calculated choice but one that didn't make the shortlist amid many other films about children and war. … [Read more...] about ‘Ayla: The Daughter of War’: Film Review