MARLA: LET’S TALK MOVIES…   SO DAVID, TELL ME ABOUT THIS YEARS UPCOMING FESTIVAL.   DAVID:  This year we have 179 movies.  the festival will be  back to the size before the pandemic. We are using the Palm Springs theatre, the Regal, the Annenberg, the Mary Pickford.  As you know we have always  specialized in intern...

Memory, Review: Contract killer with Alzheimemory In India, as I guess in many other parts of the world, Liam Neeson is instantly associated with Schindler’s List (1992), when he was 40, wherein he played a businessman who saves several Jews from being sent to concentration camps. In the thirty years since, we have seen him play several action heroes. But after 2008, he became synonymous with Bryan Mills of the Taken series. Taken 2 came in 2012 and Taken 3 in 2015. At the Toronto Film ...

IFFI Goa 2017, XVIII: 55 years of Bondage A thousand eyebrows were raised at the inclusion of a James Bond package in the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) Goa 2017. This was a first retrospect/tribute dedicated to a fictional character, the British MI6 spy who first appeared on screen in 1962. It was hotly debated whether the idea had any merit, considering retrospectives were hitherto confined to directors and countries. As many as nine Bond capers were screened, and at the cost ...

Logan Lucky, Review by Siraj Syed: How to steal millions, with a prosthetic arm and a limp leg After Christopher Nolan wowed audiences with Dunkirk, his friend Steven Soderbergh crafts a never-never heist, with no weapons and unbelievable tools, master-minded by a limping, laid off construction worker, and his one-armed bartender brother. Logan Lucky, not to be confused with the world of werewolves, is a delightfully detailed film that bears many of Soderbergh’s trade-mark touches, and ...

Dunkirk, Review by Siraj Syed: 300,000 stranded soldiers--Between certain death and uncertain rescue, a movie to cling on to It really happened. Give or take a few details, it really happened. Between 300,000 and 400,000 British troops were evacuated by British vessels from a beach in Dunkirk, France, in May 1940, amidst German submarine and aerial attacks. Dunkirk, the movie, is a visual roller-coaster on land, sea and air, where thrills are interwoven with chills, and dizzy heights blend wit...

Siraj Syed interviews Mumbai-based, under 23, prolific, short film-maker, S. Ashwin *You have been prolific in output. How many films have you made since you completed your studies a couple of years ago, and what/who made it possible to make so many? I have made 29 short films till now. My love for film-making and the conviction I have to keep making them has made it possible for me to have a large number of films to my credit today. Apart from that, my parents have been a great support--the...

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent When the Academy gets something wrong, well, over a billion people remember. Even if it really only happened once, during the live telecast for Oscars 2017. While we can’t erase the past, we can preserve Oscar 89 as a moment in time in so far as even this year marked an important once-in-a-lifetime snafu in Hollywood history. Next time, we may hear the phrase “The Other Envelope, Please.” The Academy Is Back, Folks Time to ge...

SPOTLIGHT MEDIA PRODUCTIONS By Adrienne Papp                 December 5 – 17, 2014   EGYPTIAN THEATRE ...

Interstellar, Review-- Gravity of the situation: Galactic Wormhole or Earthy Dust-bowl?   Mainly based on the scientific theories of Kip Thorne, Interstellar is a film that Steven Spielberg was to direct, and took about nine earthly years to land on planet IMAX (probably the last one to be shot on IMAX 15/70 format), courtesy spaceships Warner and Paramount. Thorne is an American Caltech physicist theoretical physicist who has written academic books on general relativity, colla...

Christopher Nolan & Emma Thomas were humble and introspective in front of the eager audience at as they opened Produced by 2012 last weekend. Nolan and Thomas worked together in England before bringing their first film Following to the US in 1998, at a time in the US when there was a "movement of cheap films that secured distribution through the festival circuit." They submitted it to the Sundance Film Festival, didn't make it, but there met a programmer from the San Francisco In...

By Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent  Just went you thought it was all fun and games and 3D at the movies, the WGA today announced its top choices for Screenwriting -- in advance of their WGA Award Show coming up in February. There are so many award-worthy movies, but as always, the comedy category gets a big snub.  What about THE OTHER GUYS?  And the nominees are...  2011 WRITERS GUILD AWARDS SCREEN NOMINEES BUT COMEDY OVERLOOKED? Still No Name?: ...