Alfonso Cuaron Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Sony's thriller The Tourist just keeps sending its talent packing. Originally set to be a vehicle for Tom Cruise and Charlize Theron, it shifted gears last month and was re-cast with Angelina Jolie and Sam Worthington. But once again, The Tourist finds itself without travel arrangements for a male lead as Variety reports that Worthington is out due to "creative disagreements" and Johnny Depp is in.

Depp is still in talks to play the hapless American tourist, and with the way this film is going, one can't assume it's finalized. But if it is, it might just be the casting coup of 2010. A Depp-Jolie pair-up has been something dreamed about by a lot of producers and studios over the years. Once upon a time, rumor even had them attached to play Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. People want to see them having onscreen sex. It'd be the hottest thing since ... well, Brad Pitt and Jolie having sex onscreen. (And off. Hey, I'm just being honest. There was a reason everyone wanted to see their offspring.)

The Tourist is also on the hunt for a director. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was circling the project, but departed alongside Worthington over those whispery creative differences. Reportedly, a lot of directors are interested, including Alfonso Cuaron. While shake-ups can be be a sign of a bad film, I'd like to think that a thriller that winds up with Jolie, Depp, and Cuaron came together exactly as it was meant to.

It never fails to amuse me whenever parents get all worked up about an occasional f-bomb or a flash of boob, but show 'em a story about child genocide peppered with mild misogyny and presto -- you've got a children's classic! Almost two years ago, it was announced that Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón would be taking on an update of Roald Dahl's The Witches, and it was originally reported that Cuarón was going to direct. Now, though, it seems like things have changed, and Empire has broken the news (in an interview with Cuarón) that Del Toro has not only finished the screenplay, but will also be taking the helm for the fantasy update.

Dahl's original story centered on a conspiracy of witches looking to rid the world of children (great bedtime story, huh?), and received the feature film treatment once before. But, that hasn't stopped the studio from going ahead with a brand new version of the dark children's tale, and by the sounds of it, there are going to be plenty of changes in Del Toro's update. Cuarón told Empire, "It won't be like the original Nicolas Roeg version, which was a beautiful film," because (and this is the very exciting part), Del Toro plans to "do it completely in stop-motion animation."

When Nicolas Roeg's version was released back in 1990, a few changes were made to make the story a little less disturbing for the kiddies (including a much lower body count). But for you purists out there, at least we can rely on the fact that at least Del Toro isn't afraid to play rough with kids on the big screen.

Sound off below, and tell us what you think about Del Toro's plan for the 'kiddie-killing' update...

In case you don't read Entertainment Weekly and didn't see this week's double issue on "The New Classics," or you didn't see my post last week about their list of the best movies from the last 25 years, here's a sad fact: only six foreign-language films made the list. They are: Wings of Desire (#28); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (#49); The Lives of Others (#56); All About My Mother (#69); Y Tu Mamá También (#86); and In the Mood for Love (#95). OK, so 6% is not terrible for a mainstream entertainment magazine, but EW had to add insult to injury with an accompanying map labeled "Movies: Breaking Down the List," which points to a number of locations around the globe in which some of these new classics are set. The only continent on the map without any love is South America (Antarctica was not included in the visual aid).

Now, before I get into my love letter to new Latin American cinema, I have to note that no film produced in Africa made the list either. However, on the map the continent was at least given some minuscule bit of love via the filming locations for Casino Royale and Gladiator. Yet despite the fact that South America was definitely used as a location in a few of the 100 films, it's shown no respect. And on top of that, Central America isn't even included on the map. For some strange reason there's just a gap between Mexico and South America. Meanwhile, Latin America's sole representative on EW's list, Mexico's Y Tu Mamá También, is left off the map so that no location from this area of the world, from the Mexican-U.S. border to Cape Horn, receives any recognition.

Few adaptations have been pored over and scrutinized for adherence to cannon as intensely as the Harry Potter films. Every omission and deviation gets pounced upon immediately. Speculation ran rampant that each of the later, longer volumes would be split into two films to accommodate J.K. Rowling's sprawling storylines, until it was finally announced that the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, actually will be. In a few weeks, I'll take a look at the prospects for David Yates' Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, due this November. This week, I want to look back at the sole Potter installment to date where the film not only did right by the book, but expanded it, improved it, brought it to life. And that would be Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

I'm usually lavish in my praise for the film; I'm fond of saying that I like it better than Cuaron's purportedly more "serious" works like Children of Men and Y Tu Mamá También. What I don't often get a chance to mention is that I'm much less enamored of the novel on which it's based. Don't get me wrong -- Rowling's Azkaban is still Harry Potter, and as such it's fast, and funny, and filled with all sorts of wonderful, world-building detail. But when I read it, shortly after tearing through The Sorcerer's Stone and The Chamber of Secrets, I couldn't help but be a bit disappointed. It seemed a little contrived, I thought, and overdramatic; a little cheesy. The climax involved a lot of ALL-CAPS YELLING to signify big emotion, the whole thing feeling like it was about to turn into a wizard soap opera. And I remember rolling my eyes at the time-travel, which felt like a cheat despite being gracelessly telegraphed a dozen times.

New Image removed at request of studio; we've replaced it with another image from the film

Above is a new photo from this fall's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; there's another one after the jump. There's rarely anything substantive to say about photos from upcoming movies, but with Harry Potter, the look of each film has been pretty distinctive, and often instrumental to the series' success. No one's yet topped Alfonso Cuarón and Michael Seresin's work on Prisoner of Azkaban, but I have high hopes for Half-Blood Prince, which was one of my favorite Harry Potter novels. Part of the reason I like it so much is that J.K. Rowling had the guts to plunge its characters into absolute, nearly hopeless despair, particularly toward the end. The movie could be powerful if it finds the courage to embrace that darkness.

David Yates, who turned in an impressively serious, almost businesslike Potter installment with Order of the Phoenix, returns for Half-Blood Prince. The grainy gloom of the photo above suggests to me that he might have the right idea. Unless I miss my guess as to what part of the film it's taken from, it depicts one of the most pivotal moments in the entire series. The movie needs to get it right.

You can click through for the second photo, or click here for an image released back in March.

Not only is playing a Harry Potter character one of the most sought after jobs for British actors, it apparently is a gig some of them wish they could keep. In an interview with MTV, Kenneth Branagh, who played Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, revealed that he was hoping to see his character's name prominently featured in the seventh and final book, Deathly Hallows. That way he could return to the movie franchise, something he had also hoped for with the making of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the character appears briefly in that book). But Branagh didn't simply want a little cameo in the final movie, he jokes that he should have been revealed to be Harry's dad. At least, I think that's what he meant. I'm not sure how that plot revelation would have worked out, but I guess since the actor-director was kidding, it doesn't matter.

Branagh did also reveal that he was considered to direct Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but it ended up going to Alfonso Cuarón. He said the main reason he wanted to direct an installment was because of the kids, who he liked working with a lot. He thought they had more potential than they were exhibiting -- perhaps he can cast some of them in one of his Shakespeare adaptations down the line? I think Emma Watson would make an excellent Viola/Cesario -- which I personally think they finally got to show in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, under Mike Newell's direction. However, when asked whether or not he'd like to helm the adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Branagh said he thinks Warner Bros. will likely choose one of the series' previous directors (Columbus, Cuarón, Newell or Yates), any of whom he thinks would do nicely. Anyway, Shawn over at MTV Movies Blog put out the question of what character the fans most wanted to see reappear in the movies. You could leave him a comment about that over there, or feel free to tell us below.

One of the most beloved literary classics of the 20th century -- and rightfully so -- the 1985 novel Love in the Time of Cholera by the Colombian-born Gabriel García Márquez made its first cinematic appearance in 2001. In Peter Chelsom's Serendipity, it was the book in which the playful Sara (Kate Beckinsale) wrote her name and phone number, in the hopes that her would-be lover Jonathan (John Cusack) would find it. He spends years searching for it, flipping through every copy of the book that he can find. That movie doesn't have many fans, but I'm fond of it, and in a way, it's truer to the spirit of Márquez's novel than Mike Newell's more straightforward movie adaptation that opens in theaters this week. Whereas Chelsom's film attempted to capture the feel of the novel, Newell's film attempts nothing more than a translation.

That's a big problem right there. The novel was originally written in Spanish, and though the English translation is quite beautiful, it's still a translation. The new movie is filmed in English, so it's an adaptation of a translation. Then, we have a director from England, Mike Newell, who has absolutely no cultural connection to the Caribbean, where the story is set. Of course, no director could perfectly, accurately represent the novel on the screen, but it's possible to start from a slightly better vantage point. On top of that, the story takes place over fifty years, which in a novel is no problem. But in a movie it requires layers of age makeup, a process that, as movie technology gets better and better, seems to get worse and worse (imagine how awful this will look on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray six months from now). And, on an emotional level, stories that cover that kind of immense time span tend to leave out life's most innocuous, but telling and truthful, moments in favor of great plot lurches and story highlights. It becomes like a Reader's Digest "condensed novel."

One of the greatest living filmmakers, Werner Herzog makes movies with an unquenchable curiosity combined with an intrepid fearlessness. His films brim with a kind of madness in an era when Hollywood wishes to control everything and leech out any unexpected qualities. Herzog's newest film Rescue Dawn (57 screens), starring Christian Bale and Steve Zahn, has opened to strong reviews and has pulled in over $1 million in U.S. box office. After a career stretching back five decades, it's his first film produced by a Hollywood studio. Though far from selling out, Herzog has brought his unique vision to the otherwise timid and brain-dead mainstream. This is good news for everyone; many Americans will see their very first Herzog film (though his 2005 documentary Grizzly Man didn't do half bad), Herzog himself may qualify for prizes usually reserved for those with half his talent, and his example may reverse an irritating trend that has prevailed for almost a century.

The 64-year-old filmmaker began in the 1960s as part of what would come to be known as the German New Wave, sharing the spotlight with, among others, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders. Herzog made a small splash with his amazing early feature Signs of Life (1968), and followed it up with the peculiar Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) and Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), which delved into the lives of little people and blind-and-deaf people with no hesitation or repulsion. His masterpiece Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) made him an art-house sensation, with its use of the physical, jungle landscape intertwining with man's obsession and insanity. While Herzog continued this exploration of untamed nature and human foibles, Wenders heeded the siren song of Hollywood, while Fassbinder burned out and left a good-looking corpse, well before Hollywood even noticed him.

One of the most versatile filmmakers around, Michael Apted is no stranger to picking up franchises that were begun by other people. Most respected is his continued following of up of 14 individuals, who have been presented every seven years in what are collectively known as the _ Up documentaries (49 Up was the most recent). He took that project -- which was not originally intended as a lifelong series -- over from Paul Almond, director of Seven Up!, for which Apted served as a researcher. A few years ago, he took on the 007 franchise for a single shot effort, The World is Not Enough. Now a little bird has told Harry Knowles at Aint it Cool News that Apted will be taking over the Chronicles of Narnia series.

I haven't seen the first of the Narnia movies, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and I wasn't planning on it, but now I'm gaining some interest. Franchises are always more appealing to me when they switch up directors midstream. It worked great for the Harry Potter movies, which completely raised their cred by bringing in Alfonso Cuarón for the third installment, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, following Chris Columbus' welcome departure after the first two. Apted may not be as great a filmmaker as Cuarón -- I lost interest in his fiction filmmaking after the J. Lo vehicle Enough (not to be confused with his James Bond effort) -- but he should bring some freshness to the Narnia movies. If the little bird is correct, he will take on the third movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Trader, which also currently is rumored to have Neil Burger attached. One or the other will replace Andrew Adamson, who, like Columbus, has been the series' director for the first two installments -- he is currently directing the second, Prince Caspian.

There are about 43 million Hispanics in the United States, and more than half of them speak Spanish frequently. Of course, there are nearly 300 million people total in the country, so for Hollywood, there may not be enough of an audience for movies centered on Hispanic characters, especially if the predominant language of those movies is Spanish. But thanks to the hype surrounding the Mexican filmmakers Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu, and the prideful excitement of actress Salma Hayek, Latin American cinema is superficially hot right now. Never mind that Spanish-language imports and homegrown indies marketed toward Latinos are not particularly big money-makers, the studios are presently interested in focusing on the "untapped" Latin market.

We've already witnessed partnerships between Lionsgate and Panamax, and between Warner Bros. and Cuaron's Esperanto Filmoj. Now Hayek is setting up another Latino division called Ventanazul; this one will be at MGM. The difference seems to be that neither Hayek or MGM is specifically interested in targeting Hispanic Americans. Instead, they plan to produce and distribute between two and four films with a Latino focus that are geared toward a wide, mainstream audience. I'm not sure how big they hope to be, but they'll have to do better than last year's Quinceañera, which had a lot of mainstream appeal and which was relatively successful considering its budget, but which still only made a couple million dollars. Hayek's last film hit, Frida, did much better, and her television success with Ugly Betty is huge, but neither one is specifically Latin-themed. So we'll have to see if a wide audience is accepting enough of Hispanic-centric movies to make the division work. It is especially interesting that MGM made this deal while Hayek is currently working on a Spanish-language project for Warner Bros.