cinematial Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Of the two main actresses in My Summer of Love, I was more impressed by Nathalie Press. But it was Emily Blunt who garnered more notice, and it was Blunt who co-starred in a major release like The Devil Wears Prada, and it is Blunt who is now the bigger star. The whole situation reminds me of Heavenly Creatures; the performance I favored in that film was Melanie Lynskey's, yet it was Kate Winslet who rose to stardom. Anyway, like Lynskey, Press has not gone away. Unlike Lynskey, though, Price is continuing to get significant roles in smaller films rather than small roles in more mainstream films. Her latest announced part is the lead in a psychological thriller titled Knife Edge.

Knife Edge was co-written and is being directed by Anthony Hickox, who last gave us the direct-to-video Steven Seagal vehicle Submerged. Considering that the average rating for his films on the IMDb is about 4.5, Knife Edge probably won't be very good. However, it does co-star Oscar nominee Joan Plowright and Hugh Bonneville, both of whom are a far cry from Hickox's usual actor type (Dolph Lundgren, Julian Sands, Armand Assante), and it is being produced by the makers of Mira Nair's Vanity Fair, so maybe this could be the first step in the right direction for the filmmaker.

The plot of Knife Edge is about a Wall Street trader (Press) who moves to the British countryside with her young son. While there, the woman experiences nightmarish visions and involvement with her family lawyer (Bonneville). Although this movie may not do much for Price's career, she should still be remembered well for My Summer of Love and last year's Red Road. She will also soon be appearing in Telepathy, alongside Cillian Murphy, Sam Neill and Miranda Richardson, and in Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching. Unfortunately, she seems to have been dropped from the Brontë sisters movie and I highly, highly doubt -- much to the disappointment of one of our commenters -- that she would ever be cast in the Barbarella remake.

It's been a long, long nine months for film critic Roger Ebert, who has been recovering from surgery for thyroid cancer. Ebert was finally able to write an update on his condition last August, when he told his many fans that what had started out to be a relatively simple surgery for recurrence of thyroid cancer turned into a major reconstruction effort after cancer was found in his jawbone and it had to be removed. Following the surgery, Ebert was preparing to go home when an artery burst near the surgery site, requiring a second surgery, and ending up with the famous critic spending months in a hospital bed.

Now, in his latest update, Ebert tells fans on his website that after a stint in the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, he's since moved to the Pritkin Center in Florida, where he has continued rehab. While recuperating, Ebert has written some reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times (although not at anywhere near his normal pace) and his Outguess Ebert Oscar feature. Now Ebert is slated to make his first official public appearance since all these health problems began in April at his Ninth Annual Overlooked Film Festival in Urbana-Champaign. Because he's still recovering, Ebert has enlisted the help of some friends to help out with the onstage Q&A, as his speaking voice is "onhold" while he continues to recuperate from a tracheostomy.

I'll be attending the Overlooked Film Festival this year for Cinematical -- it runs April 25-29, and will include a screening of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, for which Ebert wrote the screenplay. You can check out the full schedule for the fest here, and be sure to check back at the end of the month for reports and reviews from the festival.

Think of every bad scene from every bad Christmas movie ever made. Now mix them all together however you like and toss them up on a movie screen. The end result, I promise you, will still be a better film than Deck the Halls, an incredible mess of a film starring Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito, Kristin Davis and Kristin Chenoweth. The four leads all seem vaguely embarrassed to be seen in this film (and they should be), as if they kind of hope you won't notice it's them up there. If I took all twelve days of Christmas, I still couldn't enumerate all the ways in which this is a truly atrocious movie, but I'll do my best to give you a general idea.

Okay, I admit it. I've had a serious film-crush on Gael Garcia Bernal ever since I saw him in Amores Perros (It's all about the acting -- nothing to do with his gorgeous jawline. Really.) My crush further solidified with Y Tu Mama Tambien a year later. Bernal has been slowly and steadily notching an impressive number of solid roles on his belt, with The Motorcyle Diaries in 2004, and two films currently in arthouse theaters: Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, and The King, directed by James Marsh.

As if that weren't enough hot roles for a serious young actor, Bernal has a starring role in Babel, debuting next week at Cannes, and four -- FOUR -- films in pre-prod. One of those films, Toto, is a soccer film, so Martha can start going into her soccer-movie ecstasies now. Also on his plate: O, Pasado, directed by Hector Babenco (Kiss of the Spiderwoman), about a man who ends a relationship but is still hounded by his ex; Deficit, which he is also directing (because, you know, he's just not busy enough lately), about a clash between two social classes at a family gathering in Mexico; and the one I'm personally most excited about, Master of Space and Time, another Gondry flick with a screenplay by Daniel Clowes (Art School Confidential, Ghost World). 

 Whew. I'm tired just thinking about everything Bernal is juggling, but I'm ecstatic to have so many opportunities to see him on the big screen. I love how Bernal is mixing up the Spanish films with stuff like Babel and the freaky-good Gondry films, too. All you pretty-boy actors out there who think you have to take roles in crap movies to build a career? Start taking notes, because Bernal (along with some other smart young actors like Joseph Gordon Levitt and Lee Taylor Pucci) is doing it right. And wouldn't I love to see Levitt and Bernal do a film together? You bet I would.