Dear Danny,We blinked, and ten days passed. How swiftly time goes by when in festival mode, just floating on films and friends. It’s not until I’m on the way home, writing my final dispatch in between airport terminals, that I realize how tremendously exhausted I am. A good time, then, to be reflecting on Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, quite the strong cup of black coffee. As a non-fan of In Bruges (2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012), I was pleasantly surprised by the grim comic force of Martin McDonagh’s morality tale, a Southern Gothic hamlet pushed through the filter of British Catholic guilt. The eponymous placards are positioned on a dilapidated road and painted red with a confrontational query, part of the crusade waged by the grieving Mildred (Frances McDormand) against the local lawmakers who’ve failed to locate the man behind her daughter’s rape and murder.
- 9/17/2017
- MUBI
![Adam West and Burt Ward in Batman (1966)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTc5NGZhNjktOTVhNi00NzBmLTk1MTgtMjEzNDI0OWYxYWVlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTEyNzgwMDUw._V1_QL75_UX140_CR0,2,140,207_.jpg)
![Adam West and Burt Ward in Batman (1966)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTc5NGZhNjktOTVhNi00NzBmLTk1MTgtMjEzNDI0OWYxYWVlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTEyNzgwMDUw._V1_QL75_UX140_CR0,2,140,207_.jpg)
Jeremy Irons is in many respects the quintessential English film actor. That’s not simply because of the honeyed diction and innate elegance, but the versatility that has enabled him to travel with ease between romantic leading man, edgy character actor and sinister villain, towards an Indian summer of ever-dependable supporting player.
Read More: Jeremy Irons Knocks ‘Batman v Superman’: It’s ‘Overstuffed’ & ‘Very Muddled’
Think James Mason. In fact, Irons and Mason even have a role in common – the riskiest of roles, Nabokov’s infamous pedophile Humbert Humbert, Mason most famously in Kubrick’s “Lolita” of 1962, Irons for Adrian Lyne in 1997. It’s difficult to imagine many Americans jumping at a character who came second in Time’s “Top 10 Worst Fictional Fathers,” or possessing the nuance necessary to make us almost like the man.
Again like many Brits, Irons is classically trained (at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School,...
Read More: Jeremy Irons Knocks ‘Batman v Superman’: It’s ‘Overstuffed’ & ‘Very Muddled’
Think James Mason. In fact, Irons and Mason even have a role in common – the riskiest of roles, Nabokov’s infamous pedophile Humbert Humbert, Mason most famously in Kubrick’s “Lolita” of 1962, Irons for Adrian Lyne in 1997. It’s difficult to imagine many Americans jumping at a character who came second in Time’s “Top 10 Worst Fictional Fathers,” or possessing the nuance necessary to make us almost like the man.
Again like many Brits, Irons is classically trained (at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School,...
- 9/13/2016
- by Demetrios Matheou
- Indiewire
![Jean-Paul Belmondo](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTI4MTAwNDUxMV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODI0MDgzMw@@._V1_QL75_UY207_CR3,0,140,207_.jpg)
![Jean-Paul Belmondo](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTI4MTAwNDUxMV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODI0MDgzMw@@._V1_QL75_UY207_CR3,0,140,207_.jpg)
The 73rd Venice International Film Festival will award its Golden Lion awards for lifetime achievement to French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo and Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski.
The festival noted that it plans to start awarding two Golden Lions for career achievement at each edition of the festival, starting this year. One will be to a director and one to an actor.
Belmondo is well known for films such as Breathless, Pierrot le Fou (which competed in Venice in 1965), Hit Man, That Man From Rio and The Professional.
Venice festival director Alberto Barbera said: “Thanks to his fascinating face, irresistible charm and extraordinary versatility, he has played roles in dramas, adventure movies and even comedies, making him a star who is universally respected, by engagé directors and escapist cinema alike.”
Skolimowski has enjoyed a 50-year career including his early Polish trilogy of Rysopis, Walkover and Barrier; The Departure; Deep End; The Shout; Moonlighting and Essential Killing (which won a special...
The festival noted that it plans to start awarding two Golden Lions for career achievement at each edition of the festival, starting this year. One will be to a director and one to an actor.
Belmondo is well known for films such as Breathless, Pierrot le Fou (which competed in Venice in 1965), Hit Man, That Man From Rio and The Professional.
Venice festival director Alberto Barbera said: “Thanks to his fascinating face, irresistible charm and extraordinary versatility, he has played roles in dramas, adventure movies and even comedies, making him a star who is universally respected, by engagé directors and escapist cinema alike.”
Skolimowski has enjoyed a 50-year career including his early Polish trilogy of Rysopis, Walkover and Barrier; The Departure; Deep End; The Shout; Moonlighting and Essential Killing (which won a special...
- 7/14/2016
- by [email protected] (Wendy Mitchell)
- ScreenDaily
“The only place I feel comfortable is the skatepark and the library.”
What has set cinema back — both from the perspective of those who make, and those who write about it — are the binaries chosen to be created and propagated, be it taste, modes of production, or genre, essentially what forms “correct” cinema, in terms either classical or experimental. So there’s more and more hope that a film can come along that hopefully defies the tradition of quality, that makes us rethink a medium only feeling more and more trivial with every passing day, even if it’s more accessible than ever.
Amongst the many things that make 88:88 — the first feature from Isiah Medina, the 24-year-old Canadian filmmaker behind the shorts Semi-Auto Colors and Time is the Sun — so radical is its attempt to obliterate the binaries. Cutting and layering images overtop each other at the kind of...
What has set cinema back — both from the perspective of those who make, and those who write about it — are the binaries chosen to be created and propagated, be it taste, modes of production, or genre, essentially what forms “correct” cinema, in terms either classical or experimental. So there’s more and more hope that a film can come along that hopefully defies the tradition of quality, that makes us rethink a medium only feeling more and more trivial with every passing day, even if it’s more accessible than ever.
Amongst the many things that make 88:88 — the first feature from Isiah Medina, the 24-year-old Canadian filmmaker behind the shorts Semi-Auto Colors and Time is the Sun — so radical is its attempt to obliterate the binaries. Cutting and layering images overtop each other at the kind of...
- 9/20/2015
- by Ethan Vestby
- The Film Stage
![Noah Baumbach in Greenberg (2010)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjA3NTUzNzM2OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjU4MjYxMw@@._V1_QL75_UX140_CR0,2,140,207_.jpg)
![Noah Baumbach in Greenberg (2010)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjA3NTUzNzM2OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjU4MjYxMw@@._V1_QL75_UX140_CR0,2,140,207_.jpg)
Read More: Venice Film Festival Unveils Lineup: Includes 'Equals' and 'The Danish Girl' World Premieres, New Noah Baumbach Documentary Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski is no stranger to the fall festival circuit. Over his five decades in the business, the writer-director has won the Venice Grand Jury Prize ("Essential Killing"), the Cannes Best Screenplay award ("Moonlighting") and the Berlin Golden Bear ("The Departure"), among other prizes, so consider us quite excited that his new film, "11 Minutes," will world premiere in Venice before hitting the Toronto Film Festival's Masters of Cinema section this September. The official synopsis reads: "A jealous husband out of control, his sexy actress wife, a sleazy Hollywood director, a reckless drug messenger, a disoriented young woman, an ex-con hot dog vendor, a troubled student on a mysterious mission, a high-rise window window cleaner on an illicit break, an elderly sketch...
- 8/28/2015
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
11 Minutes
Director: Jerzy Skolimowski // Writer: Jerzy Skolimowski
Esteemed Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski began his directorial career in the late 60′s, but gained international acclaim outside of his native film system, dipping into the French/Belgian production of The Departure (1967), headlined by Jean-Pierre Leaud (and winning the director the Golden Berlin Bear), before helming a trio of infamous UK productions starting with 1970′s iconic Deep End, an adaptation of Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave (1972) and the mystical genre film The Shout (1978) featuring Alan Bates and John Hurt. Skolimowski would compete at Cannes five times, winning the Grand Jury prize twice, for The Shout and 1982′s Moonlighting. And then three rounds in Venice would nab him two more Jury Prizes, for The Lightship (1985) and Essential Killing (2010). Skolimowski was assumed to have retired after a hiatus dating from 1991′s 30 Door Key, but broke his silence with 2008′s Four Nights With Anna, followed by Essential Killing,...
Director: Jerzy Skolimowski // Writer: Jerzy Skolimowski
Esteemed Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski began his directorial career in the late 60′s, but gained international acclaim outside of his native film system, dipping into the French/Belgian production of The Departure (1967), headlined by Jean-Pierre Leaud (and winning the director the Golden Berlin Bear), before helming a trio of infamous UK productions starting with 1970′s iconic Deep End, an adaptation of Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave (1972) and the mystical genre film The Shout (1978) featuring Alan Bates and John Hurt. Skolimowski would compete at Cannes five times, winning the Grand Jury prize twice, for The Shout and 1982′s Moonlighting. And then three rounds in Venice would nab him two more Jury Prizes, for The Lightship (1985) and Essential Killing (2010). Skolimowski was assumed to have retired after a hiatus dating from 1991′s 30 Door Key, but broke his silence with 2008′s Four Nights With Anna, followed by Essential Killing,...
- 1/9/2015
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Element Pictures have announced that principal Photography begins this week on renowned Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski's (Essential Killing, Deep End, Moonlighting) latest feature, currently titled 11 Minutes. The Polish/Irish co-production, which has the backing of Skopia Pictures, Element Pictures and the Irish Film Board, will shoot in Dublin for five days, with Richard Dormer (Good Vibrations, Game of Thrones) taking the lead role of a film director. The film also stars an ensemble cast of Polish actors, including Agata Buzek, Beata Tysziewicz, and Mateusz Kościukiewicz. The full synopsis is below. The film follows the same 11 minutes in the lives of several different characters; young and old, prosperous and destitute. Some story elements surprisingly intertwine, others follow their own intricate rhythm. Some characters are shown just as they are about to make crucial life changing decisions, others are idly passing time, caught in the midst of their day‐to‐day.
- 9/23/2014
- by [email protected] (Tom White)
- www.themoviebit.com
"In the week where the film industry honor the six decade career of the late director Ken Russell, comes the announcement of the death of Christopher Logue," writes Rhett Bartlett. "Mr Logue wrote the screenplay for Ken Russell's sole film in 1972 — Savage Messiah," a biopic based on the life of French sculptor Henri-Gaudier Brzeska. "One year before his screenplay, Mr Logue appeared in Ken Russell's 1971 bold film — The Devils, as Cardinal Richelieu, the French clergyman who begins the film by influencing Louis Xiii to raze fortified castles and suppress feudal nobility." Bartlett also notes that Logue appeared as the "Spaghetti-eating Fanatic" in Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky and "made a brief appearance in Jerzy Skolimowski's Moonlighting (1982) and 19 years later in [Charles Shyer's] The Affair of the Necklace. Christopher Logue died on 2 December 2011, five days after Ken Russell."
"'Now hear this' — the three words that Christopher Logue, who has...
"'Now hear this' — the three words that Christopher Logue, who has...
- 12/8/2011
- MUBI
Skolimowski at work, from the December 1968 issue of Films and Filming,
via chained and perfumed.
Jerzy Skolimowski's comeback as a director after a break of nearly two decades threw many for a loop. The year was 2008, the venue was Cannes and the film was Four Nights with Anna. "Wait, what is this, exactly?" asked Daniel Kasman here in The Notebook. The answer Patrick Z McGavin settled on: "a small but crucial movie," and Skolimowski would follow it up with Essential Killing, which provoked far more resolute reactions, both positive and negative, when it premiered last fall in Venice.
Last month, Deep End (1970) emerged from legal limbo and, restored, it's currently touring the UK and sees a release on DVD in July. Now the full-blown retrospective The Cinema of Jerzy Skolimowski is on at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York through July 3 and, in Los Angeles, Cinefamily...
via chained and perfumed.
Jerzy Skolimowski's comeback as a director after a break of nearly two decades threw many for a loop. The year was 2008, the venue was Cannes and the film was Four Nights with Anna. "Wait, what is this, exactly?" asked Daniel Kasman here in The Notebook. The answer Patrick Z McGavin settled on: "a small but crucial movie," and Skolimowski would follow it up with Essential Killing, which provoked far more resolute reactions, both positive and negative, when it premiered last fall in Venice.
Last month, Deep End (1970) emerged from legal limbo and, restored, it's currently touring the UK and sees a release on DVD in July. Now the full-blown retrospective The Cinema of Jerzy Skolimowski is on at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York through July 3 and, in Los Angeles, Cinefamily...
- 6/12/2011
- MUBI
With the voyeuristic Four Nights with Anna and the visceral, brutal, beautiful and nearly wordless Essential Killing, Jerzy Skolimowski can be said to have made a comeback, but since when has he been away? Philip French in The Observer seemed confident of his authority when he suggested that Skolimowski had done "little of interest since the excellent Moonlighting in 1982." David Thomson in The Guardian called Torrents of Spring (1989), the director's last-but-one film before his seventeen years away from film directing, "a dull version of Turgenev."
Well, I liked it. It gives me no pride to break with critical tradition and admit I haven't read the book, but allowing for some unconvincing accents and dubbing (hardly anybody in this French-British-Italian co-production plays their own nationality), and a spot of rubbery old age make-up, I found it dazzling to the eye and rather enchantingly mysterious, perhaps due to elisions in the adaptation,...
Well, I liked it. It gives me no pride to break with critical tradition and admit I haven't read the book, but allowing for some unconvincing accents and dubbing (hardly anybody in this French-British-Italian co-production plays their own nationality), and a spot of rubbery old age make-up, I found it dazzling to the eye and rather enchantingly mysterious, perhaps due to elisions in the adaptation,...
- 6/9/2011
- MUBI
For 50 years Skolimowski has lived in the shadow of his fellow Polish film-making dissident Roman Polanski, acting with him under the direction of Andrzej Wajda and co-scripting Knife in the Water, the debut film that is the keystone of Polanski's career. He established his personal identity with absolute clarity only once, in the devastatingly honest comedy Moonlighting (1982), in which a party of Polish artisans led by Jeremy Irons are trapped in London doing a black-market building job during the December 1981 emergency. The time is ripe for his rehabilitation, and it has begun with the last two issues of Sight & Sound and the release of his new film, Essential Killing, and this revival of his almost forgotten Deep End (1970) is an important occasion. Made in Munich but set entirely in London, it's a bizarre tail end to the swinging London cycle of the 1960s, centring on a rundown suburban public swimming...
- 5/7/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
An actor, director, scriptwriter, poet, boxer and accomplished painter, Jerzy Skolimowski was born in Lodz, Poland in 1938. He graduated from the Lodz Film Academy in 1960, and has made more than 20 features to date, including the London set Deep End (reissued theatrically by the BFI on June 6th) and Moonlighting. Skolimowski stopped making films for nearly two decades after, in his words ‘making kind of a mediocre film’, during which time he lived in Los Angeles and devoted himself to painting awhile taking on occasional acting roles (including a part in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises). He moved back to Poland in the noughties and made his first feature in 17 years, Four Nights With Anna, in 2008.
I spoke with Mr. Skolimowski at the London office of Artificial Eye, the UK distributors of his highly acclaimed new feature Essential Killing, on the day of the film’s gala premiere launching the 9th...
I spoke with Mr. Skolimowski at the London office of Artificial Eye, the UK distributors of his highly acclaimed new feature Essential Killing, on the day of the film’s gala premiere launching the 9th...
- 4/4/2011
- by Ian Gilchrist
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
The Polish film-maker Jerzy Skolimowski, friend and collaborator of Roman Polanski (he co-scripted Knife in the Water), was one of the major international talents of the European cinema of the 1960s and 70s. But apart from pursuing his other career of painting, he's done little of interest since the excellent Moonlighting in 1982. So Essential Killing is something of a comeback, if a relatively minor one. It's a stark, pared down, existential pursuit story, the protagonist being a Muslim terrorist named in the final credits as Mohammed (Vincent Gallo), who after killing three American soldiers is captured by American special forces in a narrow ravine in the scorching desert of what is probably Afghanistan. He's waterboarded and flown with a sack over his head to a snow-covered Poland, where he escapes from his captors during a blizzard in the forest and goes on the run, experiencing terrible hardships, killing several more men,...
- 4/2/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Essential Killing
Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski
2010, Poland/Norway/Ireland/Hungary
Polish cinema has long been defined as a cinema of moral concern, with films like Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958) and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Trilogy (1993-1994) at its centre. Jerzy Skolimowski’s latest film, Essential Killing, starring the eternally polarizing Vincent Gallo, is a searingly relentless examination of man’s irrepressible quest for survival in the face of war. Skolimowski interweaves spiraling aerial shots of Middle Eastern desert and wintry Eastern European forests with the story of a wordless Taliban or Al-Qaeda fighter named Mohammed (Gallo) as he makes his way through a hostile landscape, following his capture and subsequent escape from imprisonment by U.S. troops. With panic-stricken eyes and unclear motivations, Mohammed encounters a series of adversaries in both human and animal form, which he eviscerates in the name of survival.
Gallo, winner of the...
Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski
2010, Poland/Norway/Ireland/Hungary
Polish cinema has long been defined as a cinema of moral concern, with films like Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958) and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Trilogy (1993-1994) at its centre. Jerzy Skolimowski’s latest film, Essential Killing, starring the eternally polarizing Vincent Gallo, is a searingly relentless examination of man’s irrepressible quest for survival in the face of war. Skolimowski interweaves spiraling aerial shots of Middle Eastern desert and wintry Eastern European forests with the story of a wordless Taliban or Al-Qaeda fighter named Mohammed (Gallo) as he makes his way through a hostile landscape, following his capture and subsequent escape from imprisonment by U.S. troops. With panic-stricken eyes and unclear motivations, Mohammed encounters a series of adversaries in both human and animal form, which he eviscerates in the name of survival.
Gallo, winner of the...
- 3/30/2011
- by Lindsay Peters
- SoundOnSight
At the 2010 Venice film festival, when Essential Killing won the special jury prize, its director Jerzy Skolimowski announced: "For those who like me – I'm back; and to those who don't like me – I'm back."
There's much of the man in that wry, pugnacious stance. But what does "back" mean for a Pole who will be 73 this May, and who took nearly 20 years out of a film-directing career to be a painter? How will "back" turn out for one of film's least compromising mavericks? As far as I can tell, Britain is only the second large market to give Essential Killing a release (after Poland) – with no takers in the Us. But a story about a Taliban fighter (Vincent Gallo) who kills Americans in the Afghan desert, is captured and tortured, then flown back to Europe and able to escape into the deep snow, will not compete easily with Adam Sandler.
There's much of the man in that wry, pugnacious stance. But what does "back" mean for a Pole who will be 73 this May, and who took nearly 20 years out of a film-directing career to be a painter? How will "back" turn out for one of film's least compromising mavericks? As far as I can tell, Britain is only the second large market to give Essential Killing a release (after Poland) – with no takers in the Us. But a story about a Taliban fighter (Vincent Gallo) who kills Americans in the Afghan desert, is captured and tortured, then flown back to Europe and able to escape into the deep snow, will not compete easily with Adam Sandler.
- 3/25/2011
- by David Thomson
- The Guardian - Film News
As stated in the description of the new book ‘Polish Cinema Now!’, published to coincide with the 9th annual edition of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, Polish cinema of the past twenty years, made without state control of production after the fall of communism, is paradoxically much less well known than their cinema of the earlier post war era. This year’s Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, which runs between 24 March and 23 April at various London venues as well as venues in Belfast, Edinburgh, Exeter and Glasgow, seeks to rectify this lack of exposure by presenting an eclectic selection of the best of contemporary Polish cinema, while also showcasing obscure cult and archival films from the past.
The festival kicks off on the 24th with Jerzy Skolimowski’s excellent Essential Killing, the writer/director’s second feature in three years after a 17 year absence from cinemas. Along with Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski,...
The festival kicks off on the 24th with Jerzy Skolimowski’s excellent Essential Killing, the writer/director’s second feature in three years after a 17 year absence from cinemas. Along with Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski,...
- 3/23/2011
- by Ian Gilchrist
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Director, Jerzy Skolimowski (Moonlighting) will see his latest feature, 'Essential Killing' compete at this year's 67th Venice Film Festival for the event's prestigious Golden Lion. 'Essential Killing', which is co-produced by Ireland's Element Pictures, will have its world premiere screening at the 67th Venice International Film Festival, which takes place from September 1st-11th 2010. The film [previously titled Essence of Killing] is produced and directed by veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski and stars Vincent Gallo (Arizona Dream) and Emmanuelle Seigner (La Vie en Rose).
- 8/13/2010
- IFTN
'Eastern' adds pair to cast
NEW YORK -- Armin Mueller-Stahl and Sinead Cusack will co-star opposite Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts in David Cronenberg's crime drama Eastern Promises. The Oscar-nominated Mueller-Stahl (Shine) will play Semyon, the patriarch of a London-based organized crime family with ties to the mysterious Nikolai (Mortensen). When Nikolai meets Anna (Watts), a midwife who stumbles upon incriminating evidence against the family, all hell breaks loose.
Cusack (V for Vendetta) will play Anna's mother. Donald Sumpter (The Constant Gardener) will portray Anna's uncle, and Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski (Moonlighting) will play a police officer involved with the case.
The Focus Features release is produced by Paul Webster of Kudos Pictures and Robert Lantos of Serendipity Point Films. Principal photography begins this week in London.
Mueller-Stahl is repped by WMA. Cusack is repped by Artist Rights Group.
Cusack (V for Vendetta) will play Anna's mother. Donald Sumpter (The Constant Gardener) will portray Anna's uncle, and Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski (Moonlighting) will play a police officer involved with the case.
The Focus Features release is produced by Paul Webster of Kudos Pictures and Robert Lantos of Serendipity Point Films. Principal photography begins this week in London.
Mueller-Stahl is repped by WMA. Cusack is repped by Artist Rights Group.
- 11/19/2006
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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