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During an online Ama this past Friday, Francis Ford Coppola shared some factoids about his recently released sci-fi epic “Megalopolis,” including a list of influences he posted on Letterboxd. The list includes films adapted from the works of H.G. Wells, historical epics, erotic dramas, and many more. Upon examining each individually, it’s easy to see how they all had effect on Coppola’s ultimate vision on a new Roman Empire and an architect trying to bring about change.

Starring Adam Driver and featuring performances from Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight, Nathalie Emmanuel, Shia Labeouf, Talia Shire, and Giancarlo Esposito, “Megalopolis” premiered at Cannes, where it received a mixed reception. In IndieWire’s review of the film, David Ehrlich wrote, “After more than 40 years of idly fantasizing about the project (and more than 20 years of actively trying to finance it), Coppola is bringing ‘Megalopolis’ to screens at a moment when his...

Six months after going missing in the Mount Baldy wilderness outside Los Angeles, it has been confirmed today that veteran actor Julian Sands has passed away at the age of 65.

The San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department said in an official statement today, “The identification process for the body located on Mt. Baldy on June 24, 2023, has been completed and was positively identified as 65-year-old Julian Sands of North Hollywood. The manner of death is still under investigation, pending further test results.

“We would like to extend our gratitude to all the volunteers that worked tirelessly to locate Mr. Sands,” this afternoon’s statement continued.

Here in the horror world, Julian Sands is best known for playing the titular Warlock in the 1989 horror movie Warlock, reprising his role in 1993’s Warlock: The Armageddon.

Sands played Dr. James Atherton in 1990’s Arachnophobia, also starring in Gothic (1986), Naked Lunch (1991), The Turn of the Screw...

Julian Sands, the British actor who pivoted from the romantic lead in “A Room With a View” to playing sinister characters in films like “Warlock,” was confirmed dead Tuesday after being reported missing near Mt. Baldy in Southern California on Jan. 13. He was 65.

On Saturday morning, hikers found human remains in the Mt. Baldy wilderness and contacted the Fontana Sheriff’s Station.

“The identification process for the body located on Mt. Baldy on June 24, 2023, has been completed and was positively identified as 65-year-old Julian Sands of North Hollywood. The manner of death is still under investigation, pending further test results. We would like to extend our gratitude to all the volunteers that worked tirelessly to locate Mr. Sands,” the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner Department wrote in a statement.

Sands had gone hiking in the snow-covered Baldy Bowl area, about 45 miles east of Los Angeles. He was an experienced mountaineer, but...

Human remains recently discovered by hikers in the Mount Baldy wilderness outside Los Angeles were identified as those of British actor Julian Sands, who had been missing since January, authorities announced Tuesday.

On Saturday morning, civilian hikers contacted the Fontana Sheriff’s Station after they found the remains, which were then taken to the San Bernardino County Coroner for identification.

“The identification process for the body located on Mt. Baldy on June 24, 2023, has been completed and was positively identified as 65-year-old Julian Sands of North Hollywood,” the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. “The manner of death is still under investigation, pending further test results. We would like to extend our gratitude to all the volunteers that worked tirelessly to locate Mr. Sands.”

An avid outdoorsman, Sands was reported missing by his family Jan. 13 after he had gone hiking in the Baldy Bowl Trail area of the San Gabriel Mountains that day.

Salma Hayek gets a lot of attention for her stunning looks, but her oeuvre proves she's a versatile and formidable actress. From action to drama to comedy, Hayek takes on every role with consummate aplomb. Her talent has garnered Oscar, Golden Globe, and Emmy award nominations.

Hayek started her acting career in the novela "Un Nuevo Amanecer" in the late-1980s. She then appeared in television shows, including "Teresa," "Street Justice," and "Dream On." She made her big screen debut with 1993's "Mi Vida Loca," portraying Gata -- a small yet memorable role. Her feature film debut led to bigger and bigger parts, leading her to become one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood. While the 1990s saw her cultivate a reputation as a sex symbol, she's since lent her impressive acting chops to a wide range of films, such as experimental indie flicks, superhero blockbusters, and everything in between.

In a year when four Spanish titles made the shortlist for the Academy Award best live action short and illustrious short filmmakers have or are making the transition from to feature – think Estibaliz Urresola with “Cuerdas,· now Berlin winner “20,000 Species of Bees” and now Pedro Martín-Calero with “The Wailing,” starring Ester Expósito – Malaga’s Mafiz-Spanish Screenings has launched a Short Film Corner.

Following, five standout shorts from a dizzying selection of 58 titles, which are accompanied by round tables and presentations at an immediately fully-fledged major new section at the Malaga Festival and Spanish Screenings.

“Mourn,” (Marc Borràs)

Inspired by Johnna Adams’ play “Gideon’s Knot,” “Mourn” (“Duelo”) revolves around a classroom meeting between a troubled teacher (Àngels López) and an angry and mourning mother (Sandra Molins) who blames her for a seemingly avoidable tragedy. Molins and López’s intense and emotional performances result in a powerful and agonizing confrontation.

Spanish director Juanjo Gimenez’s “Out of Sync” (“Tres”) – his first outing since the Oscar-nominated short “Timecode,” winner of Cannes’ Palme d’Or for best short film – came into this year’s Official Selection at the Venice Film Festival buzzing ahead of its world premiere.

In the film, sound designer C – played by Marta Nieto, the lead in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Oscar-nominated short “Madre” and its eponymous feature follow-up – spends countless hours alone recording sound effects, editing and mixing. There, she finds refuge from the pains of the world outside, like broken relationships and a growing distance with her mother. That is, until her own hearing drops out of sync, forcing the workaholic to take time off and reevaluate much of her life.

Featuring elements borrowed from fantasy and thriller films, “Out of Sync” is an intense, first person experience of questioning one’s own identity. Although Gimenez asks the...

Le Pacte has boarded Juanjo Gimenez’s drama “Out of Sync,” which makes its world premiere at Venice Days, and the documentary biopic “Inferno Rosso: Joe d’Amato on the Path of Excess,” which will world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in the Special Screenings section.

“Inferno Rosso: Joe d’Amato on the Path of Excess,” directed by Manlio Gomarasca and Massimiliano Zanin and presented by Danish helmer Nicolas Winding Refn, sheds light on Aristide Massaccesi, known as Joe D’amato, a popular filmmaker of horror, erotic and adult films who delivered 200 films as producer, director and cinematographer from the 1970s to the late 1990s.

Gomarasca and Zanin said telling the story of Massaccesi “means telling the story of Italian genre cinema, from spaghetti Westerns to horror and even porn, but also the remarkable life of a man who sacrificed everything for his great obsession, cinema.”

The documentary, produced by Wave Cinema,...

“Madeleine Collins,” the buzzy psychological drama directed by France’s Antoine Barraud (“Portrait of the Artist”) and toplined by popular Belgian actress Virginie Efira who plays the lesbian nun in Paul Verhoeven’s “Benedetta,” is among ten competition titles set to launch from the Venice Film Festival’s independently run Venice Days section.

The Venice section modeled around the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight is largely made up of international first works this year. All entries are world premieres.

Besides “Madeleine” in which Efira (pictured) plays a woman who leads a double life –– and which also features Nadav Lapid, who is also the Israeli director of “Synonyms” and also Jacqueline Bisset –– the three other pics competing in Venice Days that are not first works are: the drama “Private Desert,” by Brazilian director Aly Muritiba (“Rust”) that is centered around a 40-year-old-cop’s Internet love interest who goes missing; “Dusk Stone,” by Argentina...

Gaspar Noé is the kind of mad scientist filmmaker whose very name invites expectations of provocative experimentation. “Vortex,” which clocks in at 142 minutes and spends almost all of them in split screen, would appear to be consistent with that trend. Yet this quiet, slow-burn look at an elderly couple suffering from dementia and other ailments is a grounded, emotional variation of “Amour,” as well as the .

A world apart from the dazzling psychedelic rides of “Climax” and “Enter the Void,” Noé’s latest doesn’t always justify the formalist gimmicky at its center, but it doesn’t overplay the gimmick, either. A world apart from Mike Figgis’ “Timecode” or anything in Brian De Palma’s oeuvre, “Vortex” introduces its split screen within the opening minutes and simply lets it sit there as a statement on the dueling life stories at its center.

These belong to an unnamed couple, one played...

The recipient of the Short Film Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2016 (and an Oscar nod) is currently directing his second feature, a drama with hints of black comedy starring Marta Nieto. Juanjo Giménez took home the Short Film Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2016, the European Film Academy’s European Short Film Award and the Goya, among many other trophies – as well as being nominated for the Oscar, the following year – with his fiction mini-film Timecode. That’s why we are now waiting with bated breath for his next work: the filmmaker is currently flitting between Barcelona and A Coruña shooting the feature Tres (lit. “Three”), starring Marta Nieto in the lead role and featuring a screenplay written by the director together with his regular collaborator on such matters, Pere Altimira. The cast is rounded off by Miki Esparbé, Francisco Reyes, and Galician thesps Luisa Merelas, Cris...

“Last Call” is a movie about a man in need of an intervention. Not David, who misdials the suicide hotline and gets a janitor named Beth — who’s working late at the local community college — instead, but director Gavin Michael Booth, who has fallen for the fad of shooting an entire feature in a single take — or a double take, in this case. Booth films both sides of this high-stakes phone conversation simultaneously, then crowds them into the same frame, so audiences can watch this miserable melodrama play out in real time.

Someone should step in and stop inexperienced directors from pulling this sort of stunt, especially when masked as some kind of statement, the way Booth does. I don’t mean to trivialize suicide by suggesting that “Last Call” doesn’t take the subject seriously. It’s just that Booth has chosen a technique that calls attention to itself...

Before becoming a filmmaker, Leaving Las Vegas director Mike Figgis was a musician and performer in the experimental group called The People Show. Before that, he played trumpet and guitar in the experimental jazz ensemble The People Band, whose first record was produced by Rolling Stone drummer Charlie Watts. He is also the founding patron of an online community of independent filmmakers called Shooting People. You can say Figgis is a People person, which makes him the perfect director to capture Ronnie Wood in the documentary Somebody Up There Likes Me.

One of rock and roll’s most iconic guitarists, Wood is good with people. He plays well with others. He is the Stone who’s never alone. Before he began weaving guitar licks with Keith Richards in the Rolling Stones, Wood helped shape the British rock sound in bands like The Birds and the Creation. He was the bass...

Filming a long, extended take in a movie is one of the best ways to win some acclaim and show off a bit of your directorial prowess. But it’s often so complex and so ambitious that still only a handful of directors have ever dared make their movie to appear as though it was filmed in one continuous, unbroken shot. Sam Mendes is the latest mad man to attempt the feat for his World War I epic “1917,” and boy did he nail it. Here are some other films that helped pave the way for him.

“Rope” (1948)

The master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock was the first to attempt a single-take feature film, taking on a radical experiment with a big budget and A-list stars that included James Stewart. His movie “Rope” was inspired by a play by Patrick Hamilton and concerned a pair of men who murdered someone, hid his...

Although some believe 2014's Birdman to be the first one-shot film (a movie that's one continuous shot with no edit cuts), flicks like Timecode, Big Monday, and last year's Blind Spot put paid to that myth. However, a specific one-shot film that's garnering a ton of interest right now is Oscar winning director Sam Mendes' WWI epic 1917. Early reactions are very…...

Newly-enthralled by the dynamism of Korean cinema, leading European filmmaker Mike Figgis is to make “Shame,” an Asian omnibus short film project with South Korean talent agency Saram Entertainment. Known for “Leaving Las Vegas” and “Timecode,” Figgis is head of the competition jury this week at the Busan International Film Festival.

“The project will be a three-part omnibus involving Asian countries, made in each country’s native languages. We are currently working with a scriptwriter for the Korean part of the project, while details about the other two parts have not yet been decided,” said Saram CEO and producer Lee So-young.

“This project started from the idea of seeing one thing differently, and then describing it from global points of view.”

According to the Korean company, “Shame” will depict various emotions of Asian people who live different lives and will present irony, pain and reconciliation that come from the indiscreetness of the world.

“Leaving Las Vegas” director, Mike Figgis will head the jury of the New Currents competition at the Busan International Film Festival in October.

He will be joined by: Karel Och, artistic director of the Karlovy Vary Iff; Samal Yeslyamova, the winner of the best actress award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival 2018 for “Ayka”; Malaysian actress Lee Sinje (“The Eye”); and Korean sales agent and producer Suh Youngjoo, CEO of Finecut. They will select two winning films which will each receive $30,000 prizes.

Figgis, a British film maker who previously attended the second edition of the Busan festival, with 1997 picture “One Night Stand,” also directed “Timecode” in 2000, the first real-time digital film ever made.

Iranian filmmaker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Huh Moonyung, program director of the Busan Cinema Center, and Malaysian director Tan Chui Mui Love Conquers All are set as the three jury members for the Kim Jiseok Award. They will...

France’s Le Pacte has acquired international and French rights to “Tres,” the second feature from Spain’s Juanjo Giménez, whose 2016 “Timecode” won a Cannes Palme d’Or for best short and went on to be nominated for an Academy Award.

Set up at Spain’s Frida Films and Nadir Films, “Tres” will be co-produced by France’s Manny Films and M-Films in Lithuania.

A fantasy-tinged social parable, “Tres” turns on a 39-year-old woman, called C., who finds refuge in her work as a sound designer from caring for her aged mother and the pleadings of her ex. But her brain has begun to “de-synchronize,” processing sounds later than images. Her mother dies, forcing her to abandon her work, and her illness proves a second-chance opportunity as she begins a relationship with her sign-language teacher.

A winner at the Torino Film Lab while in development, and written with Giménez’s co-writer Pere Altimira,...

Chicago – At Chicago’s Michigan Avenue Magazine 10th Anniversary Issue event on September 11th, 2018, a surprise visitor joined cover celebrity Darren Criss, and his low-key appearance brought a stir of excitement to the room. Actor Kyle MacLachlan, best known for the extraordinary work in “Twin Peaks,” was in the house.

MacLachlan of course was Agent Dale Cooper, in the original run of “Twin Peaks” in 1990-91, the movie prequel “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” and the unforgettable 18 episode revisit to Tp by director/creator David Lynch, that played on the Showtime Network in 2017. But that’s not all for the Amazing Mr. MacLachlan. He is a prodigy of David Lynch, having made his debut in the director’s film version of “Dune” in 1984, followed by his godly turn in “Blue Velvet” (1986). He is also memorable in so many other roles, including Ray Manzarek in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors...

Barcelona— Germany-based Patra Spanou has taken international rights on “Trot,” the feature debut of Galician director Xacio Baño. World-premiering in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present, the competitive showcase often featuring new or rising talent, “Trot” will also participate in the upcoming San Sebastian Zabaltegi-Tabakalera sidebar competition.

Baño has previously participated at Locarno’s Pardi di domani with his shorts “Eco” (2015) and “Ser e voltar” (2014). He was selected by Variety as a top Spanish talent in 2015 and snagged a Slamdance nomination and a win at the Aspenshorts Fest with “Anacos” in 2013.

‘Trot’ is produced by Frida Films, with Lithuanian Ciobreliai Films co-producing. An independent arthouse production outfit based out of Santiago de Compostela, Frida Films productions include Adán Aliaga’s “The Ethernaut’s Wife” and Nely Reguera’s “Maria (and the Others),” best film in Miami’s HBO Ibero-American Competition.

Frida Films is also developing “Three,” the feature debut...

The Australian short film, “The Eleven O’Clock” provides the lone comedic entry among this year’s nominees at the Oscars for Best Live Action Short Film. This marks the first nomination for director Derin Seale and writer Josh Lawson.

The film opens on psychiatrist, Dr. Terry Phillips (Lawson), sitting in his office when a woman enters. She tells him her name is Linda and she is a temp for the normal receptionist who is out for the morning. He tells her that’s fine and asks her who his 11:00 appointment is with. She replies it’s a new patient who suffers from delusions of grandeur and believes himself to be a psychiatrist. Soon after, a man walks into the office saying he is Dr. Nathan Klein (Damon Herriman), apologizing for his lateness and that he is ready for their appointment.

Dr. Phillips and Dr. Klein go back and...

Since launching at last year’s Berlin film festival, the audacious one-take heist movie, Victoria, has everyone talking. How did its makers pull off something that a movie legend could not?

There’s a scene in Victoria in which the camera follows a girl from a dancefloor to the bar, to the street, to a corner shop, to a rooftop, to a car, to a bank robbery, to a shootout. You wait for the cut. But, throughout the German thriller’s two-hour running time, it never comes. In Victoria, a scene is the scene. All of it – the setup, the action, the climax – is one continuous take.

Shot by a solo cameraman across multiple locations on the streets of Berlin, Victoria is an amazing achievement. It’s being sold on a Usp that isn’t (Mike Figgis pulled off the first genuine one-take film with his sprawling split-screen experiment, Timecode,...

While not as much fun as it could be, or should be, Mark Netter's unusual 'surveillance footage thriller' Nightmare Code just about gets away with itself, largely thanks to an inventive, solidly executed stylistic choice. The film plays out within four split screens - the quartered frame recalling Mike Figgis's Timecode, though without the extended takes - presenting footage recorded from security cameras and webcams installed around an office, placed top of computers and embedded in laptops. We see nothing of the outside world, instead provided a sterile corporate environment from which the story unfolds. That this kind of gimmick actually adds something to the film, with near flawless editing and transitions, rather than acting as a distraction, feels like a small miracle. [Continued ...]...

This week, "Project Almanac" comes out in theaters nationwide. It's the tale of a group of teenagers who stumble upon a time machine and use it for their own personal gain. It harkens back to movies like "Back to the Future," with the potential hazards of messing with the space-time continuum revealed as the movie goes along. But the movie is filmed as though it is being recorded by one of the kids, in an aesthetic commonly referred to as "found footage." That's right, it's grainy and shaky and purposefully amateurish, and while the movie mostly works, it's still not enough to make you wish the movie was photographed and edited like an actual movie.

The found footage genre, exemplified by genre exercises like the "Paranormal Activity" series, has reached an impasse. Audiences are bored with it, and there's been barely any new spin on the aesthetic since 1999's groundbreaking "The Blair Witch Project.

We’re back with another round-up of news, this time focusing on the return of David Lynch’s seminal series, Twin Peaks, the upcoming Game of Thrones IMAX screenings, and when you can expect to see The Babadook haunt home media.

With Twin Peaks returning to television in nine all-new episodes in 2016 (25 years after it last aired), fans have been wondering which actors will come back. Series co-writer/director David Lynch and Showtime answered one big question by revealing that Kyle MacLachlan will once again step into the shoes of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. Lynch even tweeted a new photo of MacLachlan as Agent Cooper holding a “damn fine” cup of coffee. Here’s the official press release (via Collider) and photo (via David Lynch):

Press Release – “Golden Globe winner and Emmy® Award nominee Kyle MacLachlan will reprise his role as FBI Agent Dale Cooper when the critically-acclaimed,...

Peeping Tom: Vigalondo’s Virtual Voyeurism Thriller Too Wrapped Up in Tech

In the barest possible sense, Nacho Vigalondo’s latest film, Open Windows, can perhaps be described as Hitchcockian due to the fact that it concerns a voyeuristic male utilizing an opportunity to secretly observe a beautiful female a la a modernized Rear Window sort of set-up. Whether homage or coincidence, parallels with Hitchcock die out past Vigalondo’s log line and instead the film becomes yet another vehicle for an Elijah Wood protagonist to be manipulated in highly unlikely and increasingly silly fashion. Though Vigalondo has a rather inspired visual template for the unfolding of the narrative, much like the earlier release of technologically inspired Dutch film App, it’s a design that will only serve to hopelessly date the film which relays its tale via webcams in rudimentary form, making it also reminiscent of that multiple simultaneous perspective Mike Figgis film,...

The Digital Era: Real-time Films From 2000 To Today

40 years before, in 1960, lighter cameras enabled a cinéma vérité-flavored revolution in street realism. By 2000, new digital cameras suggested a whole new set of promises, including telling stories that would have been unimaginable within minimum budgets for features even ten years before. In 2000, film purists warned that digital still didn’t look as good as celluloid, but that didn’t stop at least three innovative filmmakers from boldly going where no filmmaker had gone before. Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000) was the first star-supported (Salma Hayek, Stellan Skarsgard, Holly Hunter, among many others) single-shot project since Rope, underlining that earlier film’s timelessness. If Run Lola Run could do one story three times, then Timecode would do three or four stories one time: the movie is four separate ninety-minute shots shown all at the same time, each in one quadrant of the screen. Where do you look?...

UK writer-turned-director Steven Knight ("Dirty Pretty Things," "Eastern Promises") introduced a screening of "Locke" (April 25) at his agency CAA Monday night. On the one hand, "Locke" is a daring film experiment (similar to Mike Figgis' triptych "Time Code"), as Knight wanted to film one performance in normal time from start to finish. Using three multiple cameras, inside and outside a BMW driving through the night on the M6, Knight and actor Tom Hardy ran through an intense sequence of bluetooth phone calls 16 times over 12 days. No other actor appears on screen--the voice actors, including Olivia Colman and Ruth Wilson, were sitting in a conference room as the calls rolled into Hardy's car. On the other, "Locke" is a tense, well-written and edited drama carried by Hardy's riveting, naturalistic performance. You can see that Hardy is really driving. As the movie unfolds, you start to figure out why the very stressed Ivan Locke,...

Odd List Ryan Lambie Simon Brew 28 Nov 2013 - 06:04

Our series of lists devoted to underappreciated films brings us to the year 2000, and another 25 overlooked gems...

The new millennium brought with it an eclectic range of hit films. Hong Kong action director John Woo brought us Mission: Impossible II, the most profitable film of the year at the box office. Ridley Scott enjoyed one of the biggest critical and financial successes of his career with Gladiator, while Robert Zemeckis created a memorable drama with Tom Hanks and a ball named Wilson in Cast Away.

From a comic book movie standpoint, 2000 was also a key year. X-Men not only established a successful film franchise which is still going, with X-Men: Days Of Future Past out next year, but also headed up a wave of big-budget Marvel adaptations which shows no sign of slowing down.

As ever, we've travelled far outside the...

There's a swagger about Mike Figgis's deconstructing film-within-a-film concerning a troubled screenwriter

Mike Figgis is one of the most creative figures in British cinema, and one of its shrewdest critics. He mastered the Hollywood system in the 1990s and then became a digital pioneer with his 2000 movie Timecode. Since then, he has been an experimentalist, and there is a Godardian swagger and challenge in his new film, a self-deconstructing movie-within-a-movie about illusions, reality and falsehood. It has some interesting ideas and funny moments, but, finally, it was just inert. Sebastian Koch plays Martin, a troubled screenwriter whose daughter Sarah (Rebecca Knight) is acting in his new film, playing a role that may be based on his wife who disappeared 15 years before. A violent crime upends his world and is investigated by Dci Bullock (Kenneth Cranham), a wannabe screenwriter who wants Martin's opinion on his script. It runs out of steam early on,...

Oscar-nominated director Mike Figgis argues that the defeatist attitude and outdated structure of Britain's movie industry is preventing film‑makers from flourishing on home soil

Way back in the 1980s, when I decided to try to move from the world of performance art into film-making, I wrote a treatment for a short film called The Side. The name comes from the spectacular street that leads down to the river Tyne. I submitted the treatment to the BFI and in due course got a letter from Peter Sainsbury (the then head of BFI) turning me down for assistance because the material was "visually interesting but lacked content".

Around this time I also applied to the National Film School to study cinema. After a fairly confrontational interview with Lord Puttnam and the great cinematographer Ossie Morris I was rejected. Undaunted, I carried on and eventually The Side became Stormy Monday, my first feature film.

Lost star Zuleikha Robinson has landed a guest role on The Mentalist. The English actress - most recently seen as Roya Hammad on Homeland - will play brilliant scientist Dr Sonia Kidd, TVLine reports. When one of her students is murdered, Kidd crosses paths with Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) and the Cbi team. Robinson previously appeared on HBO's Rome and X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen, while her film credits include 2000's Timecode and 2004's Hidalgo (more)...

"We the Party" has a poster that makes it look like a more urban entry in the popular "Step Up" franchise, but is hilariously tagged as being "From the Director of 'New Jack City,'" a movie that most of the cast and pretty much anyone they're targeting to watch the movie, have either forgotten about entirely or never seen because it's too fucking old. It is, however, quite evocative of "We the Party," a movie that tries to be edgier, more outrageous, and (oddly) more socially conscious than most teen movies, but ends up being just as tired and cliché (if not more so), combining familiar beats from every high school flick imaginable and shellacking them in the tired aesthetics of 1990s music videos.

The titular shindig in "We the Party" is one put on by Hendrix Sutton (Mandela Van Peebles – there are about a half-dozen credited Van...

The Carlisle-born film-maker delighted the crowd with some frank tales about how – and how not – to make it in Hollywood

On Saturday night at the Guardian's Open Weekend, film-maker Mike Figgis promised he was going to name names – and he duly did. Figgis gave a brilliant insight into the ups and downs of being a Hollywood director; in his case, more downs than ups. Figgis was born in Carlisle and grew up in Kenya (his father was a frustrated musician and DJ, his mother secretary to Ernest Hemingway, who may or may not have had a passion for her), and in the 1990s looked as if he could become one of Hollywood's top directors, with films such as Internal Affairs and Leaving Las Vegas. But, as he explained to a captivated audience, every time he got within sight of the pinnacle, he blew it.

The trouble is, Figgis said, he...

Catch up with the last seven days in the world of film

Read our 4-star Hunger Games review

The big story

With the John Carter fiasco rumbling on Hollywood was desperate for some good news, and it duly came in the slinky form of Jennifer Lawrence and Hunger Games. The set of novels by Suzanne Collins have been touted as the new Twilight and – to all astonishment – have been turned into a rather good film, if you believe Xan Brooks, our man at the first press preview. As the week wore on, it became clear that The Hunger Games was looking at a serious pile of cash when it would finally be released – perhaps even beating the first Twilight film's opening weekend mark of $69m in 2008. Fortunately, as is their way, the Guide had got in quickly and interviewed Lawrence last weekend – and she had little truck with the Twilight...

Stv Productions announced director Mike Figgis will direct the drama “Seconds of Pleasure” during the American Film Market event this weekend. In addition, Myriad Pictures acquired the worldwide distribution rights to the film outside of the United Kingdom. Figgis’ directorial filmography included films such as “Cold Creek Manor,” “Timecode,” and “Leaving Las Vegas.” The screenplay will be written by Neil Labute, which was based on a book of short stories published under the same title. The cast will include actors Matt Dillon, Julia Stiles, Brendan Fraser, Kristin Scott Thomas and Christina Hendrix. The film is about the intertwined stories of six different couples. “We immediately responded to Neil’s script, which is razor-sharp, so insightful and honest, about the real challenges and temptations of people face every day,” said Myriad Pictures CEO Kirk D’Amico to THR. “Mike Figgis is the perfect director to bring this script to life, especially with this extraordinary cast.

The big topic of conversation around the AfterElton employee break room this week — other than snicks stinking up the microwave with his damn tuna melts — was: "What is your favorite guilty pleasure movie?"

Some of the responses we heard were surprising, giving a disturbing glimpse into the twisted dark souls of some of our writers. Meanwhile, some responses (like, you know, mine) just stand as excellent movie recommendations. We thought we'd round up all the various answers in this new feature we're trying out called "AfterElton Trending Topics."

But we don't want to just hear from the Ae writers. As you might have noticed, most of them are blowhards. In the comments, we'd love to hear from our readers too. What is the biggest guilty pleasure in your DVD collection?

From the staff...

Ed Kennedy

Ok, so this is going to date me fairly precisely, but if I'm flipping through...

An Aardman Production For Sony Pictures Animation Martin Freeman, David Tennant, Imelda Staunton, Jeremy Piven, Salma Hayek, Brian Blessed, Brendan Gleeson, Russell Tovey, and Ashley Jensen Also On Board

Culver City, Calif. – Hugh Grant will voice the lead role alongside an all-star cast in The Pirates! Band Of Misfits, the new stop-motion, 3D, animated film produced by Aardman Animations for Sony Pictures Animation. The film, which will be distributed by Columbia Pictures, will be released March 30, 2012 in North America.

Hugh Grant, starring in his first animated role, is the luxuriantly bearded Pirate Captain – a boundlessly enthusiastic, if somewhat less-than-successful, terror of the High Seas. With a rag-tag crew at his side (Martin Freeman, Brendan Gleeson, Russell Tovey, and Ashley Jensen), and seemingly blind to the impossible odds stacked against him, the Captain has one dream: to beat his bitter rivals Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven) and Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek) to...

Mad Men star Christina Hendricks has boarded Seconds of Pleasure joining Brendan Fraser and Kristin Scott Thomas, alongside Julia Stiles and Matt Dillon.

Seconds of Pleasure has seen a bunch of changes and additions as it sets to go in front of cameras — the earlier attached Neil Labute is now replaced on the director’s chair with Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas). But it will still develop his screenplay which seems to be based on his book of short stories with the same name. Labute is also involved in producing the flick.

Seconds of Pleasure is situated mostly on an airplane and follows a series of sketches that connect the lives of the travelers. Seems kind of like Figgis’ experimental Timecode (2000). Hendricks’ character is a wedded woman who ends up getting caught doing something naughty by her husband. Brendan Fraser is signed on to be her spouse, and Julia Stiles,...

You know Mike Figgis. He’s that guy who directed Leaving Las Vegas and then, uh… some other stuff. I’m 90% certain Time Code was his next one, but then I must have stopped paying attention to him after that. Probably he did something important that’s slipping my mind and I’m really going to hear it in the comments. Regardless, he’s got a new movie on tap and he’s taking advantage of the Mad Men hiatus to have Christina Hendricks star in it. Whether she’s been running a 60s era ad agency in a parade of period costumes or grifting Captain Mal Reynolds and the crew of Serenity, I’ve absolutely loved everything that I’ve seen Christina Hendricks in, and I’m thrilled to see her get a big role in a feature. Whenever somebody writes a piece on Hendricks, it’s usually got something to do with her boom-booms and...

Oscar-nominated film-maker, writer and digital pioneer who makes cinema an accessible medium to all

Film-maker, musician, writer and digital pioneer – Mike Figgis is chimera-like. With the opening of Lucrezia Borgia at the English National Opera he can also add opera director to his list of accomplishments. His fascination with dark, complex characters makes Donizetti's degenerate Borgias an ideal subject for Figgis to tackle, although the audience may not agree with his approach. Then again, Figgis has never been one to follow the well-trodden path. While the big-bucks film studios have turned cinema into an exclusive club, the Oscar-nominated Figgis has gone out of his way to make it an accessible medium to all. Championing the cause of the aspiring amateur, his book Digital Filmmaking delivers a sensible tutorial on the disciplines required to produce a film – whatever the size of budget, crew or camera. It is up to the reader to supply the talent,...

Opera novice Mike Figgis is taking charge of Lucrezia Borgia at the Eno. Trouser parts and Renaissance porn were part of a steep learning curve

Mike Figgis is about to make his debut as an opera director at English National Opera. But his production of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia is hardly the fulfilment of a dream for the 62-year-old Oscar-nominated director. "I was never an opera-goer growing up. I was a jazz musician. I'd go and see Miles Davis. It would never cross my mind to go to the opera. My only preconceptions about opera were based on clips I had seen, to be honest." He smiles sheepishly beneath his mop of hair. "I only went to my first opera three or four years ago, when my girlfriend took me to the Met in New York."

Figgis is the latest in a long line of Eno's recruits from the worlds...

A graduate of Concordia’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Eduardo Lucatero is a Mexican-Canadian filmmaker who has worked on a variety of television and film projects in both countries. His first feature, 2007’s Corazón Marchito, is a romantic comedy made for and by cynics. It demonstrated Lucatero’s strengths as a writer who could mould a satisfying character-driven drama that balanced charm and warmth with pitch-black humour. His new film Preludio, is a deceptively simple full length single-take film that craftily distills Lucatero’s interest in character and realistic dialogue over formulaic plot devices. Both the story and the camera follow two unnamed strangers at a party over the course of a conversation with too many cigarettes, too much tequila, and one entirely inappropriate Cancer joke. The characters also become familiar to us as well, as Lucatero uses this experiment in eavesdropping to invite us to become his voyeuristic accomplices.

• Eno hopes to repeat Minghella success

• Company says 'It's our most ambitious season yet'

The man who defined Monty Python's visual language, and directed such films as Brazil, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is to try his hand at opera for the first time.

Terry Gilliam is to direct The Damnation of Faust at English National Opera next summer – where it is hoped that his production of Berlioz's masterpiece will not be beset by the problems that have harried the director in other contexts.

Heath Ledger died part way through the production of The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, while The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was abandoned after Jean Rochefort, the star, suffered a herniated disc and the set flooded.

John Berry, Eno's artistic director, acknowledged the risks for newcomers attempting to take on opera. "It can be like a car crash coming at you from every angle,...

I feel the need to respond to Steven Weber's post titled, "Art with a Capitol 'F'" with a short film I made a few weeks ago, "Break-Up Sex": Agreed, it's no "Wings" or, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" or even a "Time Code," but it was made with absolutely no money, a borrowed Dv camera, borrowed mics and three people. Within a couple weeks of putting it up on Youtube, almost 700 people have seen it. That may be an insignificant amount for some Youtube users or TV actors used to getting millions of viewers from mini-series's based on already classic films (Re: The Shining) but I mostly put the film up for friends and family to see and my mother can't watch it 700 times so I'm happy to report that others, without my asking, have watched as well....

Though he has spent the last few years performing under his own name and in the supergroup Monsters of Folk (which also includes M. Ward from She & Him and My Morning Jacket's Jim James), Conor Oberst first made his bones as the brain, voice and songwriting behind Bright Eyes. The native of Omaha, Nebraska, started recording albums when he was only 13 years old but saw his big crossover breakout come in 2002 with Lifted or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. He followed that up with what will probably go down as his most audacious project. On this day in 2005, Oberst released two albums under the Bright Eyes name. The first was a more traditional album called I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, while the other was an album of electronic music experiments called Digital Ash in a Digital Urn (one of the greatest album...

Every composer would like to have the services of a fully qualified score mixing engineer on every project. You would, wouldn't you? (Insert picture of smiling Score Engineer, like the one in my mirror.) As any specialist, he or she would bring a wealth of knowledge and experience that would make your life easier and your score sound better and more competitive.

But - - welcome to the real world - - I realize it doesn't always work out that way. For reasons of budget and expediency a composer is often called on to record, mix, and submit a finished score on his or her own. As each composer must own the computers and other technical equipment that make our modern music business possible, it's advantageous to know what to do when you need to, so that you can fend for yourself and compete.

For a dozen years I taught a class at UCLA Extension,...

Ao Scott "spoon-fed cinema" on the infantilization of the cinema. There's no solution in this piece, just despair. But it's hard to argue with the points raised -- the box office does prove that even adults prefer movies aimed at toddlers and their "Again!" refrain.

Roger Ebert is also exasperating by the dumbing down. Hey... might this have anything to do with GI Joe?

fourfour a 10 second review of GI Joe. Funny funny although I guarantee Channing has regular genitalia, having seen it.

Boy Culture Did you know that Channing Tatum was once a male stripper? Neither did I.

Edward Copeland commits heresy "a pox on all your awards shows"

Finally, if you've ever seen Mike Figgis's fascinating quartered-screen experiment Time Code (2000) you owe it to yourself to check out Nick and Tim's wordy, passionate, thorny, funny and appropriately confusing discussion for Nick's ongoing series Films of the 00s.

Digital cinematography has had an ever-shifting role as it’s edged its way into mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. Originally used as a viable solution to the economic hurdles of independent filmmaking, even the best digital cameras available in the late 1990s and early 2000s retained a grittiness and fly-by-the-pants amateur feel in movies like julien donkey-boy and Chuck & Buck (both 2000) that matched the means of production of no-budget filmmaking but looked far too unprofessional to be adapted to Hollywood. Well-known filmmakers then adapted the technology as a means of experimentation for new aesthetic or narrative approaches, allowing them to take more risks with a technology that allows for continuous takes or attack subject matter that may have been too risky for bigger budget 35mm filmmaking, like Mike Figgis’s Time Code (2000), Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000), or David Lynch’s find-the-film-as-you-make-it approach to Inland Empire (2006). By now, however, digital cinematography has become sophisticated enough to be embraced by the...

Mike Figgis’ (Internal Affairs, Leaving Las Vegas, Timecode) latest film was commissioned by Gumball 3000, the burgeoning ‘lifestyle and entertainment company’ behind the Gumball Rally. But don’t worry because as you’d expect from a 21st century Figgis work, this isn’t by any stretch a grooming promotional piece. Rather, it continues the director’s fascination with digital cinema (from 2000’s Timecode onwards) and the diverse possibilities the technology throws up; an exploratory film built around the Gumball event.

A trans-European, 3000 mile road trip for a bootful of assorted trustifarians and moneyed celebrities, The Gumball Rally has garnered its fair share of press coverage since its inception in 1999. When approached by Gumball 3000, Figgis has admitted being less than ecstatic at the prospect of a straight documentary on the rally. But when a second offer came in to simply make a film that in some way involved the rally, he decided...