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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A man goes to make a movie about a shark.

He decides to shoot on the ocean instead of a tank on a soundstage, to give it that extra sense of realism. Virtually everything that can go wrong does go wrong, including the fact that the main mechanical shark built by the special-effects team has a nagging tendency to either sink or simply not work. The crew nearly mutinies. The locals become hostile. The shoot goes over-schedule and over-budget. The consensus...

Exclusive: Veteran actor Richard Dreyfuss, best known for his Oscar-winning turn in The Goodbye Girl, has signed with Innovative Artists for representation.

Dreyfuss made his name starring in many of the most influential films of the New Hollywood period, including George Lucas’s pre-Star Wars, hangout pic American Graffiti alongside Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Other credits include The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and What About Bob?

Dreyfuss won the Best Actor Oscar in 1978 for his performance as Elliot Garfield in Herbert Ross’ popular romantic comedy The Goodbye Girl. At the time, Dreyfuss became the youngest man (age 30) to win an Oscar for Best Actor. That year Dreyfuss beat out Woody Allen, who was nominated for Manhattan, and John Travolta for Saturday Night Fever.

The film, written by Neil Simon, follows an unemployed dancer and her 10-year-old daughter who,...

Richard Dreyfuss has become one of the most iconic actors in Hollywood history. Despite not being the typical leading man type, he's starred in a string of classic films after coming to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s.

Related: Dustin Hoffman's 10 Best Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

Beginning in the theater, Dreyfuss soon moved into television and film, appearing in the classic movie The Graduate where he had only one line. His first leading role was the well-received film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which led to more leading roles in several movies that would be considered some of the greatest of all time. His work in cinema has left a legacy that won't soon be forgotten.

It’s time for genre lovers to converge on Montreal for one of the best film festivals, pound for pound, in North America: Fantasia International Film Festival. With over 130 features from all across the globe, their 23rd year of fun has something for everyone.

Twenty years after Fantasia debuted Ringu to North American audiences, director Hideo Nakata returns to the franchise’s iconic character for an Opening Night celebration (July 11) with his latest J-horror Sadako. Combine that with a Special Screening of Fox Searchlight’s Ready or Not (July 27) and Closing Night film Promare (August 1) for a trio of hotly-anticipated films spanning the entire three-week event.

Fill out the rest of your schedule with a stellar line-up including the Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg-starring Vivarium, the world premiere of Hirotaka Adachi’s Stare, an advance screening of Abner Pastoll’s A Good Woman Is Hard to Find, Gabriela Amaral...

Back in the 1980s, before I became a Variety “mugg” (as journalists were once known in our parlance here), I was an ink-stained wretch, aka an indie screenwriter with a pirate picture getting peddled to the buyers in the Cannes market. And before he became an Oscar best picture-winning producer (for Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” in 1987), Arnold Kopelson, who died Oct. 8 at his home in Beverly Hills at age 83, was already a Cannes market big shot, running his fast-growing international shingle Inter-Ocean Film Sales.

Established in the early ’70s, Kopelson’s firm was a two-person outfit perhaps better known as “Arnold and Anne,” as Kopelson and wife-to-be Anne Feinberg were, along with Dino De Laurentiis and the Salkinds (Ilya and father Alexander), pioneers of presales of North American films to independent distributors all over the world. One early success that helped catapult Inter-Ocean to the top ranks of sellers was...

As battle-scarred John Rambo, star and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone uses the post war traumas of real-life war veterans as fuel for a jingoistic revenge fantasy in the mode of Death Wish and Walking Tall. Efficiently directed by Ted Kotcheff, 1982’s First Blood is the quintessential Reagan era action film; the beleaguered Rambo takes up arms against a corrupt Washington state police department and essentially goes to war with his own government. Andrew Lazlo’s beautiful cinematography (utilizing the lush landscapes of British Columbia) recalls Vilmos Zsigmond’s work on The Deer Hunter and Jerry Goldsmith’s thoughtful score conveys an appropriately manly but melancholy mood.

The post First Blood appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

The York Theatre Company, dedicated to the development of new musicals and the preservation of musical gems from the past, as part of its acclaimed Developmental Reading Series, will present the staged reading of the new musical The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, with book and lyrics by David Spencer The Fabulist, music Alan Menken Little Shop of Horrors, and based on the novel by Mordecai Richler, for two performances only Monday, December 11 at 200 p.m. and 700 p.m. at The York Theatre Company at Saint Peter's 619 Lexington Avenue, entrance on East 54th Street, just east of Lexington Avenue.

"I always knew this was what I was gonna do," says the film and television actor Richard Dreyfuss as we sit down to record an episode of the 'Awards Chatter' podcast. The 68-year-old made his name with a string of terrific performances in great films of the '70s: George Lucas' American Graffiti (1973), Ted Kotcheff's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Herbert Ross' The Goodbye Girl (1977). But the rest of his life and career — leading up to his most recent and acclaimed portrayal of

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Most filmmakers are lucky if they can master one genre in their lifetime, but over the course of a sixty-year career Ted Kotcheff has conquered several. He helmed a grimly funny suspense classic (Wake in Fright); a literate, witty Gregory Peck Western (Billy Two-Hats); fast and funny comedies (Fun with Dick and Jane, Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe); and dramedies where the laughs coexist with unsettling insights into the dark side of the human condition (North Dallas Forty, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). All of his films are characterized by a vibrant pictorial sense – no one […]...

The world premiere production of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz The Musical, based on the novel by Mordecai Richler, with book and lyrics by David Spencer and an original music by eight-time Oscar winning composer Alan Menken, is in the process of rehearsals for the recent production, and BroadwayWorld was on the scene to get an exclusive first look. Check it out below...

For Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award winner Alan Menken - his musical based on the book and film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is what he calls 'a passion project, definitely.' Menken's version of Duddy Kravitz as a musical, which he co-wrote with David Spencer, was originally produced in the 1980's in Philadelphia. 'We did it in Philadelphia and we had a provision in the contract where we had to have a first class production which Philadelphian wasn't in order for the rights to merge, and when that didn't happen nobody could do license this musical' Menken told me from inside the Segal Centre in Montreal while on break from rehearsals.

The Segal Centre will close its blockbuster 2014-2015 Theatre Season with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz The Musical, a world premiere musical adaptation ofMordecai Richler's novel and the feature film by the same name, from June 7-28, 2015. This new production boasts an original musical score byAlan Menken, the legendary Oscar and Tony winning composer of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, with book and lyrics by acclaimed lyricist-librettistDavid Spencerand direction by American theatre veteranAustin Pendleton. Presented with the generous support of Rbc and Muse Entertainment. Check out highlights below...

The Segal Centre closes its blockbuster 2014-2015 Theatre Season with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz The Musical, a world premiere musical adaptation of Mordecai Richler's novel and the feature film by the same name, through July 12, 2015. This new production boasts an original musical score by Alan Menken, the legendary Oscar and Tony winning composer of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, with book and lyrics by acclaimed lyricist-librettist David Spencer and direction by American theatre veteran Austin Pendleton. Presented with the generous support of Rbc and Muse Entertainment.The poignant Montreal coming of age story of ambitious scoundrel Duddy Kravitz, Canadian author Mordecai Richler's beloved anti-hero, will premiere as a brand new musical in the city where the story takes place.Let's see what the critcs had to say...

All week long our writers will debate: Which was the greatest film year of the past half century.  Click here for a complete list of our essays. I was one of the first to select years for this particular exercise, which probably allowed me to select the correct year. The answer is, of course, 1974 and all other answers are wrong. No matter what your criteria happens to be, 1974 is going to come out on top. Again, this is not ambiguous or open to debate. We have to start, of course, with the best of the best. "Chinatown" is one of the greatest movies ever made. You can't structure a thriller better than Robert Towne and Roman Polanski do, nor shoot a Los Angeles movie better than John Alonzo has done. Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway give the best performances of their careers, which is no small achievement. If you ask...

The Bitter Ash

A rather precious thing happened in Montreal in the mid 1970s. Canadian cinema had been dominated by the National Film Board since its formation in 1940, and the generally-perceived character of Canadian film was all educational documentary, and not a lot of fun. Directors such as Claude Jutra, Don Owen, and Gilles Groulx struck off on their own to make the first Canadian new wave fiction films (A tout prendre [1963], Nobody Waved Goodbye, and Le chat dans le sac [both 1964] respectively), on the back of independents like Sydney J. Furie’s groundbreaking A Dangerous Age (1959) and Larry Kent’s student feature The Bitter Ash (1963), but for all their youthful, semi-bohemian trappings, these were still quite po-faced affairs. Then came the “genial loser” films of the 70s, led by Owen’s Goin’ Down The Road (1970), and others such as The Rowdyman (Peter Carter, 1972) and Paperback Hero (Peter Pearson, 1973), for the...

‘Tucker And Dale vs. Evil’ Film Poster

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Written by Eli Craig and Morgan Jurgenson

Directed by Eli Craig

Canada, 2010

Over the years, Canadian film and television has gotten a reputation for being something that leaves a lot to be desired. It’s often depicted as low budget productions with mediocre acting, and a film grain to make you cringe. Except more and more, outstanding Canadian cinema is making headlines in Hollywood for being cutting edge, artistic, meaningful, not to mention downright funny. From the classic Quebec film C.R.A.Z.Y., the franco-anglo production Bon Cop Bad Cop to The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Canadian films are more than just bad film stereotypes; they’re innovative, imaginative, and a joy to watch.

And that goes for their genre cinema too.

This week in the world of Canadian film, for Sound on Sight’s 31 days of Horror,...

Peter Bart and Mike Fleming Jr. worked together for two decades at Daily Variety. In this occasional column, two old friends get together and grind their axes, mostly on the movie business.

Fleming: I found it interesting that audiences turned up their noses at A Walk Among The Tombstones, a thriller that had what should have been all you need for a hit — Liam Neeson on a one-sheet, holding a gun. The filmmaker Scott Frank made a throwback to the ’70s films he grew up loving. The title didn’t help: didn’t it evoke memories of being dragged to the cemetery to pay posthumous respects to Grandpa? In my view, it got maligned unfairly by critic squeamishness over grisly scenes that weren’t there. Kenny Turan called it Eli Roth torture porn, though Roth told me last week the critic told him he’d never actually watched a Roth film.

Today on Trailers from Hell, Alan Spencer talks 1982 thriller "First Blood," starring Sylvester Stallone as the legendary Rambo. As battle scarred John Rambo, star and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone uses the post war traumas of real-life war veterans as fuel for a jingoistic revenge fantasy in the mode of "Death Wish" and "Walking Tall." Efficiently directed by Ted Kotcheff ("The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz," "North Dallas Forty"), 1982's "First Blood" is the quintessential Reagan era action film; the beleaguered Rambo takes up arms against a corrupt Washington state police department and essentially goes to war with his own government. Andrew Lazlo’s ("Southern Comfort," "Innerspace") beautiful cinematography (utilizing the lush landscapes of British Columbia) recalls Vilmos Zsigmond’s work on "The Deer Hunter" and Jerry Goldsmith’s thoughtful score conveys an...

As battle scarred John Rambo, star and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone uses the post war traumas of real-life war veterans as fuel for a jingoistic revenge fantasy in the mode of Death Wish and Walking Tall. Efficiently directed by Ted Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, North Dallas Forty), 1982's First Blood is the quintessential Reagan era action film; the beleaguered Rambo takes up arms against a corrupt Washington state police department and essentially goes to war with his own government. Andrew Lazlo's (Southern Comfort, Innerspace) beautiful cinematography (utilizing the lush landscapes of British Columbia) recalls Vilmos Zsigmond's work on The Deer Hunter and Jerry Goldsmith's thoughtful score conveys an appropriately manly but melancholy mood.

The post First Blood appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by David Spencer, is getting a second chance at a fully mounted production in Montreal this summer after its first attempt at a Broadway run in 1987. The musical, based on the Mordecai Richtler film and novel by the same name, is set to receive a full production at the Segal Centre in Montreal from today, June 7-28, 2015.

Richard Dreyfuss hasn't given many interviews over the last few years. Perhaps that's because the legendary 66-year-old actor, who is best known for a string of instant-classics from the 1970s -- American Graffiti (1973), The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and The Goodbye Girl (1977) -- has, of late, been primarily focused on things other than acting, including and especially his nonprofit organization The Dreyfuss Initiative, which promotes civic education. But last week, Dreyfuss, who now lives in San Diego, came back to Hollywood to revisit his glory days at

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The name director Ted Kotcheff may not be as instantly recognisable as some of his filmmaker contemporaries, but a fertile creative period during the 70s and 80s saw him craft a number of well-received films across a variety of genres – The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (which launched the career of a young, pre-Jaws Richard Dreyfuss), the original Fun with Dick and Jane, North Dallas Forty, Switching Channels and Weekend at Bernie’s.

Arguably, he’s best known for bringing the iconic character of John Rambo into the world with the 1982 ‘Nam-scarred survivalist classic First Blood, but another underappreciated film from his CV is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. 1971’s Wake in Fright was an early addition to the Australian New Wave cinema movement, and remains a vivid and disturbing depiction of the country’s hard-drinking, fiercely masculine subculture of that era. We talked to Kotcheff earlier this month...

The star of Jaws and Close Encounters made another early film, but it never got the credit it was due. Its rerelease reminds us that the young actor really had something special

At 65, with the big hits well behind him and the star retinue long since dissipated, Richard Dreyfuss still burns with the righteous fire of the Hollywood player. He fixes me with a beady eye and says: "Acting is an ennobling experience and if it's something that you're capable of, you're lucky. I enjoyed and am proud of everything I ever did – except maybe two or three films whose names you'll never get from me. I am proud of my life and proud of my body of work."

These days, Dreyfuss cuts a very different figure from the bundle of nervous energy that made him a massive star in the early 70s, and one of the key faces of...

This revival of the 1974 adaptation of Mordecai Richler's novel proved a wonderful shop-window for the young Richard Dreyfuss

Just a year shy of its 40th anniversary, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz has been proudly spruced up and reissued; an act of reclamation, in some level, for a film that back in the early 70s, was one of the first Canadian features to make an international impact. Adapted from Mordecai Richler's 1959 novel set in a Jewish area of Montreal about a bustling young man furiously angling to get ahead – the missing link, if you will, between Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run and Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus – Duddy Kravitz is an affectionate picaresque detailing the push-pull impact of the new world on émigrés from old Europe. Clan loyalty contends with ruthless self-advancement; expediency with tenderness; ambition with gullibility.

The film also provided a tremendous showcase for a mid-20s Richard Dreyfuss,...

A still from “Charulata”

Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (The Lonely Wife) is one among the twenty feature films to be presented at Cannes Classics, as part of the Official Selection.

Based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore about a lonely housewife, the film features Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee and Shailen Mukherjee. It won Satyajit Ray a Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin international film festival in 1965.

Cannes Classics was created in 2004 to present old films and masterpieces from cinematographic history that have been carefully restored. It is also a way to pay tribute to the essential work being down by copyrightholders, film libraries, production companies and national archives throughout the world.

This year’s programme of Cannes Classics is made up of twenty feature-length films and three documentaries.

Restored Prints

Borom Sarret (1963, 20’) by Ousmane Sembène

Charulata (Charluta: The Lonely Wife) (1964, 1:57) by Satyajit Ray

Cleopatra (1963, 4:03) by Joseph L. Mankiewicz...

The 2013 Cannes Film Festival lineup continues to grow, today with the announcement of the films playing in the Cannes Classics selection as well as the titles playing on the beach at night as part of the Cinema de la Plage selection. It was already announced Kim Novak would be in attendance to present the restored version of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, but the restorations that will be screening don't end there. In addition to Vertigo a restored print of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra will screen along with restorations of Billy Wilder's Fedora, Yasujir? Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon, Hal Ashby's The Last Detail starring Jack Nicholson and a 3-D conversion of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. Additional notable names include films from Alain Resnais, Marco Ferreri, Chris Marker and Rene Clement. In addition to those titles a special presentation of Jean Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete...

Director Ted Kotcheff Talks Wake in Fright, fully-restored and on Blu-ray now!

Alongside Mad Max and Walkabout, Wake in Fright is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal films in the development of modern Australian cinema. Directed by Ted Kotcheff and starring Donald Pleasence, this thriller tells the nightmarish story of a schoolteacher's (Gary Bond) descent into personal demoralization at the hands of drunken, deranged derelicts while stranded in a small town in outback Australia. Believed to be lost for decades and virtually unseen in America until now, Wake in Fright returns fully-restored in stunning HD in what the New York Observer says "may be the greatest Australian film ever made."

Wake in Fright is now available on Blu-ray and DVD. To celebrate this home release, we caught up with director Ted Kotcheff to chat about the film's revival and its near destruction. Ted is a luminary in the field of action cinema,...

Drafthouse Films announced that they will be bringing 1971′s Wake in Fright to Blu-ray and DVD in January. Continue reading for the official release details and cover art:

A schoolteacher gets waylaid in the Australian outback and takes a journey into the heart of darkness in Wake In Fright, a revered and groundbreaking thriller that for 40 years lived only in the memory of its initial viewers. But following its miraculous recovery and restoration, the “lost” film made a triumphant return to screens nationwide this fall. Now it will make its home entertainment debut when Drafthouse Films releases it on high-definition Blu-ray and DVD on January 15, 2013.

Alongside Mad Max and Walkabout, Wake In Fright is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal films of modern Australian cinema. Author Neil Rattigan, in his book about the New Australian Cinema, Images of Australia, called it “a cinematic trip into hell. … No other Australian...

A schoolteacher gets waylaid in the Australian outback and takes a journey into the heart of darkness in Wake in Fright, a revered and groundbreaking thriller that for 40 years lived only in the memory of its initial viewers. But following its miraculous recovery and restoration, the "lost" film made a triumphant return to screens nationwide this fall. Now it will make its home entertainment debut when Drafthouse Films releases it on high-definition Blu-ray and DVD on January 15, 2013.

Alongside Mad Max and Walkabout, Wake in Fright is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal films of modern Australian cinema. Author Neil Rattigan, in his book about the New Australian Cinema, Images of Australia, called it "a cinematic trip into hell. ... No other Australian film offers such a savage indictment of a great number of cherished cultural perceptions."

Directed by Ted Kotcheff (First Blood, North Dallas Forty, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz...

Ted Kotcheff's once lost award-winning film Wake in Fright is getting set to make its long awaited arrival onto DVD and Blu-ray, and believe me, horror fans; this is one trip to the Outback you're really gonna want to take!

From the Press Release

A schoolteacher gets waylaid in the Australian Outback and takes a journey into the heart of darkness in Wake In Fright, a revered and groundbreaking thriller that for 40 years lived only in the memory of its initial viewers. But following its miraculous recovery and restoration, the "lost" film made a triumphant return to screens nationwide this fall. Now it will make its home entertainment debut when Drafthouse Films releases it on high-definition Blu-ray and DVD on January 15, 2013.

Alongside Mad Max and Walkabout, Wake In Fright is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal films of modern Australian cinema. Author Neil Rattigan, in his book about the New Australian Cinema,...

by Steve Dollar

Redeemed from a Pittsburgh warehouse days before it was to be incinerated, the negatives of Ted Kotcheff's 1971 beer-soaked Outback misadventure Wake in Fright were painstakingly restored in 2009, marking the return of a long-lost classic. A bare-knuckled saga of madness and mayhem in a land without women but lots of kangaroos, the film details the humiliating transformation of uptight, city-slicker schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond) when his holiday trip home from the boondocks gets sidetracked during a stopover in "The Yabba"–a frontier town where, after losing all his money in a frenzied gambling game called "Two Up," he falls in with a crew of local rowdies, including an amazing Donald Pleasance as an alcoholic doctor given to existential pronouncements and bouts of sodomy. Admirers of the movie, whose number include the rocker Nick Cave and director Martin Scorsese, consider it the great lost Australian film, even...

Actor Raw Leiba has had discussions with Marvel about the possibility of playing strongman hero Luke Cage or Black Panther archnemesis Erik Killmonger.

Marvel hired a writer for a Black Panther movie in January and had at one time been developing a Luke Cage feature.

The actor, who appears in the upcoming Conan the Barbarian reboot, had previously revealed he was keen to be considered for either of those potential adaptations and has now made his interest official.

As the picture above shows, Leiba (on the right) and his manager Charlie Wright visited the entertainment giant's offices. Sources say discussions included Luke Cage as well as the role of Erik Killmonger (see image below), a villain from the Black Panther comics.

Leiba has also become a producer on Dream Destinations, a documentary of the life and works of Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, whose credits include 1982's First Blood, the first in the Rambo franchise.

The producer of Barney's Version, Robert Lantos, chats to us about the film, about getting small budget movies made, and the mighty Due South...

This interview starts with me being absolutely gushing about Barney's Version, with as close to fawning adoration as you can get over a very quiet phone line to North America. Don't think this is me overcompensating, though, or fulfilling my end of a deal. I had to return a screener disc last week, leaving me empty and bereft of a repeat viewing.

No, I am true to my word. Barney's Version is every bit as good as my opening salvo suggests. Better, even. But I'm trying to temper expectations. Play it down a little bit, all of which means that talking to the film's producer, the prolific Robert Lantos, is a very nice thing, indeed.

Lantos has been making films for over thirty years, a pioneer...

Mordecai Richler, the Canadian novelist who died 10 years ago at the age of 70, worked for many years in Britain writing screenplays and contributing to our literary life. He wrote a series of hilarious, partly autobiographical novels about Montreal's Jewish community, two of which – The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Joshua Then and Now – he adapted for the cinema. His books are quite close to those of the Canadian-born Saul Bellow, though funnier and less self-regarding; the last one, the characteristically sprawling Barney's Version, has now been filmed with a wonderful central performance from Paul Giamatti.

He plays Barney Panofsky (Richler probably borrowed the surname from Erwin Panofsky, the art historian who pioneered the study of iconography), a Montreal entrepreneur who starts out in the 1970s supporting his bohemian friends in Rome as a dealer in olive oil before returning home to work as a Jewish fundraiser and the producer of...

Don't let Hollywood's sugary adaptation put you off reading Mordecai Richler's acid novel, Barney's Version

From behind his Coke-bottle glasses, the bookseller on the Charing Cross Road focused his magnified eyeballs as narrowly as he was able. "Mordecai Richler?" he said, releasing a frisson of fine dust. "Now there's a name from the past."

For those of us to whom the ghost of Canada's greatest satirical writer remains a biting presence, this was not the most reassuring of statements – especially issuing from a bookseller who himself gave the appearance of having been not so much born as unearthed in some archaeological dig. But such was Mordecai Richler's currency when I checked recently in London – where he lived for two decades and about which he often wrote, largely from the expat's point of view. To wit: none of the used bookshops on the Charing Cross Road carried any of Richler's 10 novels.

Paul Giamatti is one of those actors whose presence in a movie generally validates it, and Barney’s Version is no exception. He manages to make a central character with few—if any—admirable traits not only bearable but downright compelling. And if this Barney strays from the way Mordecai Richler painted him in his first-person novel, he still justifies his existence in this entertaining film. No one who is familiar with Richler’s writings—or the wonderful 1974 film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which starred Richard Dreyfuss—should be shocked to learn that the protagonist of this tall tale is a Canadian Jew. Barney…...

Ten years after Mordecai Richler's death, Sian Griffiths goes on a literary crawl of the novelist's old neighbourhood as well as some of his downtown drinking haunts

Nearly 10 years after his death, there is again great interest in the award-winning author Mordecai Richler and his vision of Montreal. A new Golden Globe-nominated film based on his book Barney's Version, starring Paul Giamatti and Minnie Driver, is being released in the UK at the end of this month. In Montreal, there is a movement to commemorate Richler by naming a street or place after him - which is meeting with strong resistance from Quebec nationalists who still resent how he poked fun at their cause and what he saw as their draconian language laws, especially in his book Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country.

But Richler will always be remembered for using his biting wit and vivid...

Paul Giamatti's monumental performance as a cantankerous, self-destructive TV producer anchors this epic tale of a man and his three wives in a production situated in Rome and Montreal. The film is based on a largely narrative, fictitious memoir of Barney Panofsky penned by the late Mordecai Richler, to whom the film is dedicated. "Barney's Version," like Richler's "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (made into a movie by Ted Kotcheff), is along similar lines: the advice given by a father to son, which, in the case of "Duddy Kravitz" can be summed up as "a man without land is nothing." The current story finds the title character (my theory) embodying a sense of inferiority as Jewish man who believes he cannot "fit in" to the overwhelmingly Christian Quebec and Canada as a whole, striving to overcome his fears by pushing himself-not so much for money as for the woman of his dreams.

Mordecai Richler was among Canada's most prolific writers, a gifted man with a knack for creating eccentric characters he made us care about despite their many flaws. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1974 screenplay adaptation of his most celebrated novel, “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” in which a young Richard Dreyfuss gave an astonishing performance as the scheming, vicious Duddy, told "a man without land is nothing" and going after that land with an obsession that is pathological.

This story probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has followed actor Richard Dreyfuss' storied career over the years. The actor, who will forever be immortalized for his work in such legendary films as American Graffiti, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, has revealed to Hollywood News that the only reason he made Piranha 3D was because he needed…wait for it…"to get money."

Not that the cause wasn't noble, mind you. Despite Dreyfuss' rather outlandish political claims from time to time, the actor has been working on initiatives to get America back on its feet, and one of the ways he wants to do this is to teach kids about the originating values and principles that led the country to rise to prominence in the first place. This civics Initiative led him to say yes to Bob Weinstein and accept what,...

I always try to find at least one film at Toronto that's way off the beaten track. I rarely stray further afield than I did Tuesday night, when I found myself watching "Wake in Fright," a film made in Australia in 1971 and almost lost forever. It's not dated. It is powerful, genuinely shocking, and rather amazing. It comes billed as a "horror film," and contains a great deal of horror, but all of the horror is human and brutally realistic.

Donald Pleasence in "Wake in Fright"

The story involves a young school teacher in the middle of the desolate wilderness of the Outback. The opening overhead shot shows a shabby building beside a railroad track, the camera pans 360 degrees and finds only the distant horizon. and then returns to find a second building on the other side of the tracks. One building is the school. The other is the hotel.

Dustin Hoffman will star alongside Paul Giamatti in Barney’s Version, an adaptation of the book of the same name by Mordecai Richler.Hoffman will play the father of Giamatti’s title character, Barney Panofsky, a TV producer whose colourful life story, including three marriages and a position as prime suspect in the murder of his best friend, is told in flashback.Intriguingly, Duddy Kravitz – a character featured by Richler in a previous book, The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz – features briefly in Barney’s Version. It would be quietly beautiful if director Richard J. Lewis, a writer/director on C.S.I. Crime Scene Investigation, could persuade Richard Dreyfuss, who played the role in the 1974 film version, to fill Duddy’s shoes once more.Filming is scheduled to start in Rome in August on a film that, if nothing else, should be well-acted.