News

Gazing into the crystal ball, Screen rounds up its Cannes predictions.

With the unveiling of Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection now exactly three weeks away buzz over the titles that Thierry Fremaux and his team will select for the 68th edition is hitting fever pitch.

Official teaser announcements have started to roll this week, led by the confirmation on Wednesday that George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road would premiere in an Out of Competition screening on May 14.

Earlier the week, Cannes unveiled its poster featuring Ingrid Bergman to mark the centenary of the late big screen’s birth and it was announced that Stig Bjorkman’s documentary Ingrid Bergman – In Her Own Words would show in Cannes Classics as part of the commemorations.

For the rest of the Official Selection, except perhaps the opening film which is traditionally revealed in advance, Cannes watchers will have to wait for the announcement press conference in Paris on April...

I know that many of you who read GeekTyrant are interested in becoming future filmmakers, which is awesome! It should come as no surprise to you that since I run a movie blog that I too would like to get into the business of making movies.

The Hollywood Reporter has come up with their list of 25 best film schools with basic details for each one. For those of you wanting to study the art of filmmaking, and wondering what the best schools for this are then this list should come in handy. Check out the full list below, and tell us what you think!

1. American Film Institute

Among the most selective film schools in America, AFI's Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies in Los Angeles offers a two-year conservatory program where students specialize in fields including directing, producing and writing, often coming to the institute after working in the...

The Jerzy Skolimowski retrospective currently touring the United States is re-introducing American audiences to one of the most free-spirited directors the movies have ever produced. His first features, made in Poland in his mid-twenties, presented an exuberant sensibility shaped by both jazz and poetry; more than 40 years old, they still feel more youthful than most contemporary films. Skolimowski’s fourth feature, Hands Up (1967), was too free-spirited for Communist Poland, as State authorities banned the movie and pressured Skolimowski to leave the country. Working as a nomadic director, he produced an unpredictable but often inspired run of films, though the frustrations of making movies led him increasingly to take solace in painting. At 73, Skolimowski seems to have reconciled the great dilemmas of his life: He returned to Poland in 2008, and he seems to have struck a balance between painting and filmmaking. Last week, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky and I called Skolimowski in Poland to discuss his two careers,...

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...

"Though Éric Rohmer's breakthrough film stateside was the lustrous black-and-white, winter-set My Night at Maud's (1969), the New Wave architect may be cinema's greatest chronicler of the summer vacation," suggests Melissa Anderson in the Voice. "Among the director's many holiday-set movies, Pauline at the Beach (1983) and A Summer's Tale (1996) explore both the languid pleasures and the romantic anguish of time off during the hottest season. Rohmer's 1986 masterpiece (being re-released with its original French title, which translates as 'The Green Ray'), Le Rayon Vert centers on those themes, too, but delivers something much richer: an absorbing, empathic portrait of a complex woman caught between her own obstinacy and melancholy."

"As Delphine, the lonely but defiant Paris secretary at the center of Le Rayon Vert, Marie Rivière creates an emotionally rich portrait of a young woman disappointed in love who transfers her energies into an anxious quest for the ideal summer vacation.

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,...

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.