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At the start of 2020, Courtney Barnett was looking forward to a year of open-ended songwriting, with just one proviso. “It’s important to remember to live and to experience and to have something real to write about,” she told Rolling Stone in an interview that January. “Not just to sit in a room and write an album for the sake of making an album.”

Barnett laughs when she’s reminded of that conversation now. “That’s funny,” the Australian singer-songwriter, 33, says on a call from her home in Melbourne. “Very...

A look at what's new on DVD today:

"The Films of Rita Hayworth"

Released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

A collection of five of the brunette bombshell's films -- the 1944 Gene Kelly musical "Cover Girl" and her most famous film "Gilda," as well as the 1945 musical "Tonight and Every Night," "Miss Sadie Thompson" and "Salome," which are making their first appearance on DVD -- with introductions by Martin Scorsese on "Tonight and Every Night," Baz Luhrmann on "Cover Girl" and Patricia Clarkson on "Miss Sadie Thompson," the original trailers for each of the films and a featurette with Scorsese and Luhrmann comparing notes on "Gilda."

"Angel"

Directed by François Ozon

Released by Mpi Home Video

It's been a long journey for French filmmaker Ozon's first fully-English film - he's already made three others since "Angel" premiered at Berlinale in 2007, but it boasts a bunch of big names including Michael Fassbender,...

"The Lightkeepers" is a dark horse candidate for awards season attention, offering up Richard Dreyfuss in his showiest lead performance since 1995's "Mr. Holland's Opus" and an offbeat marketing plan by a well-financed foreign sales company intent on making a splash in the U.S. marketplace.

Opening on Friday in Los Angeles for an Oscar-qualifying run, the performance-driven period drama written and directed by Daniel Adams also features strong performances by Blythe Danner, Tom Wisdom and Mamie Gummer (Meryl Streep's daughter) in an old-fashioned love story set on Cape Cod in 1912.

"Lightkeeprs" is the third platform release this year by New Films International, a Sherman Oaks-based foreign sales company founded by Nesim Hason that has output deals in Latin America, Japan, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The move into domestic distribution comes at a time it has gotten much harder to make presales without a U.S. release in place.

Nov 20, 2009

Very few films have lingered in the post-production pipeline as long as Turning Green, a dark comedy that was actually a runner-up for Project Greenlight and played in festivals way back in 2005. How could a film with intriguing actors like Timothy Hutton, Allesandro Nivola, and Colm Meaney lay on a shelf for so long? Could it really be that bad? No, it's not That bad. What's more likely is that it was simply forgotten. The coming-of-age story never comes together, wasting talented people in small roles, miscasting the lead, and ...Read more at MovieRetriever.com...

Actor Alessandro Nivola has something he'd like people to know: He's not British. Nor French, Italian, Irish, or Australian. As he told me last week, he'd forgive you for thinking otherwise, but in real life, Nivola's just a regular old Boston native who speaks with an utterly neutral voice.

Of course, Nivola himself would be the first to admit he's made things difficult for people. In his biggest roles, he's employed some sort of odd voice or accent (typically a British one, as in Laurel Canyon or Mansfield Park) and he shows off two more in theaters now: In the new film Turning Green, he's an Irish thug, and in Coco Before Chanel, he plays a Brit who speaks in fluent French throughout the picture. Do people in the industry ever forget that he's an American? "American?" laughed the affable actor. "When have people ever thought that about me?"...

2009 is about to end with a bang, though probably not the apocalyptic kind predicted in the long-awaited adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" or Chris Smith's terrifying doc "Collapse," though those will both be playing at your local arthouse. Instead, audiences will be able to enjoy a winter of wildly different indie film offerings to reflect the wildly different tastes of moviegoers as we leave one decade and move into another. (There are also many different ways to watch them, as you can tell from our Anywhere But a Movie Theater section.)

From November through January, there will be musicals ("Nine"), comedies (Broken Lizard's "The Slammin' Salmon") and stop-motion animated wonderments ("A Town Called Panic") to entertain and new films from Michael Haneke, Pedro Almodóvar, Richard Linklater, Terry Gilliam and Werner Herzog to ponder. And if new movies aren't necessarily doing the trick, you can always cozy...

Ireland has some jarring inconsistencies when it comes to morality. Drunkenness, gambling and violence are all tolerated by turning a blind eye, but try to sell a magazine containing pictures of naked women and watch your local town go nuts. (Sure, you could argue that it’s exactly the same here in the U.S., but isn’t it always easier to laugh at another culture?) In the upcoming feature film “Turning Green,” Donal Gallery stars in a breakout role as a young man who hates Ireland so much he’ll do whatever it takes to get out. Trapped in what he considers to be a sexless country full of Old Biddies and Holy Joes, young James spends his days in the 1970s being rebuffed by the local girls and fantasizing about consenting American ones. James, you see, has an ace up his sleeve. He was born in America and can’t wait to return.