Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraín on How Opera Being ‘Beyond a Description’ Inspired Their Major Contender ‘Maria’ https://t.co/KLrkIhNZcV

— IndieWire (@IndieWire) September 3, 2024

Telluride: The star and filmmaker behind one of the festival season's instant hits walks IndieWire through their meticulous process, from real singing to even more real emotion.

By Anne Thompson
September 2, 2024 9:24 pm

Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraín had been wanting to work together for a long time when “Maria” came up. The filmmaker got his star interested in the role before he wrote the script (with her firmly in mind). The film, the third in his Great Woman trilogy (“Jackie,” “Spencer”) debuted to solid reviews in Venice (where Netflix picked it up) and Telluride and could return the Oscar-winning Jolie to the Best Actress race (she won Best Supporting Actress for “Girl, Interrupted” and received the honorary Jean Hersholt award).

In the film, plays the Greek opera diva in her last days in 1977 Paris, when she was losing her voice and taking strong drug cocktails that gave her hallucinations. She wanders through Paris in one fabulous outfit after another talking to imaginary journalist Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) about many of her past lives, which we see in black-and-white flashback.

The movie starts off with Callas in black-and-white close-up singing “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s opera “Otello.” She’s clearly singing, as her face muscles and breathing demonstrate. Ahead, the pair walk IndieWire through the preparation and production of an operatic film, in both sound and vision.

Anne Thompson: What was your reaction when you first saw the script?

Angelina Jolie: We met and talked about “Maria,” and then listened to music a lot. When the script came in, there was so much about it I loved. We talked even further, and we were discussing the character together. So it was a long process.

When I look at those luminous close-ups of you as Callas, I feel so much pain. What is her anguish, her unhappiness?

Jolie: There’s a beautiful thing about discovering, really listening to opera, where it’s a feeling that’s beyond a description, right? It’s such a complete feeling of being so open and human, and the totality of so much of the tragedies that she lived or played or felt or performed. Most people carry a great deal of pain. And so much of her art was the exploration of depth of emotion that she was able to connect to because she carried quite a lot. So I would never pretend to understand her completely, but I’m not sure it was an unhappiness as much as it was a relationship to deeply feeling life and tragedy.

Pablo Larraín: What you felt on those close-ups that you described as pain? Probably what drives you to think that is the music that you hear. If the music would have been different, wouldn’t that make you feel different too? The music of Callas is so charged with deep, deep emotions that not aren’t necessarily sad, but often it creates a layer where it’s unsettling, but very beautiful. It’s very moving, and it transports you into a space of transcendence.

Jolie: I’m 49. I do feel like an older woman now and I embrace that. When I was younger, there were certain pieces of music and certain sounds that matched what I was feeling: I was falling in love, or I was curious about this, or whatever I was going through. There is nothing that meets what you’re feeling like opera. [Some pieces] are so beautiful, so full of hope and so full of yearning. Opera is bigger. It is bigger than we allow ourselves to feel in every moment.

Did you do a deep dive into learning about opera, or were you already well-versed?

Jolie: I was not. I grew up in America. In other countries, they understand how essential and important it is, and it’s much more a part of the culture, but not where I was raised [Los Angeles]. I had been introduced to [Callas] but it was a complete discovery of this new art form, to come in and transform my life and teach me all of the different operas. I hope that most people however they relate to the film go into a discovery and they let themselves feel it and they try to sing it. If I can do it…

How did you both prepare for Angie to sing opera on-screen?

Larraín: Besides the technicality and the process that she went through, probably the best way to approach the character was to get into her music. I read eight biographies and I heard all kind of stories. I saw every single documentary that’s around. But it’s the music that lets you in and makes it so different. It was so important to open the film with “Ave Maria.” I said to her: “Let’s just kill the ghost in frame one. We are going to open with a close-up of you singing this piece of music.” And she was bold and said, “I love it.” OK!

Jolie: I had six months to go. So I thought, “we got plenty of time.” I was so terribly nervous that day. I was terrified.

Larraín: .I’ve been operating the camera lately in the movies that I do. Now no one else touches the camera, I don’t do the Steadicam, but everything else, like handheld or whatever. So we were very close, yeah, sometimes during the place of the performance.

It’s 35 millimeter?

Larraín: Yes.

Were you recording in a studio?

Larraín: She had different trainers. The first one was posture, breathing and accent, being able to properly sing mostly in Italian. And the second is the singing itself. That is about pitch. If we just play a song from a pop music say from Madonna, we could all maybe sing it out loud and be quite decent. You can’t do that with opera. No. You can’t follow the melody because of the pitch. So you have to follow the structure of the music and get there. John Warhurst, who is a musician and an engineer, has developed a way to work. He did it with Rami Malik, and now the new Michael Jackson movie, and Bob Marley and so on. He had never done it with opera before, so it was new for all of us. Angie had to wear an earpiece on the set and sing it out loud. And there was no other sound in there but her voice.

[Winces.]

Jolie: Exactly how I felt.

Larraín: So why do we do that? So we capture that sound. We not only have her voice, but we have breathing, every sound that comes out of Angie’s physicality is captured in the mix. So sometimes you hear most of it is Callas, as it should be in a movie about Maria Callas, when she’s singing well, right? And then in the present of the film, there’s more of Angie. Sometimes it’s 5 percent, sometimes 50, sometimes 70.

How do you sing badly?

Jolie: Callas not at her best is still better than everybody, the rest of the world.

Larraín: Because we do have some pieces of her own singing. A singer that is “losing her voice” is someone that cannot reach certain sort of notes anymore, and projection.

Did you have fun with the costumes by Massimo Cantini Parrini?

Jolie: I loved the costumes. Of course, they transform you. In my mind the Maria of the moment is when we were meeting her, the woman with the Greek features and the hair, who’s alone with her glasses and her life and her faith and her fragility. And so that [nubby white] robe actually was first for me, because it anchors the present. It was interesting being an actress, playing an actress, performing a role, because it felt like me and her were then performing a third character, which I’d never done.

Was she was always performing? Even with her own house team, she’s pretending, she’s lying.

Jolie: When she was in public, she was performing, certainly.

Larraín: She’s playing. It’s a game, of emotions, and it’s a game of relationships among them.

And you’re also monitoring Callas’ drug intake, because it’s affecting how she behaves? She’s on quaaludes and steroids.

Jolie: Yeah. The way that Steven Knight and Pablo handled that in the script, if you look closely at this film, there are many brave, unusual moves in the writing that could have been captured the wrong way. The drugs were handled in a unique way, because it was about what they were doing to her, what it was recalling, what it was opening, and why that was relevant.

The character Mandrax gives her the ability to talk and recall.

Jolie: And it brings her back to different operas. It brings her back to her mother. It makes her alone with herself in a way, as certain things do. It puts her in a slightly different place where she’s trapped inside so much of the past. It’s like a haunting.

How documented is her past? Did her mother make her sing and also sleep with the Nazi soldiers?

Larraín: Among all the biographies, 70 percent of things are in common, they agree. And there’s a fragment of the different visions, different documentations that lends to different facts.

Did she talk about it?

Larraín: Not directly. She was oblique in certain letters that she wrote, but there’s enough documentation to think that that was possible. What happened in Greece back then, we wanted to be in a place of ambiguity. You could feel that that actually happened. Or some people don’t.

Jolie: We know she was under occupation. We know that she sang and her mother pushed her to sing for them.

Pablo Larrain: She was dating soldiers. That is something she said.

Anne Thompson: Pablo, is this the end of your famous women trilogy. It said, ‘final.’ Nothing’s ever final, right?

Larraín: It’s so true. I never planned to do three movies about these enormous figures of the second half of the 20th century. It accidentally happened.

I love when Callas disses President Kennedy.

Jolie: I love that scene too. It’s so good. You could tell I enjoyed performing it.

Larraín: That group [Aristotle Onassis, Jackie and John Kennedy, Maria Callas], it is quite extraordinary, the overlap. They were together that night. The famous scene when Marilyn Monroe sings to Kennedy, before that the same night on the same stage, Maria Callas sang “Carmen” to Kennedy in Madison Square Garden. Oh, it’s a hidden map. Every piece of music has a meaning in the opera and it’s related to what we’re saying in the film.

When Callas says goodbye to the dying Onassis as Jackie Kennedy is about to arrive, she was loving and sweet.

Larraín: Angie would always go for the exorcism of Maria, which is what I think happens to you in this hospital. She made me believe in the stoicism in the character that I didn’t foresee.

Jolie: Maybe that feels like how women handle those moments. She’s not somebody who allowed herself to be a victim. That’s the way she survived her life, her childhood, her mother’s cruelty, the press, by having that.

And you understand that too.

Jolie: Uh huh.

Larraín: She was able to understand it and to sing it, because that’s stoicism. It’s in the music.



“Maria” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, followed by a screening at Telluride. It will be available to stream on Netflix later this year.

This is Anne Thompson's rebuke of Brad's PR's very foolish effort to discredit Ed Zwick.  

Why Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts Behaved Badly: Ed Zwick Interview – IndieWire https://t.co/GnV0xJUjdT

— Anne Thompson (@akstanwyck) February 10, 2024

About 20 notebooks are socked away in producer-director-writer Edward Zwick’s office in no particular order, full of odd magazine clippings and notes. During the pandemic he rooted through them and rewatched his work, looking for the nuggets and details that would become his memoir “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood.”

He chronicles a television career with longtime Bedford Falls partner Marshall Herskovitz — together they created “Thirtysomething,” “Once and Again,” and “My So-Called Life” — but much of the book tracks Zwick in the movie business, from Demi Moore and Rob Lowe in “About Last Night” in 1986, “Legends of the Fall” with Brad Pitt in 1994, “The Last Samurai” with Tom Cruise in 2003, “Blood DIamond” with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2006, and his last outing with Cruise, “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” in 2016.

Zwick and I have talked many times over the years; we reconvened over Zoom to parse his book, which lays bare the highs and lows of his varied career.

Anne Thompson: What were you initially trying to achieve? When did you decide to take off the gloves?

Ed Zwick: There were these relationships that have meant an enormous amount to me. You’d spent hours together and rainy wet nights and fights and tears and love affairs. I was trying to try to find some meaning in what these years had been to me. When I started writing, I didn’t even know I was writing a book. You keep a file on your computer and I would write “b–k,” not to defy the literary gods by saying, actually, it was a book. To take a little pressure off myself.

But once I started getting into it, and I showed it to a couple of friends who are serious writers who I count on to tell me when I’m full of shit, they were encouraging. But they also said, “Look, what you would say to an actor, or to a writer at this point is, ‘Where are you? You’ve got to dig deeper.'” And once I began to do that, I had to make a determination. If I was going to be authentic about what my memories were, and what I believe happened, that earned me the right to be equally so about these people. It’s a case-by-case thing, but there seemed to be a dividing line for me. If people behaved badly, professionally, that felt to be fair game, but to embarrass someone, personally, for the sheer sake of dish seemed to be out of bounds. That might have been the line that I was drawing there.

The first time you had trouble with an actor on a movie was post-“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” Matthew Broderick, who played the lead in the 1989 Civil War drama “Glory.” Not to mention his interfering mother.

I also went to great lengths, in that case and in a couple others, to try to be compassionate to understand what it is to be those people at that moment. He was 24 years old. He was surrounded by handlers and fluffers. And, his parent. That’s a lot of responsibility to put on the hands of a young actor, who’s not necessarily trained to be in that position and who then takes on the feeling and the anxiety of being responsible in this way. I tried to be mindful of what I would have been at 24. And at least showing some empathy, which at the same time, allowed me to be brutally honest.

I don’t think your memoir is like any other memoir that I’ve ever read. It lays bare how Hollywood actually works. How ugly it is.

I had an agenda: If only I could have had this book to read when I was starting out. There are going to be people who read this book because of the dish, and they’ve liked the movies, and they want to see the inside baseball. But my notion is there are going to be young filmmakers reading it, who are going to get something as to the rough-and-tumble of this process, and how failure plays a role and how to not think, “What’s going to happen if I get knocked down,” but when I get knocked down, how do you get up? How do you hold on to those things that were part of your dream, as everybody comes after you to tell you what your dream is supposed to be? The values of this place, and some of the toxicity of this place, is a strong force. It’s an entropy that you have to try to hold back.

You have a few mentors. One was Nina Foch at the AFI Conservatory.

She was extraordinary. She was an heir to a whole generation of Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen and Stella Adler. She was confrontational, too. She didn’t take any shit from a presumptuous 22-year-old.

Sydney Pollack saw something in you and took you under his wing at TriStar.

I had done a thing for television called “Special Bulletin” [1983], and it got a lot of attention. I got a call from my agent saying Sydney Pollack would like to meet you because he’d seen it. He had just finished some movies, the TriStar studio had just been formed, and they’d hired Sydney to be a consultant. And Sydney said, “Come on over and have lunch.” He liked to cook in his own kitchen at lunch. He said, “So kid, you want to make movies? How about if we give you enough money to not have to work for six months, figure out what you need to pay your mortgage, and whatever, trying to think about what you might want to do, you can develop a couple of scripts, you could read a lot of scripts.” That led to to “About Last Night” and that was the game-changing moment. It was an investment in an artist by another artist who sensed his possibility.

I don’t believe that would ever happen now.

If anybody were to take the aggregate of the P&L of all my movies, and say, “Well, should we make this bet over 25 years?” The answer is, “Yeah, you should have.” But ever since that time, everything has become a one-off. The idea of investing in a laboratory where you bring in artists, and try to give them at least some grace to figure out what they want to do? I was the beneficiary of it.

They just don’t have those budgets any longer.

Not at all, and they want to give you a thing that is already finished. A thing is never really finished until you’ve gone through that process. “Glory” began as one movie and became another movie as it was made. They have to allow for a certain amount of improvisation, a certain amount of openness to what’s happening in the whole process.

Your movies, more than most, were organically grown. One of them was “Shakespeare in Love.” You ended up being the producer and on stage on Oscar night. But that was a torturous, unpleasant story with Harvey Weinstein. You developed it, you started it. You went to playwright Tom Stoppard and convinced him to do the rewrite.

I got to work with one of my idols in a delicious experience. I remember Hitchcock saying that you make the movie in prep, and by the time you’re shooting, it is already made. In that sense, I had already made the movie in my head. But I just never got to make it in the flesh, and I had to accept that disappointment. Heartbreak, as in life, is part of being in the movie business.

So you had already built sets, everything was going forward. And Julia Roberts crumbled.

There again, she was very young, there was a lot of pressure on her. She might have feared how she might have done in the role. But for whatever reason, she behaved badly. And [Universal chairman] Tom Pollock — whom I adored, who had been a supporter to me, he’d been my lawyer earlier on — chickened out, didn’t hold her feet to the flame. Whether there was another agenda there about other things with the star, or Mike Ovitz, or God knows who, it just went away. I had to say, “Okay, what now?” Had that not happened, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to make “Legends of the Fall.”

Pitt on “Legends of the Fall” was not easy, either. You called him “volatile” on set. What makes a movie star behave badly or act out?

You have to understand the anxiety, the level of fear and dread to be out there, fronting a movie. Actors have come into this more from a state of hunger than from abundance. They’ve been shunted aside. They’ve been waiting to get into rooms; their whole life has been about reaching some perch and some purchase on a career. There’s this notion that the failure of a thing or the possible failure is a judgment, on their viability, on their bankability.

One of the actors that you had the most pleasurable experiences with, early in his career, was Denzel Washington. You got to see the emergence of his talent in “Glory.”

It was like discovering a Ferrari. And all you have to do is just put your hand on the steering wheel and go like this, and the car will go screaming around the corner. His abilities to be present, and to be creative in a moment, so exceeded anybody I’d ever worked with. He saved my ass countless times with scenes that wouldn’t have worked. The number of times that I recall him saying to me, “I can act those words.” In other words, “Those words suck, don’t worry, I can do that.” And he didn’t mean that cruelly. His instincts about scripts, like Tom Cruise’s — there are reasons why these guys have careers with that kind of longevity. It’s not because of some play of light and shadow on their face. They are every bit as smart and as gifted as any director or any writer. They don’t necessarily have the same language, but you ignore their contribution at your peril.

Tom Cruise and “The Last Samurai,” another project you developed from scratch. I love that moment where you’re rewriting John Logan in your Colorado winter cabin.

John had written a wonderful first draft, but he was then not available to do more work. I made the mistake of actually submitting it to Tom. I’d met Tom years before several times. Graciously, he passed. I was disappointed and realized I had made a stupid rookie error, which is say, give something to somebody before it’s absolutely the best it could be.

I rewrote the script in two weeks. I locked myself in there for hours and hours and hours. I walked back into [Warner production chief] Lorenzo di Bonaventura’s office, put the script on his desk, and said, “Here, I’ve rewritten it, you don’t have to pay me. What I want you to do is get this so that we can show this to Tom Cruise again.” He said, “Okay.” It is so rare for an actor to turn down something and then read it again.

You confessed your anxieties to Tom Cruise at one point. What happened?

At first I thought, “Oh God, he doesn’t want to hear it.” I realized later he had been in this situation so many times before. He wanted me to be that person who he could count on, who had these things handled. It was a teachable moment for me, which is to say that you have to own your size in those moments.

Brad Pitt Wasn't 'Volatile' on Set, Says Source, Slamming Director as 'Desperate for Attention' (Exclusive) https://t.co/07sBGR1cyj

— People (@people) February 8, 2024

An industry insider is pushing back on director Edward Zwick’s memories of working with Brad Pitt.

According to a source familiar with the filming of the 1994 Western hit Legends of the Fall, Pitt, who starred in the film, was not the “volatile” one on set, as Zwick claims in his upcoming memoir, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood.

“They had disagreements,” a source involved with the film tells PEOPLE. “But Brad was not volatile.”

"It's sort of sad that he's so desperate for attention that he would talk trash about people like Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt and others, when he's the one whose behavior, kicking over chairs and throwing things, got so bad that it upset the cast and crew," says the source.

Reps for Zwick and Pitt did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Without going into detail, which presumably is forthcoming, Brad has talked about embracing his mistakes and weaknesses -- including losing his temper.  It serves as his personal rebuke of his own PR.

Anthony Hopkins for Interview Mag
HOPKINS: I’ve read you had a struggle with booze and all that.
PITT: Well, I just saw it as a disservice to myself, as an escape.

HOPKINS: And you’re as easy going as ever.
PITT: Pretty much, it’s my gliding speed. But I lose it at times. I get sucked into something, and I can lose it. I take my hands off the wheel.

Discussing (Bullet Train) on Australian TV show Sunrise on Wednesday, the 58-year-old said he can relate to Ladybug's tendency to lose his temper, no matter how hard he tries to stay calm

'I mean, I'm pretty laid-back but I can lose it and lose my s**t, and I can certainly step in s**t and put my foot in my mouth,' he confessed, adding: 'So, [the film is] just making fun of all of that, where the big laugh is.'

GQ

"I think I spent years with a low-grade depression, and it’s not until coming to terms with that, trying to embrace all sides of self—the beauty and the ugly—that I’ve been able to catch those moments of joy.”

it’s really not till recently that I have had a greater embrace of my friends and family.

And he explains, as if to a friend, something he has learned about effective communication in a relationship, emphasizing that a healthy self begins with taking “radical accountability.”

VF

According to a source close to Pitt, “Brad was drinking, and the confrontation got out of hand. He was absolutely wrong in how he behaved but immediately apologized and acknowledged that he had crossed a line, which he will always regret, and right away took steps to address this and try to make amends.”

“This case has been covered as a celebrity divorce; it is really a story about abuse,” says a source familiar with the matter.

“I hope you’ll give some grace to somebody who had a breakdown,” says one person who knew the family.

His reps are doing him a disservice trying to discredit an Oscar-winning director who has worked with many big stars.  It was an ill-advised effort to use the same playbook they used to shift blame to Angelina right after the incident. 

@scobie
Predictable noise coming from Pitt's side (who in 2016 promised all sorts to certain outlets in exchange for ignoring Jolie's story).

Brad is ultimately responsible for what is said on his behalf by people on his payroll.  He owes Zwick an apology.

How Brad Pitt's zen reinvention has paved the way for Oscar glory via @catherineshoard
https://t.co/cjWQXGoAcD

— Anne Thompson (@akstanwyck) February 3, 2020

Catherine Shoard

As final votes are cast, the Hollywood heavyweight has been putting in a winning - and carefully calibrated – turn as a wise-cracking sage

Every awards season has its darling. An actor whose modesty, wit and earnest embrace of the Oscar race charms both punters and peers. Last year, it was Richard E Grant, whose 30-year career – and longstanding friendship with numerous A-listers – was successfully redacted for a new narrative: he was a wide-eyed starlet gasping at the sight of Lady Gaga.
This year’s homecoming king is 56-year-old Brad Pitt: an evergreen A-lister who has managed a third-act reinvention as, simultaneously, a veteran, an unknown (thanks to a strategic decision to wear his name tag at the Oscar nominees’ lunch), a frontrunner, an underdog, a footloose bachelor and half of Hollywood’s best-loved power couple.
Most surprising, perhaps, has been Pitt’s sudden emergence as a public speaker of rare zip and self-awareness. The actor’s acceptance speeches at the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards, where his performance as a zen stuntman in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood won him best supporting actor, made headlines for their well-crafted wisecracks.
In the former, after a nod to Leonardo DiCaprio’s fate in Titanic (“I would have shared the raft”), he explained he’d hoped to bring his mother as his plus-one, “but any woman I stand next to they say I’m dating and it’d just be awkward”. At the SAGs, he began by saying he’d have to update his Tinder profile, teased his director about his foot fetish (“Quentin has separated more women from their shoes than the TSA”), then indulged in superlative self-satire. His part in the film, he said, was “a big stretch: a guy who gets high, takes his shirt off and doesn’t get on with his wife.”
“The idea that Pitt has a speechwriter is not news,” says Anne Thompson, Indiewire’s editor-at-large. “They all use them. Carrie Fisher used to do it. This one is good, whoever they are.”
“Every one of the competing films has a PR team that brainstorm, write, manage, promote and do everything possible to control every single moment and decision of the campaign,” adds Steven Gaydos, editor-in-chief of Variety. The financial and artistic stakes are too high for anything other than micro-management. The script for such a key lobbying platform would never be left in the hands of an amateur.
Or, even, a film-maker: it’s rumoured a Netflix insider has drafted all the potential acceptance speeches for Marriage Story, while names mooted to be behind Pitt’s bon mots include Saturday Night Live stars Nick Kroll and John Mulaney. “Everything is very carefully curated,” says Thompson. “The awards teams behind each of these films have talking points, things they want to get across.”
In the case of Pitt, these include his emergence from domestic and addiction woes (“We know pain, we know loneliness,” he said at the SAGs) and his newfound singleton status. This is balanced by an amplification of his “good-old-boy qualities … leaning into jokes that men will laugh at,” says Thompson. Phrases such as “holy moly” have made an appearance. He refers to his colleagues as brothers and sisters, to DiCaprio as “an all-star, a gent”.
Also key is the dovetailing of Pitt’s podium persona with his character in the film: macho yet laconic, tough yet up for concluding a speech with a shoutout for kindness. This ensures he acts as a goodwill conduit for a film many voters might not feel is quite worthy of a top prize (just, says Thompson, as Laura Dern is likely to become “the win” for Marriage Story).
Another of Pitt’s strengths is his willingness to play the game. While his chief rival in the supporting actor category – The Irishman’s Joe Pesci – does no press and rarely attends awards ceremonies, Pitt is the opposite. “He has an incredibly engaging, warm and open acceptance of the rigours of campaigning,” says Gaydos. “Night after night, day after day, he’s attending an endless stream of events and when called upon to collect another award, he’s shown a side of himself that is sincere, witty and appreciative.”
Hollywood’s renewed crush on its longtime darling is also self-protection, thinks Gaydos. At a time when the bona fide movie star is under threat, Pitt acts as the ultimate poster boy.
The ace up Pitt’s sleeve, however, remains the real-life drama in which so many still invest: whether he and ex-wife Jennifer Aniston – now both divorced from their second spouses – could reconnect. His marital-discord crack at the SAGs was warmly applauded by Aniston in the audience, and photos of the pair congratulating one other backstage have proved an irresistible crumb to millions hoping for a reunion.
“Hollywood is a small town. And they genuinely still like each other,” says Thompson. “But Brad and Jen knew they were being photographed. Movie stars are calculating everything all the time. They make clever calculations that become viral moments. That’s how they stay movie stars.”
Whether or not a reconciliation occurs, the warmth such a prospect engenders will likely help buoy the belle of this year’s ball to his first on-screen Oscar. “Oh yeah,” says Thompson. “There’s no way it’s not gonna be Brad.”

She apparently intends to go to Afghanistan in the near future.

The Mind of Angelina Jolie: How ‘The Breadwinner’ Leaned on Her Work More Than Her Name https://t.co/OC4Sk6KMXk pic.twitter.com/D8xanNi4DP

— Anne Thompson (@akstanwyck) February 15, 2018

Rookie director Nora Twomey turned to U.N. Special Envoy Angelina Jolie for her expertise on Afghanistan.

Anne Thompson

Irish animator Nora Twomey didn’t need Angelina Jolie to make the Oscar-animated “The Breadwinner.” The production was already fully financed by Cartoon Saloon in Kilkenny, Ireland, Aircraft Pictures in Toronto, and Melusine Productions in Luxembourg.

However, Twomey didn’t want Jolie’s name; she wanted her mind. This would be Twomey’s first outing as a solo director, and she recognized early on that she could use Jolie’s expertise on Afghanistan, where the U.N. Goodwill Ambassador has built schools for girls. Twomey wanted to tackle a sensitive drama about political oppression with adult sophistication and style; the story is based on Deborah Ellis’ 2000 YA novel about a tough 11-year-old girl who dresses as a boy in order to feed her mother and sisters when her father is captured by the Taliban.
So Twomey reached out to Jolie through mutual friends Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, the Egyptian filmmakers behind Oscar-nominated documentary “The Square.” Said Jolie, “We knew each other from working on refugee issues.”

Jolie not only offered advice about story beats and hiring voice actors, but also the intricacies of Afghanistan culture and navigating the country’s infrastructure. “Who better?” said Twoney. “She’s like a diplomat. She had a long interest in Afghanistan and an understanding of the issues we tried to explore in ‘The Breadwinner.’ She was someone who didn’t take anything lightly, she thought deeply, it was evident in everything she does. That was something we could use.”
“When we met, we just both saw the same film,” said Jolie. “We want people to respect what these young children go through and understand this magical culture with a rich, deep history. With the Afghanistan people, you only think about oppression. You don’t think about how a father loves his daughter, and what a daughter will do to risk her life for her daddy. People don’t think of those things, especially for Afghanistan after all these years of war.”

Twomey and Jolie also agreed to not pander to young viewers, but be willing to show them the realities of conflict. “We make big mistakes when we speak down to children on these issues,” said Jolie. “I’ve been surprised by the children I’ve brought to see this film — I thought my own would understand this — but others may see a woman in a burqa being beaten by the Taliban for the first time, or see why a little a girl would have to go to work to feed her family or change her gender in order to do that, what this is for women… They are able to absorb that and walk away feeling that they would be friends with Parvana, that they like to see themselves in her, that they are proud of Parvana and believe they are capable of more as children, that their voices matter.”

Twomey and Jolie were closely involved in the casting of the Afghan voices. Jolie listened carefully to tapes “to find the soul of the person,” she said. “This voice is too funny, or too old, or this person doesn’t sound as gentle.”

“She has an actor’s ear,” said Twomey, who credits Jolie with helping her cast an actress with a bubbly personality as Parvana’s best friend to counterbalance her heroine’s gravity. “She can’t be happy, as she is mourning her father who is missing.”

One way to modulate the terror was to keep the audience connected to the characters and show the stark beauty of the landscape and the power of a young girl’s fantasies. Twomey used an Afghanistan color palette to show “Parvana’s imagination and capacity as a storyteller and connection with her father and culture,” she said. “We wanted it to be a celebration of a young girl’s imagination, her love for her father and family, and her innocence and wisdom and flaws. We wanted her to be quite real: Imagination allows you to do that.”

Added Jolie, “I’d give little hints here and there for the early boards and the music,” she said. “The biggest discussion was about how do you end this: You cannot say, ‘Here come the planes and everything was better.’ You can’t do that to this country. And yet you want to give hope and say there’s a moving forward and yet have to be realistic that there is a future for Afghanistan.”

Twomey screened the movie for the First Lady of Afghanistan as well as an Afghan educator who also dressed as a boy to go to a secret school; the woman now runs schools for girls in Kabul. Older relatives of the film’s voice actors have been moved to talk about their own experiences for the first time after seeing the film. The filmmaker also screened “The Breadwinner” for the U.N. representative from Afghanistan, where the dubbed movie will be shown on television. “They have embraced it,” she said.

Jolie can’t wait to go back to the country and screen it as well. “They have ‘Sesame Street’ with Afghan characters,” she said. “Art has made its way. The Afghan people are an extremely creative people. They love this film because of all of their own that they recognize, from the way they have dinner to the music.”

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Angelina Jolie was robbed: I talk to her about on catharsis in ‘First They Killed My Father,’ and working with her son: Awards Season Spotlight Profile https://t.co/JuWHMYgkvX via @indiewire

— Anne Thompson (@akstanwyck) January 27, 2018

IndieWire Awards Spotlight: Angelina Jolie on making 'First They Killed My Father,' "It could be traumatic, or it could be cathartic. And we insisted it would be cathartic" https://t.co/zobBrsM7qK @XFINITY pic.twitter.com/cPuEwplR2l

— IndieWire (@IndieWire) January 27, 2018

Jude Dry

“First They Killed My Father,” Angelina Jolie’s gripping drama about a child surviving the Khmer Rouge, is the actress-turned-director’s finest film to date. The movie was rejected by the Oscars, receiving no nominations, though it was Cambodia’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film — a fact that in no way diminishes the artistry and power of the film Jolie crafted from Cambodian author and activist’s Loung Ung’s best-selling memoir of the same name. The story had deep personal resonance; Jolie’s son, Maddox, is Cambodian by birth. The director said she felt a great responsibility to get the story right — not just for her son, but for all Cambodians.

When you’re a director, you don’t wanna feel you’ve let down your team, or you’ve let down the country, or you’ve let down the family,” Jolie said in an interview for IndieWire’s Spotlight Awards series. It was her son Maddox, who at 16 years old now has his first producer credit for the movie, who suggested she make “First They Killed My Father.” “[He] was the reason we finally did it,” she added.

“The majority of our crew were survivors… So everybody was affected,” Jolie said. “It could be traumatic, or it could be cathartic, and we insisted it would be cathartic. It had to not be easy. Because we were fighting to make something that mattered, so it had to be a little difficult.”
The story follows Ung’s brutal childhood surviving the deadly Khmer Rouge in 1970s Cambodia; Ung adapted the script from her memoir. “[She] made it safe…for everybody to have their moments,” said Ung. “There were times we had to stop shooting, because people were suffering from post-traumatic stress, and Angie was great.”

Even if Jolie did not get the Oscar nod she was hoping for, “First They Killed My Father” was warmly received, and went a long way toward marking Jolie as a director with vision and skill. Not only is the movie an enormous accomplishment for a woman who wears many hats in Hollywood, but it’s a tale close to her heart. “This movie’s about family…It’s how warm it is, and what it means to have a family, and how that forms us, and how that helps us heal and survive.”
Heal, survive, and hopefully flourish.

This year’s Awards Spotlight series is produced with help from our partners at Xfinity, and filmed at the Variety Content Studio.

The Oscars nominations were announced on Tuesday and FTKMF did not make this list. We are still proud and thrilled. We made the film we wanted and made it with love and integrity. Thank you all for your support. Loung https://t.co/mMLLoDnqgu

— Loung Ung (@UngLoung) January 25, 2018

NBR with Ken Burns

Al Gore

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Ken Burns

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6 Things We Learned at Telluride, Including Oscar Chances for Greta Gerwig, Angelina Jolie, and Gary Oldman https://t.co/xKCknGQBfe pic.twitter.com/q0LhYc0vn3

— Anne Thompson (@akstanwyck) September 4, 2017

The Telluride Film Festival is about a lot more than Oscars. Co-directors Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger certainly set out to program the year’s likeliest Oscar contenders, including Joe Wright’s Gary Oldman vehicle “Darkest Hour,” Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” starring Saoirse Ronan, Guillermo del Toro’s “Shape of Water,” starring Sally Hawkins, and “Battle of the Sexes,” starring a luminous Emma Stone as real-life hero Billie Jean King.
But Telluride was also a crucible for conversations about the state of the motion picture industry throughout the weekend, as Netflix and Amazon threw parties and checked out several high-profile movies without distribution — including Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Cotton Club Encore” — that banked on the festival boosting their critical and audience cred before top buyers.
Here’s what we learned over the Labor Day weekend:

1. Christian Bale is fat.

The subject of two well-deserved weekend tributes wore black all weekend to disguise his added bulk, as he is packing on the pounds (yet again) to play Dick Cheney in Annapurna’s “Backseat” for “The Big Short” director Adam McKay. Bale was in athletic movie-star mode in director Scott Cooper’s independently financed $35-million 19th-century western “Hostiles,” co-starring Rosamund Pike and Wes Studi, which played well over the weekend as it sought a buyer. I will catch the movie in Toronto, where even more distributors will see it. (When it’s on the release calendar, I will weigh in on whether or not Bale is Oscar-worthy.)
Writer-director Cooper told me he would love to see “Hostiles” open this fall, so that Bale could be in the awards mix. (The trades played along, offering gushy Oscar bonafides.)
Truth is, it’s a light year for Best Actor contenders. But top distributors like Sony Pictures Classics have their fall awards slates well under way. Mounting something at this late date can be done (Fox Searchlight bought both Oscar-contenders “The Wrestler” and “Jackie” in Toronto), but it’s a tall order.
Producer John Lesher (“Birdman”), who developed the ’80s Donald Stewart script with Virginia-born Cooper (“Black Mass,” “Crazy Heart”), financed the movie with foreign sales and brought in producer-investor Ken Kao. They will weigh the best possible home for the violent western.
One likely buyer is deep-pocketed Netflix, which doesn’t have to support an expensive theatrical campaign and has beefed up its marketing team with Oscar-savvy former Lionsgate executive Julie Fontaine. However, if Bale’s Oscar campaign is the goal, Netflix has not proven its ability to push non-documentary fare into Oscar contention.

2. Paul Schrader is back.

Also for sale title was “First Reformed,” a rigorous, religious, and timely ecological fable that sees Paul Schrader in top form. Raised Calvinist, the writer of “Taxi Driver” and director of “Light Sleeper” crafts an elegantly formal homage to Robert Bresson’s “The Diary of a Country Priest.” Ethan Hawke plays a grieving minister fighting despair who finds some hope in a pregnant church member (Amanda Seyfried). The movie is both beautiful and ugly, intense and moving.
Critics will point arthouse audiences to yet another brilliant Hawke performance. Again, is a distributor be willing to push this up the hill this fall? A home for 2018 is more likely.

3. Women on Top

Angelina Jolie (“First They Killed My Father”), Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird”), Rebecca Miller (“Arthur Miller: Writer”), Chloé Zhao (“The Rider”), Agnes Varda (“Faces, Places,” with J.R.), and Valerie Faris (“Battle of the Sexes,” with husband Jonathan Dayton) are among the female directors earning rave reviews at Telluride.

Jolie’s “First They Killed My Father” is based on Loung Ung’s Cambodian memoir about her middle-class family’s horrific experiences after they were forced out of Phnom Penh in 1975 during the four-year takeover by the Khmer Rouge. Jolie has been friends with the writer for 17 years and convinced Netflix to back the $24-million Cambodian war epic, which she whittled down to two hours and 16 minutes.

The well-mounted movie, told entirely from the point of view of a young girl (Sareum Srey Moch) and impeccably shot by Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) with a sensitive score by Marco Beltrami, made audiences weep and scored a rapturous standing ovation. It could score some Oscar nominations, as well an official slot as the Cambodian Oscar entry. That’s an Oscar it could win.

We already knew Greta Gerwig as a smashing actress and writer (“Frances Ha,” “Mistress America”). With her feature debut “Lady Bird” (A24), a semi-autobiographical story from her high school days in Sacramento starring Saoirse Ronan and the superb Laurie Metcalf as her mother, Gerwig finds herself in the Oscar race as writer and director. Ronan and Metcalf may be there, too.
Ronan’s competition may come from two Fox Searchlight stars: Emma Stone as a sexily athletic and formidable sports star living a double life, and Sally Hawkins in Guillermo de Toro’s exquisite ’60s Douglas Sirk romantic fantasy-thriller “The Shape of Water.”

4. The British are coming!

Joe Wright’s “The Darkest Hour” was Telluride’s surefire Oscar contender, and Gary Oldman as a wily and messy Winston Churchill is the one to beat for Best Actor (not to mention Hair and Makeup). At a Telluride dinner, Oldman told me he channeled the Prime Minister’s inner child, and also compared him to Stanley Kubrick, who expected everyone on his team to step up to his standards and work ethic.
Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn (“Bloodline”) said he couldn’t have been more shocked to be cast as King George VI— although he looks just like him. When “Theory of Everything” Oscar-nominated screenwriter Anthony McCarten tried to pick among possible writing gigs, a friend told him to do “Theory of Everything” producer Lisa Bruce’s “The Darkest Hour,” because “right now we need a leader.” So McCarten took on “Darkest Hour.” Wright told the opening night crowd that he only wanted to do yet another movie about Winston Churchil if Oldman played him.

At the closing night party at the Steinbergs, Wright told me (and admiring Amazon Studios executive Ted Hope) that he stole the idea for the film’s stunning out-the-window tracking shots from the Coens’ “A Serious Man.”
Other British films made a splash. James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli and memoirist Peter Turner spent more than 20 years developing “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” which details Turner’s affair with aging Hollywood star Gloria Grahame; it could push Annette Bening back into the Oscar race. At the Sony Pictures Classics dinner, star Jamie Bell said when doing research in Liverpool, he met several actors who had thought they might play his role over the years, from Ian Hart to David Morrissey.

5. The Academy throws a great party

I finally nabbed an invite to the Academy’s press-free annual Telluride gathering, which was packed with stars. Jolie huddled with Hawke. (They starred together in “Taking Lives” in 2004, as Hawke’s press agent Mara Buxbaum put it, “before she was Angelina Jolie.”) Gerwig, Faris, and Dayton commiserated about pre-world premiere jitters, while Bale had to get through his first Tribute.
Still on the stump for climate change with “An Inconvenient Sequel,” Al Gore looked each new person in the eye and memorized their name. (I can testify to this skill, as he greeted me with “Hi, Anne!” the next night at Participant Media’s Telluride dinner, where he regaled the table with stories of living large on his world travels as Vice President — before getting serious about the potential upside of Hurricane Harvey for climate change.)

6. The foreign-language race is getting interesting.

The Russian Oscar committee could actually choose “Leviathan” director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Cannes hit “Loveless” (Sony Pictures Classics) for its official submission, although Telluride also played its lower-profile rival, the dark family drama “Tesnota.” SPC’s other foreign possibility is Sebastián Lelio’s transgender drama, “A Fantastic Woman,” which played well with Chilean actress Daniela Vega on hand. Lebanon is expected to select Ziad Douieri’s “The Insult” (Cohen Media), which built buzz over the weekend.




L.A. Times

Oscar buzz and movie love mingle at the Telluride film festival

Josh Rottenberg

The Telluride Film Festival prides itself on being unlike bigger, glitzier festivals. The atmosphere is decidedly low-key and intimate, with neither the deal-making frenzy of Sundance nor the black-tie glamour of Cannes. There are no red carpets, no juries doling out awards. Most of the venues aren’t even actual movie theaters — one is a middle school gym, another is an ice-skating rink and yet another is the town’s Masonic Hall.
“You think it’s a festival and it’s going to just feel like a festival but it doesn’t,” said Angelina Jolie, who attended the Rocky Mountain festival over Labor Day weekend for the first time to screen her latest directorial effort, the wrenching Cambodian genocide drama “First They Killed My Father.” “It’s a lot of nice people, and you get the chance to really talk and have some amazing conversations. I geeked out on Ken Burns.”

That said, Telluride isn’t only about filmmakers and stars convivially communing in jeans and untucked shirts — though there is plenty of that. In recent years, the festival has taken on an increasingly important role in the awards-season ecosystem, having hosted seven of the last eight best picture winners. So as the 44th edition of the fest unfolded, Oscar prognosticators had their antenna finely tuned to pick up reverberations of buzz — and in what was widely seen as a strong crop of films, several got an early leg up on the long climb ahead to potential Oscar glory.
Screening in the same opening-night slot in which “Moonlight” played last year, actress Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, the coming-of-age dramedy “Lady Bird,” made a major splash, with the audience warmly cheering the coming-of-age dramedy about a rebellious high school senior (Saoirse Ronan) who yearns to escape her hometown of Sacramento and her stormy relationship with her mother (Laurie Metcalf).

“It was intimidating to be in the same slot that ‘Moonlight’ was in, but it’s not a thing I feel like I could ever live up to,” a very relieved Gerwig told The Times the next morning. “I didn’t feel as if I had to pass the ‘Moonlight’ bar. So in a way it was just an honor. I just felt like it was very warm and kind.”

Director Guillermo del Toro’s typically off-kilter and surreal adult fairy tale “The Shape of Water” — the story of a mute janitor (Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with an aquatic humanoid creature in a secret government laboratory — built upon the wave of rave reviews it earned after premiering at the Venice Film Festival.
While films with fantasy elements sometimes have a difficult time being taken seriously by critics and Oscar voters, Del Toro brushed aside any concern about being placed in a box. “That would be important if I cared — but I don’t,” the director said bluntly. “Look, I’ve been doing this for 25 years. If I thought it was not the route to go, I would have changed.”

Perhaps not surprisingly given these turbulent geopolitical times, films dealing head-on with real-life conflict also resonated with festivalgoers. Jolie’s film about a young girl whose family is swept up in the horrors of the Khmer Rouge’s savage revolution in 1975, which will be released on Netflix and in select theaters on Sept. 15, drew a standing ovation in its first major screening outside of Cambodia.
Director Joe Wright’s World War II drama “Darkest Hour,” which chronicles Winston Churchill’s attempt to unite Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany as Hitler’s army rampages across Europe in 1940, also earned its share of acclaim. Nearly unrecognizable underneath makeup and prosthetics that took over three hours to apply each day, Gary Oldman humanizes Churchill as a sometimes erratic and overly emotional but brilliant leader in a performance that is sure to put him in the heart of the lead actor conversation.
In a Q&A following the film’s last screening, Oldman said immersing himself deeply in the role of Churchill had rekindled his love of acting after doing too many films that felt rushed and creatively undernourished. “It was a real joy,” he said. “Until this film, I had really started to lose my love of the work, of why I wanted to do it in the first place.”

Among the festival’s documentaries as well, a number of films confronted weighty and contentious issues, including “Eating Animals,” an investigation into the ills of factory farming produced by Natalie Portman, and Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei’s “Human Flow,” an epic, nearly three-hour look at the global refugee crisis.
On a somewhat lighter note, “Battle of the Sexes” — about the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) that turned King into a feminist icon — received a warm reception at its first-ever screening, with the audience rising to its feet when husband-and-wife directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton introduced King herself.
Director Alexander Payne’s bizarro satire “Downsizing,” which had been met with raves out of Venice, drew a somewhat more divided response from the Telluride crowd. To be fair, though, a film that takes so many big creative swings — set in a near-future in which scientists have figured out how to shrink people down to 6 inches in size — was likely never going to be for all tastes, and “Downsizing,” which won’t hit theaters until December, will certainly have its passionate supporters as awards season unfolds.
Director Scott Cooper’s brutal western “Hostiles,” which is seeking distribution, drew a number of glowing reviews, with many singling out the performance of Christian Bale as an Army captain who reluctantly agrees to escort an ailing, elderly Native American (played by Wes Studi) to his tribal home. Bale himself was honored, along with cinematographer Ed Lachman (represented in the lineup by Todd Haynes’ period drama “Wonderstruck”), with a special tribute by the festival. As he moved around Telluride over the weekend, though, the actor often passed festivalgoers unnoticed, having packed on some pounds to play Dick Cheney in an upcoming film from director Adam McKay.

Notably, at a time when many have criticized Hollywood’s lack of gender parity in the hiring of directors, roughly a third of the films at this year’s festival were either directed or co-directed by women. Meanwhile, a free, open-air panel called “Real-Life Wonder Women” — featuring Jolie, Portman, King and legendary chef Alice Waters — drew what appeared to be the largest crowd to any such panel in the festival’s history.
“I’d like to get to the point where [the number of female directors] is not a conversation,” Jolie told The Times. “We’re going to have to work a little bit harder, but I think if we support each other, then women in this business will move forward. But we have far to go.”

Speaking of having far to go, awards season is a marathon, not a sprint. With the Toronto Film Festival set to kick off later this week and a slew of potential heavy-hitters yet to be unveiled, would-be contenders need to pace themselves.
For her part, Gerwig was simply gratified to have made her first step along that journey in the nurturing environment of Telluride. “One of my favorite things about Telluride — and it’s been very vivid this year — is because it’s so small the directors are really there for each other,” she said. “That has been the most meaningful thing — you look at another director and they feel the very same thing you feel, this combination of relief and fear.”
Director Scott Cooper’s brutal western “Hostiles,” which is seeking distribution, drew a number of glowing reviews, with many singling out the performance of Christian Bale as an Army captain who reluctantly agrees to escort an ailing, elderly Native American (played by Wes Studi) to his tribal home. Bale himself was honored, along with cinematographer Ed Lachman (represented in the lineup by Todd Haynes’ period drama “Wonderstruck”), with a special tribute by the festival. As he moved around Telluride over the weekend, though, the actor often passed festivalgoers unnoticed, having packed on some pounds to play Dick Cheney in an upcoming film from director Adam McKay.

Screen Talk: What's Wrong with 'Exodus' and Right with 'Unbroken' http://t.co/M3bj90J3g3
— Anne Thompson (@akstanwyck) December 5, 2014

By Anne Thompson | Thompson on Hollywood December 5, 2014 at 3:40PM

This week Eric Kohn and I have finally caught up with all the major awards contenders--with Top Ten lists to be unveiled next Friday, we both have catching up to do on smaller films, but the big players have landed.

So what's the verdict? In short, we were both disappointed by Ridley Scott's paint-by-numbers biblical epic "Exodus: Gods and Kings," and hail the rise of director Angelina Jolie, who delivers with "Unbroken" and rising star Jack O'Connell. Could her cinematographer, frequent Coens collaborator Roger Deakins, finally land the Big O after 11 nominations? After all, "Birdman" D.P. Emmanuel Lubezki won last year for "Gravity."
We also dig into some other categories and races as well as the Sundance lineup so far and recommend what you should watch this weekend.

WATCH: Angelina Jolie charms in UNBROKEN featurette: http://t.co/0Ksf0agW1U pic.twitter.com/i8njrbkM4L
— Indiewire (@indiewire) December 5, 2014

Top Ten lists

From TOH

TOH! Top Tens of 2012

ANNE THOMPSON:
1. "Life of Pi"
Taiwan-born Ang Lee, more than any director working today, is a filmmaker for the world. His three great love stories -- martial arts romance "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," gay tragedy "Brokeback Mountain" and Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility"-- were accessible to multiple cultures. With "Life of Pi" Lee has fashioned, with screenwriter David Magee ("Finding Neverland") adapting Yann Martel's global bestseller, another love story that transcends borders. In this case, it's between a 17-year-old young man (non-pro Suraj Sharma) from India and a Bengal tiger. But it is also a stunning technological triumph, as the VFX required were impossible until now. Conceived four years ago before the arrival of the 3-D "Avatar," this movie is a live-action/animation hybrid, as major characters like the threatening tiger and sublime phosphorescent Pacific seascapes could only be created by artists in the digital realm.
2. "Beasts of the Southern Wild"
When he won the grand jury and cinematography prizes at Sundance, director Benh Zeitlin, who shot "Beasts" with his ragtag film collective on a constantly flooding delta island below the New Orleans levees with a cast of non-actors, said: "We had more freedom to make this film than any filmmakers in America ever." Zeitlin was able to control the chaos: the end result is a constantly surprising and deeply moving fantastical portrait of where we are, right now.
3. "Zero Dark Thirty"
Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's incredibly timely movie about the CIA's ten-year pursuit of Osama bin Laden is as relentless as its heroine (Jessica Chastain), laying out the hard facts and details without flinching from its purpose, which is to make real the daily headlines. Bigelow deploys 120 speaking parts from all over the world and three to four roving cameras to catch the unfolding action in wide-ranging locations from India, Egypt and Jordan to London and Washington, D.C. As Bigelow avoids Hollywood narrative conventions, she also gives us the toughest motherfuckin' woman lead since Ripley.

4. "Silver Linings Playbook"
This delicately edited family relationship comedy is both funny and moving. The film's two romantic leads, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, are two lost, emotionally damaged yet attractive people who draw comfort and kinship from each other. Writer-director David O. Russell has, dare I say it, Billy Wilder's tough unsentimental approach to romance. Even in this cynical age, we root for these two characters in pain to heal each other, make their families happy, win their dance contest and find true love.

5. "Lincoln"
The thing that hits you on first viewing "Lincoln" is how unconventional it is. It's organic, grown from the seeds in Doris Kearns Goodwin's 800-page Lincoln tome "Team of Rivals," nurtured over five years by playwright Tony Kushner, and shaped by Steven Spielberg and actor Daniel Day-Lewis into something we've never seen before. This alchemy of a torrent of words, well-researched history, and the powerful personality of the world's most popular American president has yielded a magical biopic that is the current front-runner in the Oscar race.
6. "End of Watch"
David Ayer celebrates the work ethic and bravery of two cops, partners on the beat in East Los Angeles, who face an unforgiving world with humor and verbal acuity. Shot on the run, the movie was choreographed with no room for waste or error: Ayer shot 135 hours of footage in 22 days.  Jack Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena were primed and ready and give the best performances of their respective careers.

7. "Argo"
Ben Affleck directs this taut and commercial thriller, his third behind the camera, with screw-tightening efficiency that would make Michael Mann proud. Think "The Insider" on steroids. Affleck gives a solid, naturalistic performance as Tony Mendez, a smart and experienced CIA operative who specializes in pulling people out of tight situations. Affleck, like other actor-directors Clooney and Clint Eastwood, sees the value of staying hands-on with a modest budget. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Oscar-nominated for "Brokeback Mountain") does outstanding work on location in Turkey, Los Angeles and the Ontario airport, while composer Alexandre Desplat ("The King's Speech") could land a fifth Oscar nomination--unless he knocks himself out with "Zero Dark Thirty."
8. "The Sessions"
"The Sessions" starts with a script from Australian filmmaker Ben Lewin, who suffered polio as a youth and still limps with a cane. Helen Hunt and John Hawkes saw rich material in this story about the late great intellectual Mark O'Brien who wanted more from life than lying immobile in an iron lung. He found a sex surrogate to help him find love in his life. While the surrogate came to care deeply for O'Brien--within the confines of a professional relationship--she was able to teach him how to make another woman happy.  Audiences are often uncomfortable with sex in cinema, and this movie embraces moments that are awkward and embarrassing, even humiliating. This intimate sexual souffle is so delicate and sensitive--both actors are literally naked-- that it could easily have gone flat. Instead it is uplifting.

'Moonrise Kingdom"

9. "Moonrise Kingdom" This coming-of-age romance takes place inside an artificial fantasy based on the children's books writer-director Wes Anderson still loves. He builds the movie on the shoulders of two young kids in love. "I love artifice and very emotional movies," he told me in Cannes. The art direction, tone, and acting--one standout is Bruce Willis's sweet buffoonish cop--are all perfectly in tune with Anderson's precise imagination.
10. "Anna Karenina"
The decision not to shoot "Anna Karenina" on location in Russia liberated director Joe Wright. Without changing the Tom Stoppard adaptation of Tolstoy's classic, Wright used an old London theater as a way to completely free himself from the constrictions of period costume drama. "Anna Karenina" is a swirling, mad, exuberant, joyful, passionate celebration of the novel. Anna (Keira Knightley of Wright's "Atonement" and "Pride & Prejudice") is far from your ordinary romantic heroine. She's doomed to meet that train. But there's more to this story than adultery. Tolstoy's counterpart, Levin (Domhall Gleeson), balances out the drama. And Jude Law gives one of his best performances as Anna's cuckolded husband.

BEST FOREIGN FILM
"Barbara," Germany's Oscar entry, is Christian Petzold's fifth collaboration with actress Nina Hoss. She plays an intrepid East Berlin doctor in 1980 who has been sent to the boonies as punishment for wanting to leave the country. Like everyone around her, she lies to survive; she sneaks around in the night to meet her West German lover in the woods. But she's a great doctor who cares for her patients; that bonds her with her fellow doctor (up-and-comer Ronald Zehrfeld). Even though she's surrounded by fear and suspicion and paranoia, she comes to trust him.

BEST DOCUMENTARY
Eugene Jarecki's incisive and incendiary "The House I Live In," which won the U.S. documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and is shortlisted for next year's doc Oscar, will blow your mind. That's because it tackles a subject that you think you know a little about--America's war on drugs--and in excruciating detail shows you how the whole system is broken and dysfunctional.

BEST ANIMATED FILM
"Frankenweenie," Tim Burton filmed his most personal movie since "Edward Scissorhands" in black and white and stop motion. He returns to the Burbank suburbs he has loved to show us ever since the 1984 Disney short on which the movie is based. While the feature was not a box office success, it's an inspiring reminder of what an artist can do when he's not playing to the marketplace.



 From NYTimes

25 Favorites From a Year When 10 Aren’t Enough

Weinstein Company

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in “The Master.” More Photos »

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: December 14, 2012

IF you spent a lot of time this year reading and writing about movies — as opposed to watching them, which is more fun — you might have detected recurrent notes of anxiety, trepidation, even dread. Television is better than movies; audience levels are in a state of permanent decline; the Hollywood studios have given up on grown-ups; and digital, a force so powerful that it is both adjective and noun, is destroying cinema as we know it. These are among the tenets of a pessimistic conventional wisdom.

They may well all be true, but the movies themselves answered this hand wringing with a defiant “So what?” Over the past decade series television has certainly (at last) begun to unlock its potential to deliver complex, long-form narrative, but there are still feats of scale, intimacy and visual ambition that cannot be doled out in episodic small-screen doses.

And people still like to go to the movies! The big studios, after the usual summer of superheroes and sequels, crowded the fourth quarter of the year with solid stories about adult matters, some of which — “Argo,” “Flight,” “Lincoln” — brought in pretty good box office. And some of the best films of the year were actually, in the old-fashioned literal sense, films, brought to us by the chemical transformation of strips of stuff rather than the mathematical manipulation of strings of code.

Digital cinema is a mighty force, still emerging, and it continued to extend its reach in 2012. Not only did computer-hatched effects help us see superheroes, Hobbits and Pixar creatures; they also added the tiger to “Life of Pi” and subtracted Marion Cotillard’s legs from “Rust and Bone.” Digital, because it lowers costs and increases access to the tools of filmmaking, is also partly responsible for the current boom in documentaries, which were so various and powerful this year that they demanded their own list.

But I’m struck, surveying my own favorites, by how many films relied on old-fashioned methods and materials: the grainy 16-millimeter of “Beasts of the Southern Wild”; the lustrous 65-millimeter of “The Master”; the burnished chiaroscuro of “Lincoln”; the meticulous framing and cutting of “Amour.” Maybe this is coincidence, or fuddy-duddyism on my part. Or maybe technological means are, finally, less important than artistic ends.

The annual ritual of narrowing down hundreds of titles — and thousands of hours of rapture and reverie — to just 10 is a cruel torment, but also, perhaps, a necessary discipline. Although, as usual, I’ve found it necessary to cheat a bit, and extend the 10 to 25. These lists are never meant to be permanent historical judgments, graven in stone. They are ephemeral and subjective, made up of hunches and desires, and they record, in my case, the impressions that I could not shake and the pictures I’m eager to see again, in some cases for the fourth or fifth time.

Top 10 Films

1. AMOUR (Michael Haneke) With ruthless clarity, but also with tact and compassion, Mr. Haneke invites us to look at the arrival of death at the end of a Parisian couple’s long marriage, and shows, almost as if for the first time, how the saddest and most intractable facts of life can be transformed into art. Months after its debut at Cannes this film already feels permanent.

2. LINCOLN (Steven Spielberg) A great, flawed movie about a great, flawed president of a great, flawed nation. Argue about the flaws, but allow yourself to be moved by the grand, noble sentiments that swirl through Tony Kushner’s eloquent script and Daniel Day-Lewis’s sly performance.

3. BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (Benh Zeitlin) A thousand years from now scientists will know that there was a Hushpuppy, who lived in the Bathtub with her daddy.

4. FOOTNOTE (Joseph Cedar) This Israeli film takes what might have been a trivial anecdote — a committee accidentally awards a prize to the wrong scholar — and turns it into a tragicomic opera with a great deal to say about Zionism, academia, family life and the way language functions as a bridge between the sacred and the profane.

5. THE MASTER (Paul Thomas Anderson) Troubling and enigmatic, this movie — suggested by the early career of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology — seems designed to be misunderstood. It tells the story of a damaged soul (Joaquin Phoenix) who seeks healing from a charismatic fraud and finds what he is looking for.

6. ZERO DARK THIRTY (Kathryn Bigelow) A milestone in post-Sept. 11 cinema, and an attempt to grapple honestly with the moral complexities of the war on terror. Jessica Chastain’s tough, quiet performance as a C.I.A. officer involved in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden synthesizes much of the collective emotion of the past decade — grief, fear, frustration and fatigue — within a narrative that also works as a tense and brutal geopolitical thriller.

7. DJANGO UNCHAINED (Quentin Tarantino) Mr. Tarantino follows “Inglourious Basterds,” his action-cartoon about the Holocaust, with an even bolder provocation: a blaxploitation spaghetti western about American slavery. More than any other director he tests and extends the power of pop-culture fantasy to engage the painful atrocities of history.

8. GOODBYE, FIRST LOVE (Mia Hansen-Love) The tired phrase “coming-of-age story” hardly does justice to this sensitive, observant chronicle of a young woman’s discovery of passion, disappointment and her own resourcefulness as she moves from adolescence into her early 20s. With her third feature Ms. Hansen-Love confirms her status as one of the freshest, bravest voices in French movies.

9. NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (Kleber Mendonça Filho) In his first feature Mr. Mendonça, a former film critic, chronicles the daily rhythms of life in an affluent apartment complex in the Brazilian coastal city of Recife. What emerges is a subtle portrait of a society in the throes of rapid social transformation, still haunted by the cruelties of its feudal past.

10. THE GREY (Joe Carnahan) A pack of dudes. A pack of wolves. Liam Neeson leads the fight for survival, and Mr. Carnahan conducts a clinic in muscular action-movie technique that is also a somber, moving meditation on life, death and the line between the human and the wild.

HONORABLE MENTION “Argo” (Ben Affleck); “Barbara” (Christian Petzold); “Brave” (Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman); “Consuming Spirits” (Chris Sullivan); “The Deep Blue Sea” (Terence Davies); “Moonrise Kingdom” (Wes Anderson); “Pitch Perfect” (Jason Moore); “Rust and Bone” (Jacques Audiard); “Take This Waltz” (Sarah Polley); “The Turin Horse” (Bela Tarr).

Top Five Documentaries

1. THE GATEKEEPERS (Dror Moreh) The post-1967 history of Israel, public and secret, as told by six former leaders of Shin Bet, the country’s clandestine security service. Essential, eye-opening viewing if you think you understand the Middle East.

2. THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES (Lauren Greenfield) How the other 1 percent lives: just like the rest of us, but with a lot more money.

3. HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (David France) A remarkable story of loss, love and activism during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic.

4. THIS IS NOT A FILM (Jafar Panahi) Mr. Panahi, forbidden by the Iranian authorities from practicing as a filmmaker, responded with this brave and witty video diary, an essay on the struggle between political tyranny and the creative imagination.

5. THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE (Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon) A notorious crime — the rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989 — is revisited in this painful, angry, scrupulously reported story of race, injustice and media frenzy. 

Against the Odds, Smart Films Thrive at the Box Office

Focus Features

Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman in Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom." More Photos »

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: December 14, 2012

SEEN any good movies lately? How could you not? This has been a bumper year for movies big and small, imported and domestic, some made for hundreds of millions of dollars and others made for about the price of a grande soy latte. As has been the case in recent years, the top box office movies in America were mostly formulaic corporate entertainments, including the superhero comic-book fantasies like “Marvel’s The Avengers” that make some critics despair. Even amid the usual selection of big-screen cartoons and testosterone, though, it was nice to see female-driven stories like “The Hunger Games” — and all the female viewers its box office represents — muscling into the mix.

Look past the Top 20 on boxofficemojo.com, and things become more interesting. The 21st domestic top grosser of the year was the little male stripper movie that could and did, all while flashing its viewers: “Magic Mike,” directed by that cinematic chameleon Steven Soderbergh, was one of the unexpectedly enjoyable movies of the year and one of the most surprisingly profitable. Made on the cheap, the independently bankrolled production was bought by Warner Brothers for about $7 million and scooped up $113 million in the United States. It’s a shining, sweat-kissed example of how the studios could diversify their offerings and maybe their audiences by doing more than remaking the same movies over again, as Sony Pictures did with the perfectly adequate if misleadingly titled “Amazing Spider-Man.”

The next 20 box office domestic grossers included solid thinking-adult entertainments like “Argo,” “Flight” and “Lincoln,” each of which has raked in more than two of the most heavily promoted corporate-cinema bombs of the year, “Battleship” and “John Carter.” Does this mean that there is a sea change, and that the studios will start filling their slates with outrageous international exploits, constitutional fights and gravely flawed, complex protagonists? Your guess is as good as mine, because, really, every year the studios release good, bad, indifferent work, the best of which invariably end up on my Top 10. Last year Mr. Soderbergh made one of those, “Contagion.” He better not retire, as he has threatened to do, or I will be short one studio-ready director whom I can generally count on.

There are other dependable American directors, filmmakers who are as good as any working anywhere today — and as good and sometimes better as many who worked in the old studio system. Two that come to mind are Paul Thomas Anderson (“The Master”) and Wes Anderson (“Moonrise Kingdom”). “Moonrise Kingdom” has earned $46 million, more than movies as different as “The Three Stooges” and “Resident Evil: Retribution,” both of which played on more than twice as many screens. “The Master” has brought in far less money ($15 million), but it’s pretty thrilling that this brilliant, uncompromising film was the 109th most popular at the box office, ahead of cynical dreck like “Dredd,” a reboot that flooded theaters and came with built-in brand recognition.

Talking about money may seem polluting, and I loathe the Monday box office reports, which, like the endless awards season, dominate so much of entertainment media chatter. But just like the larger shifts that certain Oscar wins underscore, the box office numbers are reassuring proof that the state of our movie culture is not as dire as some insist. Movies like “Dredd” can be dispiriting, but only if you base your arguments on the worst the movies have to offer. Today’s corporate cinema is reflective of its moment, but so are movies like “The Master,” which speaks to a fundamental human yearning for meaning in a story that is specifically American. I love old Hollywood, but Louis B. Mayer would never have made “The Master,” and neither would any other studio boss of his era.

The sheer existence of “The Master” is reflective of the aesthetic expansiveness of American movies, which contain multitudes — along with, you know, garbage. Independents like Mr. Anderson usually have to scrounge for money, true, but it is the price they pay for making the films they want, the way that they want. That seems unfair, but playing with large sums of other people’s money usually comes with strings attached. It’s worth remembering that, just as it’s worth remembering all the Hollywood hires who were forced to champ at the bit once upon a studio time. In 1935 the great screenwriter Ben Hecht wrote a hilarious, wildly filthy poem mocking the demands of his Hollywood masters: “My heroine must be so nice,” he wrote, in one smut-free bit, “This Venus of cliché and slop/Must nary imbecile affront.”

Heroines and heroes still must be nice. (Get ready for complaints that Jessica Chastain’s character in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” isn’t nice or “relatable”; to the movie’s credit, she isn’t.) But there is also more variety on screen than ever before, both in work from across the globe and even from within America. (Is it necessary to point out that this diversity means that our cinematic choices are no longer almost entirely the creative domain of white men?) This increasing diversity defines contemporary movie culture as much as corporate cinema does. And while old Hollywood movies helped teach us how to be, and dream as, Americans, movies today can impart other truths, including how to listen to other voices and to dream with other cultures that aren’t back-lot simulacrums.

There is, in other words, much to appreciate about contemporary movies this year. In 1960 the great poet, essayist, critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas wrote: “Films will soon be made as easily as written poems, and almost as cheaply. They will be made everywhere and by everybody. The empires of professionalism and big budgets are crumbling.” More than a half-century later Mr. Mekas’s Utopian vision appears to have come true in some respects, as do-it-themselves filmmakers from North Hollywood and digital cinema masters from Turkey prove. I have reservations about all the images that are here in theaters today and streaming on iTunes tomorrow. But Mr. Mekas, who turns 90 Dec. 24, and his stubborn faith in art and artists are a restorative tonic. Here’s to him! 

Top 10, alphabetical order: “Amour” (Michael Haneke); “The Deep Blue Sea” (Terence Davies); “The Gatekeepers” (Dror Moreh); “Holy Motors” (Leos Carax); “The Master” (Paul Thomas Anderson); “Moonrise Kingdom” (Wes Anderson); “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” (Nuri Bilge Ceylan); “Searching for Sugar Man” (Malik Bendjelloul); “Silver Linings Playbook” (David O. Russell); “Zero Dark Thirty” (Kathryn Bigelow). 

The rest of the best, alphabetically: “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” (Alison Klayman); “Argo” (Ben Affleck); “August and After” (Nathaniel Dorsky); “Auto-Collider XV” (Ernie Gehr); “Barbara” (Christian Petzold); “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (Benh Zeitlin); “Bernie” (Richard Linklater); “Brooklyn Castle” (Katie Dellamaggiore); “The Dark Knight Rises” (Christopher Nolan); “Departure” (Mr. Gehr); “Footnote” (Joseph Cedar); “The House I Live In” (Eugene Jarecki); “The Kid With a Bike” (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne); “Life of Pi” — only at sea (Ang Lee); “Magic Mike” (Steven Soderbergh); “A Man Vanishes” (Shohei Imamura); “Middle of Nowhere” (Ava DuVernay); “Miss Bala” (Gerardo Naranjo); “Napoleon” (Abel Gance, restored by Kevin Brownlow); “Oslo, August 31st” (Joachim Trier); “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” (Peter Lord); “Rust and Bone” (Jacques Audiard); “Skyfall” (Sam Mendes); “Starlet” (Sean Baker); “This Is Not a Film” (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb); “The Turin Horse” (Bela Tarr); “View From the Acropolis” (Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan).