• Louis Malle’s “My Dinner with Andre,” released in 1981, documented a two-hour conversation between the courtly, garrulous actor-stage director Andre Gregory and the diminutive, nasally defiant actor-playwright Wallace Shawn. If you were one of the many dazzled by it, you will undoubtedly want “Before and After Dinner,” the new documentary on Andre Gregory conceived and directed by his wife, Cindy Kleine, to see the

  • Taking a real police case--it was also the subject of a novel called "Deadly Confession" (2006) by Romanian writer Tatiana Niculescu Bran--and fictionalizing it for the big screen, Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu took his new film "După dealuri" ("Beyond the hills" in Romanian) to Cannes and walked away with two wins (Mungiu previously earned the festival's top honor, the Palme D'Or): best screenplay, and his leads

  • Great films are the product of the collaborative process. And while screenwriters may not get asked the most questions during the daily press conferences at Cannes as wordsmiths and dramatists they are responsible for the surprising comeback, the wit, the meme, and the devastating third act that make a film come alive. A screenplay is the most sought-after piece of writing nowadays--one element of a script gets overlooked and a film

  • Babygirl is Irish filmmaker Macdara Vallely’s alternatively wistful and funny tale of a sixteen year-old wise-beyond-her-years Bronx girl named Lena (Yainis Ynoa) who defiantly protects her mother (Rosa Arredondo). A lonely single mom, Lucy is easily swayed by flattery, which repeatedly links her to unworthy male suitors. When an oily, mustachioed youngster named Victor (Flaco Navaja) flirts openly with both Lena and Lucy on a

  • A cursory glance at the entertainment news cycle will quickly reveal that we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift as far as how movies are consumed; Facebook, soon to be a publicly-traded company, could in the next few years become the main player in online movie streaming (but the road ahead is fraught with peril). But aren't more people going to the movies? Or less? It's hard to say, the middle-of-the-week at

  • With today's dried-up loan markets and lack of funding for the arts, financing all of their film's budget through credit-cards, endless bartender shifts and selling internal organs is the norm for independent filmmakers. What you don't hear about often is someone shedding his identity to dodge debt collectors. New York-based David Spaltro suffered through this for two years, ever since wrapping his first, largely autobiographical film

  • Though John Landis’s name may not be as instantly recognizable as those of George Lucas or Martin Scorsese, his contributions to quintessential American cinema are just as popular and venerable as those of his better-known (or perhaps just better-marketed) colleagues. The director of such classics—a very worn-out term that actually applies here—as “Animal House” (1978), “The Blues Brothers” (1980), and “An American Werewolf