• Who is Billy Moore? He's a British citizen who was caught heroin while in Thailand and sent to jail, only to emerge a boxing champion. A white male, who gets thrown in jail while sojourning in a completely foreign country and walks out of there a boxing champion makes for the kind of extraordinary, by-the-bootstraps survival story that screenwriters are hardly able to generate. As it were, "A Prayer Before Dawn" is adapted from a book that Moore

  • It's been a few days now since Sam Weisberg published his article about the rivalry between two men (a director, Abel Ferrara, and a distributor, Vincent Maraval) and the former's claims to artistic prerogative surrounding the production and subsequent U.S. release of the movie "Welcome to New York." I sent a link of Sam's article to Abel Ferrara, who had also received financing from Paris-based Wild Bunch

  • Today, after a six month-press war launched by filmmaker Abel Ferrara against his chief financier, Vincent Maraval (French distributor Wild Bunch's head honcho) and IFC Films, the R-rated cut of Ferrara’s originally unrated “Welcome to New York” is opening theatrically—to Ferrara’s chagrin—in the US.

    It is, however, only showing at one theater: The Roxie, in San Francisco.

  • (PARIS) Here’s guessing you’re not going to see French cinéaste Abdellatif Kechiche (at left in picture) and producer/distributor Marin Karmitz enjoying onion soup together at Le Sélect anytime soon. A court in France ruled that Palme D’Or recipient Kechiche (“Blue is the warmest color,” a.k.a. “La vie D’Adèle” in the original French title) did not fulfill the terms of the contract that bound him to MK2