Kristin Scott Thomas

DVD on Kristin Scott Thomas:

	The Golden Compass (New Line Platinum Series Two-Disc Widescreen Edition) EDITION:  DVD MANUFACTURER:  New Line Home Video RELEASE DATE:  29 April, 2008
	Life as a House (New Line Platinum Series) EDITION:  DVD MANUFACTURER:  New Line Home Video RELEASE DATE:  26 March, 2002
	The English Patient (Miramax Collector's Edition) EDITION:  DVD MANUFACTURER:  Miramax Home Entertainment RELEASE DATE:  29 June, 2004
	Body and Soul EDITION:  DVD MANUFACTURER:  Questar RELEASE DATE:  02 October, 2007
	Gosford Park EDITION:  DVD MANUFACTURER:  Universal Studios RELEASE DATE:  25 June, 2002
	The Horse Whisperer Scott Thomas, Kristin EDITION:  DVD MANUFACTURER:  Walt Disney Video RELEASE DATE:  10 November, 1998
	Four Weddings and a Funeral (Deluxe Edition) EDITION:  DVD MANUFACTURER:  MGM (Video & DVD) RELEASE DATE:  31 January, 2006
	Four Weddings and a Funeral EDITION:  DVD MANUFACTURER:  MGM (Video & DVD) RELEASE DATE:  07 September, 1999
	Keeping Mum EDITION:  DVD MANUFACTURER:  Velocity / Thinkfilm RELEASE DATE:  20 February, 2007
	Richard III EDITION:  DVD MANUFACTURER:  MGM (Video & DVD) RELEASE DATE:  28 March, 2000

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Europe

Golden Globe hopes for Winslet and Mendes

Working with one's spouse can so often be a shortcut to acrimony, but not for Kate Winslet and her husband, Sam Mendes. Yesterday, their first joint project, Revolutionary Road - directed by him and starring her - received a slew of nominations at the Golden Globes, honoured alongside an unusually large array of British talent.If all goes well on January 11, he could win best director, it could win best film, she could scoop best actress and her co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio, could take best actor.Winslet has another chance to win the Golden Globe that has eluded her on five occasions: she is also nominated for best supporting actress for The Reader, in which she plays a former Nazi concentration camp guard who has an affair with a teenage boy.The Winslet-Mendeses are not the only couple up for awards. Brad Pitt is nominated for best actor for his role as the eponymous hero in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, who is born aged 80 and grows younger by the day, and his partner, Angelina Jolie, has a chance at best actress for The Changeling.In the coveted best drama category, Revolutionary Road is competing against Stephen Daldry's The Reader and another British-directed film, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire. But the big competition looks to come from Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which both won five nominations. Doubt, which stars Meryl Streep as a nun who confronts a priest she suspects of abusing a black student, is also competing in five categories.British talent was nominated in at least 20 of the 25 categories.British actress Kristin Scott Thomas was nominated in the best dramatic actress category for her role in the French film I've Loved You So Long. It is her first Golden Globe nomination since 1997, when she was up for best actress for her performance in The English Patient.Other British women in contention include Emma Thompson for Last Chance Harvey, Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky and Rebecca Hall for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The last two are up for best comedy or musical, alongside Burn After Reading, Happy-Go-Lucky, In Bruges and Mamma Mia!Ralph Fiennes has been given a best TV actor nod for Bernard and Doris, an HBO film in which he stars alongside Susan Sarandon. He is also a contender in the best supporting actor category for The Duchess, against the late Heath Ledger, who is favourite to win for his role as the Joker in the Batman film The Dark Knight.Frost/Nixon is a big-screen version of Peter Morgan's West End hit, which recreates the 1977 standoff between presenter David Frost and the disgraced former president Richard Nixon. Morgan has been nominated for best screenplay, pitting him against fellow Britons Simon Beaufoy for Slumdog Millionaire and David Hare for The Reader.The Globes are typically seen as a crucial pointer towards the Academy Awards that follow in February, though they are not foolproof. Last year's best drama award went to Atonement, while Sweeney Todd was named best comedy or musical. A month later, the best film Oscar went to No Country for Old Men. Sweeney Todd failed to even secure a nomination.Kate WinsletBrad PittAngelina JolieGolden GlobesMeryl StreepDanny Boyleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Published: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:17:38 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the article

Europe

Dame Judi Dench honoured at European Oscars

Having tackled countless Shakespearean roles down the years, Dame Judi Dench fulfilled an unlikely ambition at Saturday night's 21st annual European film awards in Copenhagen. She was finally able to play the Dane.The Yorkshire-born actor, in town to collect a lifetime achievement award, admitted she had never visited Denmark before, but added: "This is a surprise because I have some Danish blood in my ancestry." As if to prove it, she proceeded to deliver a portion of her speech in Hamlet's native tongue.Dench, 74 tomorrow, was honoured for a silver screen career that stretches back to a supporting turn in 1964's The Third Secret. She has won nine Baftas, and an Oscar for her role as Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. In recent years her profile has been raised by acclaimed performances in Iris and Notes on a Scandal alongside a lucrative, ongoing gig as M in the James Bond pictures. Fittingly, she was handed her award by the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, who played the villainous Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. "I have been acting for 51 years now," Dench reflected. "So I hope lifetime achievement means more than 51 years, because I'm about to do a play in my 52nd year. It would be nice to think it's not all over."The European film awards were conceived as a riposte to the Hollywood-dominated Oscars. Past evidence suggests few of the winning pictures stand much chance of troubling next February's Academy Awards in anything but the foreign film category. What they lack in star voltage they make up for in quality. Dench aside, the night's big winner was Gomorrah. Matteo Garrone's harsh, hard-hitting exposé of the Neapolitan mafia took five awards, including best director and best film. "I want to thank all the people who helped make this difficult and dangerous movie," Garrone said. "Living in Naples is like living in a jungle. Every day is a fight for survival, and I want to share these awards with those people. I'm standing up here on my own and it's not right. Film is a collaborative art."It was a decent night for British talent. Kristin Scott Thomas was named best actress for her role in the French-language I've Loved You So Long, while British artist Steve McQueen scooped the European discovery award for his debut feature, Hunger.Following the ceremony, however, McQueen confessed he had no immediate plans to capitalise on this success. "I've never understood how film-makers can just go from one film to the next," he told the Guardian. "I've lived and breathed Hunger for the last five years of my life, so it's natural to want a cooling off period. Right now my focus is back on art and on the Venice Biennale, which happens in 2009." Having just been discovered, McQueen seems intent on losing himself again - at least so far as the European film industry is concerned.Elsewhere, the achievement in world cinema award went to Danish directors Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen and Kristian Levring, co-founders of the Dogme 95 manifesto. At times it seemed Dogme's anarchic approach had infected the ceremony as a whole. Spare a thought for Spanish nominee Oscar Faura, who rushed the stage to collect the cinematography award for The Orphanage, only to find that it had actually gone to Gomorrah instead.Awards and prizesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Published: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:14:13 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the article

Europe

Jason Solomons takes a look at the films that are rejuvenating French cinema

When director Laurent Cantet accepted the Palme d'Or at Cannes last May, he took to the stage surrounded by a large cast of children. African, Caribbean, white, Arab, Chinese - these French faces were the young stars of his film Entre les murs (The Class). It was a stirring, televised spectacle for the host nation - not only was it the first time in 21 years that a French film had picked up cinema's most prestigious trophy but it was a film about youth, hope and multi-culturalism that had achieved it.The Class is a magnificent film tracing a state school year in the lively, racially mixed classroom of one teacher, François Bégaudeau. A winning blend of documentary style and improvised drama, the film reflects the changing nature of French society in microcosm, using these 14-year-old Parisian kids' identities and personalities to touch on themes of race, postcolonialism, language and law. Cantet's film is not typical of traditional French cinema, but does its success at Cannes mean that, finally, France's film-makers are opening up to the possibilities of reflecting the new world around them?Perhaps the cosy, traditional French bourgeois drama is becoming a thing of the past. Such films have tended to fall into two categories: the country house affair, with large family gatherings on sun-filled terraces; or the urbane Parisian comedy, packed with bistro meetings, girls in summer dresses, chic women in Chanel suits, fabulous apartments overlooking the Seine and strolls in the Jardin du Luxembourg.Perhaps the optimism inspired by France's victory in the football World Cup that it hosted in 1998, when the 'rainbow nation' team of Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry and Youri Djorkaeff paraded along the Champs-Elysées, has now filtered into French culture. 'All I know is that this film struck a chord with this particular jury at Cannes in this particular year,' says Cantet. 'I greatly enjoyed making the film and spending a year with these wonderful young people, so, personally, I think there is great cause for hope in the future of our country and it is encouraging to see that hope reflected in French cinema.'These are heady times for French film, which seems finally to have found a new voice after many years spent emerging from the long shadows of the Nouvelle Vague and battling the influence of Hollywood. French films are taking centre stage around the world and the names of French directors are once again rolling off the tongues of cinephiles: Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, Olivier Assayas, Agnès Jaoui. Is this the start of a new New Wave?This group of directors is disparate but certainly brings a new edge to French film. Cantet has been building a distinctive career with socially aware films such as Human Resources and Time Out, films about men caught in suffocating systems and workplaces. Kechiche, born in Tunisia, has also - in films such as L'esquive (The Dodge) and last year's César-winning Couscous - concentrated on a social realism more in tune with the films of Britain's Ken Loach than anything in the French tradition. The films of Assayas, a former film critic, range widely, from twentysomething Parisian bourgeois angst in Fin août, début septembre, to a spin on period drama among a porcelain-producing family in Les destinées sentimentales, to doom-laden global futurism in Demonlover.'We're not a family, that's for sure,' says Agnès Jaoui, the writer, director and actress whose new film, Let's Talk About the Rain, is now playing in UK cinemas. Jaoui - known for polished ensemble comedies such as the Cannes-winning Comme une image (Look at Me) and The Taste of Others - was brought up by poor immigrant Tunisian Jewish parents in Paris. 'I don't feel that we're part of a new school or fashion or movement. But, yes, we are, we must be, united by something - the fact that, somehow, 15 years or so ago, French cinema survived.'Jaoui is referring to 'la loi Toubon', the law introduced in 1994 by culture minister Jacques Toubon which protected French language and production. Two out of every five songs on the radio, for example, must be in French. The laws on film production led to tax breaks and levies pouring money into French productions and keeping French films playing in multiplexes.According to Jaoui, all European countries would benefit from such laws. 'French cinema was nearly destroyed by the weight of its own history and by the power of Hollywood on its young people,' she says. 'Maybe even film-makers were against these laws at first, but now I would say that, among us all in the current generation, there is a general feeling, a mood, of survival and of diversity.'In France, 2008 has been a landmark year. Not only did The Class win the Palme d'Or but Marion Cotillard won a Best Actress Oscar - the first French language performance ever to do so, propelling her film, La Vie en Rose, to impressive international box-office figures (£1m in the UK). France also produced its most successful film ever in Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks), a culture-clash comedy based in small-town northern France, which brought 20 million French people into cinemas, grossing more than $200m and, so far, racking up more than two million DVD sales. No film, French or American, has been more popular.In the UK, French film dominates the foreign language releases. The number of French films in 2008 stands at 42, with receipts expected to be above £15m. According to Unifrance, which promotes French film abroad, the number of tickets sold in the UK for French films in the past three years has increased fivefold.What we are seeing, in other words, is a new wave of commercialism in French cinema. Rather than wowing the world - as the New Wave did with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle or Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups - with a new style or a new film grammar, France has positioned itself as a powerhouse of production, cultivating a domestic scene that also feeds international reputation and demand. For instance, it is not seen as a commercial risk to have French actor Mathieu Amalric as the latest Bond villain.French cinema is using this new internationalism wisely. Guillaume Canet, for instance, is perhaps best known for starring with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach. But he is also the young director behind Tell No One, a stylish thriller that enjoyed a long run in British cinemas last year and is now enjoying cult success in New York and Los Angeles. You would not call it traditional 'arthouse', but it does trade on being more upmarket simply because it's in a foreign language. It also depicts a grittier, urban France, which is also reflected in one of the most anticipated French films, Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One, an epic, two-part crime saga starring Vincent Cassel as one of France's most notorious gangsters. This year's current stylish French mystery - complete with bluesy guitar slides reminiscent of Tell No One - is I've Loved You So Long, which looks likely to earn several awards nominations for its leading lady, Kristin Scott Thomas, who also appeared in Tell No One, and is, of course, familiar around the world.The global reach of French cinema is both a blessing and a curse, according to a veteran observer of such things. Agnès Varda, often labelled the 'grandmother of the New Wave', is now 80 but has just completed a beguiling personal film called Les plages d'Agnès. 'Nowadays, French cinema has to be international to survive. There is so much competition, so much pressure. Now you have films from a dozen other countries. We never had that. Our only competition used to be from the Italians.'Varda thinks highly of Abdellatif Kechiche whose La graine et le mulet (Couscous) is a wonderful film which follows an elderly Arab immigrant, Slimane, as he tries to build his dream: a fish couscous restaurant on a disused boat in the town of Sète, near Marseille. Again, like Cantet, using improvisation and documentary techniques in a realist tradition, Kechiche's masterly work brought to the fore a cast of characters - mostly Arab in origin - ignored by French cinema for too long. An unexpected commercial success at the French box office, Couscous introduced the actress Hafsia Herzi and she is now on her way to becoming French cinema's first female Arab superstar.France's leading Arab film star is Jamel Debbouze, who first became known through TV comedy but who has now moved to the big screen in films such as the Asterix adaptations starring Gérard Depardieu, Amélie opposite Audrey Tatou and, most significantly, the fine revisionist Second World War drama Days of Glory, directed by Algerian-born Rachid Bouchareb, about the contribution of African troops in liberating France from the Nazis. Debbouze is now starring in Let's Talk About the Rain. 'Jamel is a phenomenon in France, not just a star,' says Jaoui. 'But would you believe we still got some sniping in the press, that we were seeking bigger audiences by working with Jamel, that we were somehow dumbing down our usual ensemble to include him. That's just rubbish, but it shows how hard it still is to change things around in France.'Even more traditional French films have been given a twist. It's interesting to note that idiosyncratic director Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale and Olivier Assayas's recent hit, Summer Hours, starring Juliette Binoche, are both about old French families coming to terms with the death of their matriarch and the divvying up of the family home. Let's Talk About the Rain has similar themes. All three films show a big French family shaken up by modern life, with its taxes, globalism and multiculturalism. For Assayas, a return to making bourgeois drama was, ironically, the route for him to say more about the future of French culture. In the film, family members (including Binoche, Jérémie Renier, Charles Berling) meet to discuss what to do with the valuable art collection left in their family summer house after the death of their mother (Edith Scob), once the lover of a great artist. The film borrowed many fabulous artworks from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.'I was surprised how easily this kind of bourgeois story was the canvas for talking about issues that obsess me,' says Assayas. 'Namely, how to respect the past yet also to embrace the future and appreciate its styles, fashions and ideas as much as what came before. I was surprised, too, by how popular this type of story still is with audiences, particularly abroad.'It's interesting that this generation of film-makers see themselves as reacting to the New Wave. 'The films of Godard and Truffaut are fine,' says Jaoui, 'but I think it took the new generation so long to come out of the shadow of the Nouvelle Vague that they did as much harm as good. You know, the Cahiers du Cinéma [France's leading intellectual film magazine] and the critics, that sort of snobisme held back film-makers for too long - it made us scared, lacking in experimentation to find our own voice to say: this is who we are, this is how we want our films to sound, to look, to be about.'I'm French but I'm the child of Tunisian parents, so I don't know if I would call my film French in any typical way. What is that now? Is it sophisticated comedy or realist social drama or big budget action? What we see now is very talented film-makers realising, hey, we're all still here, we're all alive, so let's just make the films we can and enjoy it. If that's a movement, then that's what we're all part of.' ? The Class opens in FebruaryWhat do you think? Email us at review@observer.co.ukNew classics: Cinq to see Irreversible (2002) Violent stunner from Argentinian-born director Gaspar Noé, a long, dark Paris nightmare about Vincent Cassel seeking revenge for the rape of his lover, Monica Bellucci. Prompted walk-outs and fainting at Cannes.The Beat My Heart Skipped (2005) Career-making performance by actor Romain Duris in Jacques Audiard's urban thriller about a property repo-man among immigrant squatters who really wants to be a concert pianist. Hidden (2005) Directed by Austrian Michael Haneke, Hidden gripped audiences with its unsettling mystery about a couple (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) sent incriminating video tapes - a brilliant film about post-colonial bourgeois guilt and the first to mention a police massacre of Algerian protesters in Paris in 1961.La Vie en Rose (2007) Olivier Dahan's biopic of Edith Piaf earned Marion Cotillard the first-ever best actress Oscar for a French language performance. Controversially skated over the Nazi occupation of Paris, and Piaf's performances for German officers.Couscous (2007) Released in France as La graine et le mulet, it was the surprise winner of four Césars earlier this year. The long family Sunday lunch is one of the great food scenes in film.World cinemaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Published: Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:03:35 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the article

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