Pages tagged “penelope cruz”

With award season in full swing, Milk and Wall-E have proven to be be the big winners on both sides of the coast. The New York Film Critics Circle named the Gus Van Sant-directed drama as its best film, while the Los Angeles Film Critics Association went for Pixar's latest opus.

There's a surprisingly gargantuan Internet faction dedicated to predicting who will be up for film's most coveted prize, the Academy Award. Publications like Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times and New York Times all have Oscar blogs that obsessively trail the fluctuations in buzz amongst the year's top films. That's not to mention stand-alone sites like Awards Daily and In Contention, or well-known bloggers like Jeff Wells, Dave Poland and Anne Thompson. Even Roger Ebert has devoted a wealth of recent ink on the subject. But, the truth is, no matter how much someone knows, it's still just a wild guessing game.

It is but the middle of October and we already have our first set of 2008 film-award nominations. The Gotham Independent Film Awards announced its yearly list of nominees, shining the spotlight on a number of smaller films sure to factor into the Oscar equation later this year.

The annals of director-actor relationships are long and storied—Leone-Eastwood, Scorsese-DeNiro, Burton-Depp—but among the least celebrated living examples has to be Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz.

Release Date: Aug. 15
Director/Writer: Woody Allen
Cinematographer: Javier Aguirresarobe
Starring: Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall
Studio/Run Time: The Weinstein Company, 97 mins.

Woody Allen and his star-studded cast strike the right balance between sex and comedy

In his most delightful subversion yet, septuagenarian Woody Allen’s films get richer and sexier as he grows older and greyer. Credit the success of 2005’s Match Point for a lesson well-learned: The right, pillowy-lipped cast can turn would-be annoying neuroticism into a compelling look at human nature and culture clashes.

Release Date: August 8 (limited)

Director: Isabel Coixet

Writer: Nicholas Meyer, Philip Roth

Cinematographer: Jean-Claude Larrieu

Starring: Ben Kingsley, Penelope Cruz, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson

Studio/Run Time: Samuel Goldwyn Films, 108 mins.

Being an intelligent, self-satisfied, confident and worldly college professor is not enough to protect David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) from the power of love in Elegy, Nicholas Meyer’s film adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel The Dying Animal. While having a reputation for seducing his female students, Kepesh continuously avoids any kind of lasting relationship, until he meets Consuela (Penelope Cruz), a dark-haired beauty of Cuban immigrants who becomes Kepesh’s lover, but also his obsession. Like an infatuated schoolboy fearful of rejection, he pines over her when she is not with him but keeps her at bay when she is close. While the age difference seemingly means nothing to Consuela, Kepesh uses it and his belief in carnal adventures without commitment to sabotage any kind of possible future together.