The organisers of the seventh Kerry Film Festival have confirmed Mike Leigh as one of the judges for the event, which runs from October 23rd to 29th. Leigh won the Palme d'Or for Secrets & Lies at the 1996 Cannes festival and the Golden Lion for his most recent feature, Vera Drake, at Venice in 2004.
He will judge the Best Director category at the Kerry festival, where the adjudicators will include film censor John Kelleher, award-winning director Ken Wardrop, Oscar-nominated animator Bill Plympton and documentarist Peter Naylor.
John Moore, the Dundalk native who directed Behind Enemy Lines, Flight of the Phoenix and The Omen, is sponsoring the €1,000 prize for the festival's new prize, the audience award. In addition to screenings at venues all over Kerry, the festival will present masterclasses in screenwriting, animation and special effects.
www.kerryfilmfestival.com
Boorman in the Basque
John Boorman's new Irish thriller, The Tiger's Tail, which stars Brendan Gleeson and Kim Cattrall, will have its world premiere at the 54th San Sebastian Film Festival later this month. Boorman's film, which opens here in November, is in competition at the Basque Country festival. Other entries include Agnieska Holland's Copying Beethoven with Ed Harris; provocative dark comedy Sleeping Dogs Lie, directed by actor Bobcat Goldthwait; and Tom DiCillo's comedy Delirious, with Michael Pitt and Steve Buscemi.
Two documentaries are in the competition. In Ghost, Nick Broomfield explores how 23 illegal Chinese immigrants died while cockle-picking on the north coast of England in 2004. And Heddy Honigmann's Forever deals with the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the burial place of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Maria Callas, Edith Piaf, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret and Jim Morrison, among many others.
Screening out of competition at San Sebastian is the eagerly awaited new Lars von Trier movie, The Boss of It All, a Dogme comedy in which an actor finds his moral principles tested when hired to impersonate a company chairman.
A strange love of endings
Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1964) has topped a poll on www.filmcritic.com to select the best movie endings of all time. Fight Club and Chinatown are placed second and third, ahead of the "beginning of a beautiful friendship" ending in Casablanca and the bullet-sprayed finale of Bonnie and Clyde. Completing the top 10 are Boogie Nights, Night of the Living Dead (1968 version), Big Night, Don't Look Now and Some Like It Hot. Surprisingly, the doorway scene from The Searchers is down in 27th place, and the heart-tugging conclusion of Shane is a lowly 43rd. More surprisingly, only two foreign-language movies make the top 50 - Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (30th) and Fellini's 8½ (38th). And there's no trace of my favourite tearjerker finale (Imitation of Life) or the shock-ending of Carrie.
Monty Python in Belfast
Belfast Castle is the venue for open-air screenings of Monty Python and the Holy Grail next Thursday night and The Princess Bride on Friday night. Each film will be accompanied by archive newsreels on subjects from the building of the Titanic in 1912 to the DeLorean cars of the 1980s. www.belfastfilmfestival.org
Lohan's lateness lashed
Following producer James Robinson's well-publicised letter chiding Lindsay Lohan for repeatedly turning up late on the set of Georgia Rule, William H Macy has added his two cents' worth about working with Lohan on the Emilio Estevez-directed Bobby. "She was pretty late," he told a US press conference. "I think what an actor has to realise, when you show up an hour late, 150 people have been scrambling to cover for you and there is not an apology big enough in the world to have to make 150 people scramble. It's nothing but disrespect. And Lindsay Lohan is not the only one. A lot of actors show up late as if they're God's gift to the film. It's inexcusable, and they should have their asses kicked."
