The Paperboy received it’s first screening at Cannes early this morning, and the reviews are coming in. It sounds like it has aroused a lot of controversy, but that was certainly to be expected! Everything I’ve read so far praises Nicole for her performance, which is exciting. And then of course there’s the pee-ing news! Read on for the first reviews, and check back throughout the day for more reviews as they come in …

Cannes 2012: The Paperboy – review

Nicole Kidman’s performance is To Die For in Lee Daniels’s gripping, scary and queasily funny Florida noir

A heady, humid swamp fever rises from Lee Daniels’s violent and black-comic Florida noir The Paperboy, based on the thriller by Pete Dexter: a lazy, funny tone co-exists with menace, and Nicole Kidman gives her best performance since To Die For. Race, sex, journalism, publishing and 60s America are all part of the mix – The Help was never like this – and Daniels keeps it bubbling. This gripping, scary and queasily funny picture nurtures a dark threat which lurks like one of its gators just below the surface.

Apart from everything else, The Paperboy is about family dysfunction: Scott Glenn plays WW, a smalltown Florida newspaper publisher whose louche son Ward (Matthew McConaughey), having gone into the family business, has just come in from Miami on a mission to write a massive story about a miscarriage of justice on their doorstep. Convicted felon Hillary Van Wetter, played by a horribly sleazy and bloated John Cusack, faces the electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit. Ward and his colleague Yardley (David Oyelowo) – a black man whose smooth British accent cows the racist locals – figure they can crack this case wide open, and Ward’s excitable kid brother Jack, played by Zac Efron, has offered to be their driver.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nicole and her The Paperboy co-stars and director appeared on French talk show Le Grand Journal earlier today to talk about their film. If you can understand French, then it’s a fantastic, long interview. If not, then the French voiceover is slightly too loud to be able to hear much of the English unfortunately. We can see her get embarrassed by the large picture of Charlotte displayed on one of the screens though! Maybe one of our French speaking fans can give us a quick lowdown on what was said. Nevertheless, have a watch below.

I will add screencaptures from the interview in the coming days.

Thanks to our forum news poster extraordinaire thehours_fan for the alert to this.

Power Couple, Covering War (And Waging Their Own)

Before Christiane Amanpour, before Ann Garrels, before Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, there was Martha Gellhorn, one of the first great female war correspondents.

From the Spanish Civil War through Vietnam, she covered every major conflict of the day. But Gellhorn’s reputation as a journalist was sometimes overshadowed by her marriage to one of the great American writers, Ernest Hemingway.

HBO has made a film about Hemingway and Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. The movie puts the spotlight back on the lady in question, a striking figure — leggy, smart and impassioned.

In 1983, a British TV interviewer posed this loaded question to Gellhorn, then 75 and still gorgeous: “I.F. Stone once described governments as comprised entirely of liars and nothing they say should ever be believed.”

Read the rest of this entry »

BEST-SELLING Stourbridge author S J Watson has spoken of his excitement at the news that Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman is to star in the forthcoming film adaptation of his debut novel.

Moulin Rouge and Eyes Wide Shut star Kidman is to play amnesia patient Christine, who wakes each day to find she’s married to a stranger and she’s 20 years older than she remembers, in the movie version of Watson’s best-selling psychological thriller Before I Go To Sleep.

Bafta-winning director Rowan Joffe is directing the film which is currently in pre-production – with movie moguls Sir Ridley Scott and Tony Scott involved as executive producers.

Watson, who grew up in Wordsley, said: “The news that a star like Nicole Kidman will be starring in the film of my book just feels incredibly surreal – and incredibly exciting.

“I can’t wait to see what someone with her talent can bring to the role.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Cannes buyers have fallen under the spell of “Grace of Monaco,” Olivier Dahan’s drama toplining Nicole Kidman as thesp-turned-princess Grace Kelly.

Repped by L.A.-based shingle Inferno, “Grace of Monaco” pre-sold to Italy (Lucky Red), Australia (Entertainment One), Scandinavia (Scanbox), Germany (Square One), Latin America (Play Arte), Eastern Europe (Revolutionary Releasing) and Benelux (RVC).

“‘Grace’ has been very well received by buyers because they’ve been tracking the project since it’s been on the (Hollywood screenplay) Black List,” Inferno’s co-founder Jim Seibel tells Variety.

Seibel added, “‘Grace’ is on track to sell worldwide by the end of the market — the few remaining territories, including Spain, U.K. and Canada, are expected to be closed in the coming days.”

Dahan is best known for helming “La Vie en Rose,” the Edith Piaf biopic that earned Marion Cotillard an Oscar.

The 1962-set “Grace,” which is penned by Brit screenwriter Arash Amel, is produced by Pierre-Ange Le Pogam’s Stone Angels. The Gallic outfit is also producing Inferno-repped “Maggie,” Henry Hobson’s upscale genre pic based on John Scott 3′s script.

- Variety.com

‘Hemingway & Gellhorn’: Love is a battlefield in the HBO movie
Stormy lovers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn are played by Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in the film directed by Phil Kaufman.

Most writers can only daydream about meeting — in the flesh — the characters they’ve imagined. But for Ernest Hemingway, one afternoon in Key West, Fla., it came close to actually happening. One day when the writer was in his mid-30s, hanging out at a local fisherman’s bar, he spotted a woman uncannily similar to the strong-willed, sexually liberated heartbreaker from his first novel.

“It’s as if, borne on the sea foam, she emerged — out of his own mind,” says director Phil Kaufman. “The woman of his dreams, of his own writing, came into his life.”

Kaufman is not musing idly; he’s recently completed directing a film about the relationship between the burly novelist and Martha Gellhorn, the intrepid war correspondent whom Kaufman sees as reminiscent of Lady Brett Ashley from “The Sun Also Rises.”

After Gellhorn walked into Sloppy Joe’s bar on that day in 1936, her life, like that of the novelist, was fundamentally altered. Hemingway — married at the time to Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife — urged Gellhorn, still establishing herself as a writer, to go with him to cover the Spanish Civil War. There the two began a romance, and they were later married in what proved to be a passionate but often difficult union.

As Kaufman sees it, Hemingway’s enthusiasm and support lighted a spark in Gellhorn, but that’s where things got complicated. “He ignited it,” says Nicole Kidman, who plays the journalist with an assertive spirit. “But once he ignited it, I don’t think he wanted that flame to grow.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Nicole Kidman plays 3rd Mrs. Hemingway

Actress Nicole Kidman says she loves plumbing someone else’s psyche. It’s the thing that keeps her coming back to acting, something she’s done for 28 years. “I think I still like getting lost in somebody else’s world,” she says.

“It’s just very rewarding. I don’t work as much now because I have a 12-year-old and a 3-year-old that require an enormous amount of time to raise them properly and to be there. So when I go and work, I’ve got to really feel it. I’ve got to feel the desire to tell the story.”

She felt the desire so keenly for her latest project, HBO’s “Hemingway & Gellhorn,” that she pleaded for the part.

Earlier she’d run into director Philip Kaufman at a fund-raiser. “His wife had recently passed, Rose, and he was still in an enormous of amount of pain and grief,” she recalls.

“He was there with his son. I was there and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, there’s Phil Kaufman.’ And I went over to him and I said, ‘How are you? You look like you’re in a lot of pain.’ And he went, ‘I am. I’m not good.’ Things that words don’t say, we just connected. And I loved him because he loved his wife so much and because you could just see the rawness.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The 10 Greatest Movies of the Millennium (Thus Far)
TIME’s Richard Corliss has created a countdown of the 10 greatest films made since the year 2000, from No. 10 (The Artist) to No. 1 (see for yourself)

9. Moulin Rouge!, 2001

If a feeling is too intense to put into words, then put it into song. That’s an artistic mandate that applied for millennia to all forms of drama (Greek tragedy, Italian opera, Hollywood movies), though later audiences found it laughably peculiar. Leave it to Baz Luhrmann, the unreconstructed Aussie romantic who infused Shakespeare with an urban urgency in Romeo + Juliet, to go both retro and now-tro in a musical that blends MGM and MTV. It’s a convulsive love story daubed in a giddily gaudy palette, with the never-prettier Nicole Kidman entrancing hunkily soulful Ewan McGregor in an orgasmic swirl of color, design and pop music. Wearing its soft heart on its fancily embroidered sleeve, Moulin Rouge! brought love stories back in fashion — though in the debased form of films from Nicholas Sparks novels — and cued the sporadic revival of musical movies and TV shows (Mamma Mia!, Hairspray, Glee). In the age of media cool, this recklessly amorous burst of kinetic excess offended cooler sensibilities even as it launched other viewers, including this one, into rapture. The movie asks, Moulin Rouge-ez avec moi ce soir? I say, Sure. All night long.

- See the rest of the list at Time.com

The helmer talks about his Competition entry “The Paperboy” and how Cannes is an out-of-body experience.

Lee Daniels is a Cannes veteran who has steadily worked his way up through the festival’s hierarchy.

The Woodsman, which he produced, played Directors’ Fortnight in 2004. Precious, which he directed, was featured in Un Certain Regard in 2009. And this year, Daniels graduates to the Competition with his newest film, The Paperboy, which receives its gala priemere on Thursday.

An adaptation of the 1995 novel by Pete Dexter, the film is set in 1960s South Florida, where a young man (Zac Efron) witnesses a series of events while his journalist older brother (Matthew McConaughey) is recruited by a death-row groupie (Nicole Kidman) to prove that a man convicted of murder (John Cusack) is innocent. Daniels spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about finally returning to work after the whirlwind that surrounded the release of Precious, how he assembled a cast and what it means to him to be summoned to walk the red carpet.

After Precious, you spent several years pursuing a movie called Selma, about the famous Civil Rights march. How did The Paperboy become your next movie instead?

I did. We got right to the altar, and the bride ran away. We had the money, but I needed more money. Looking at it in hindsight now, I should have figured out a way [to make Selma]. I think oftentimes filmmakers make that mistake. I know I did. You don’t realize the gift that you have making films. It’s so rare that you have the opportunity to do it. But it brought Paperboy into my lap. I had had the book, Pete’s book. I’d gotten it around the same time I’d gotten Precious, actually Push, by Sapphire. I enjoyed both of them very much. They are the types of books that are on my bed stand. When I got some money from investors, I had the choice and I decided to do Precious. After Precious, there were several movies that were floating around — Nights of Cabiria, Miss Saigon. Being courted by so many people because of the hype of Precious, you lose a sense of focus. But after the fairy dust settled and reality kicked back in, I became an unemployed director. I went back to what I knew, which was my passion for Paperboy.

Read the rest of this entry »