Jennifer Connelly
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Five Questions for Shelter Writer/Director Paul Bettany
Actor Paul Bettany makes his directorial debut with Shelter, a drama about homeless junkies on the streets of New York starring his wife, Jennifer Connelly, and Anthony Mackie. Although Bettany references below Jerry Schatzberg’s classic Panic in Needle Park, he also emphasizes that his film moves far from those gritty New York streets of yore, finding an unexpectedly beautiful visual style to capture the life of a new generation of Gotham addicts. Shelter screens at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, September 12. Below, I talk with Bettany about cinematic inspirations, city moments and directing his wife. Filmmaker: There’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 11, 2014 -
Into the Splice: Black Swan
Things didn’t bode well from the beginning. The crowd in the theater was restive. People shifted uncomfortably in their seats even before the movie began. I was alone, and sat in the back, the projector whirring somewhere above and behind me. But that was only the beginning. As it turns out, I had been editing Alla Gadassik’s remarkable video-essay for the Requiem // 102 project, and had learned of an obscure Italian Jennifer Connelly film from 1988, Etoile (directed by Peter Del Monte), which also happens to be a nightmarish film about Swan Lake that also features a monstrous black […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jan 10, 2011 -
Jon Amiel, Creation
The first non-Canadian film to open the Toronto film festival in quite some time, Jon Amiel’s Creation seems to both embrace and shun the duties and limitations of the historical biopic. Paul Bettany stars as middle age naturalist Charles Darwin, well past his explorations on the HMS Beagle, who having settled into English country life with his children and wife Emma (Bettany’s real life spouse Jennifer Connelly), decides to finally tackle writing a book on his nascent theory of Evolution. Haunted by visions of his recently deceased daughter and the notion that he may permanently alter man’s conception of the […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 20, 2010
