ASIA ARGENTO IN DIRECTOR CATHERINE BREILLAT’S THE LAST MISTRESS. COURTESY IFC FILMS. Hated and loved in equal measure, Catherine Breillat is a filmmaker who could never be accused of being boring. The French writer director seems courting controversy since the beginning of her career: she was a literary sensation at the age of 17 when she published her first novel, L’homme Facile which was sufficiently racy to be forbidden reading for minors and her first cinematic involvement was acting in Bernardo Bertolucci’s sordid classic Last Tango in Paris (1972). She made her directorial debut in 1976 with an adaptation of […]
by Nick Dawson on Jun 27, 2008NATALIE PORTMAN AND JAVIER BARDEM IN MILOS FORMAN’S GOYA’S GHOSTS. COURTESY SAMUEL GOLDWYN FILMS. It is something of a tragic irony that after escaping the restrictions of Communist Czechoslovakia in 1968 — where he had made five films in five years — in the subsequent 40 years Milos Forman has worked in America, he has only made a further nine features. Taking Off (1971) was a transition between the looseness of his Czech films, such as the classic Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen’s Ball (1967), and the more conventional Hollywood style he would later adopt, and was […]
by Nick Dawson on Jul 20, 2007