समाचार

“The Brutalist” was one of the buzziest titles to come out of the Venice Film Festival, pushing filmmaker Brady Corbet immediately into many Oscar predictions lists for best director. Many might not be aware that, 20 years earlier, Corbet was the teenage lead star of the film “Thunderbirds.”

This cinematic fact was revealed on stage at the BFI London Film Festival in something of a rare public talk by the heads of Working Title, Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.

Despite being arguably the U.K.’s best known and most successful production company — whose more than 150 films have landed more than 300 Oscars, BAFTAs and Golden Globes combined — the two were asked to discuss their failures and the lessons learned along the way.

“Thunderbirds” — based on the cult sci-fi TV series — was among the flops mentioned, making just $28 million from a budget of $57 million.

The fault with that film — according to Fellner...

Click here to read the full article.

Cate Blanchett has become a mainstay of the Venice Film Festival. She was named best actress in 2007 for her turn as a reimagined version of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, and she served as the international jury president in 2020 as the festival emerged from Covid.

But her allegiance to Venice dates back to 1998, when, at age 29, the Australian actress made her first visit to the fest with Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, in which she played the English queen as a young woman, earning her first Oscar nomination in the process.

Two years later, she returned with British director Sally Potter’s The Man Who Cried. In the film, set mostly in Paris on the eve of World War II, Christina Ricci played a dislocated Russian Jew who joins a singing and dancing troupe, where she is befriended by a Russian...

by Nathaniel R

I'm pleased to share that I have returned for a second appearance on Murtada's fun podcast "Sundays with Cate" in which he's surveying Cate Blanchett's whole career (not chronologically) with various guests. This week's topic is the strange Sally Potter misfire The Man Who Cried (2001), a pre World War II drama about dancing Russians, singing Jews, and operatic Italians in Paris. I requested this one because I remembered being absolutely bewitched by one closeup in particular when the film was in theaters. But the film had become so entirely forgotten (even by me) that I could barely remember anything of the context. The film stars Johnny Depp and Cristina Ricci (both having just co-starred in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow) placing it forever in a very specific place in Hollywood time. Give us a listen! ...

U.S. weekend box office (though we still won't have theaters any time soon for some cities) 

The Croods: New Age $4.4 ($20.3 cum) Half Brothers $720k *new* Freaky $460k ($7.7 cum) All My Life $350k *new* The War With Grandpa $329k

Home Viewing? This week we rewatched The Man Who Cried (2000/2001) of all things for Murtada's Sundays with Cate podcast as well as Citizen Kane (1941) which is as marvelous as ever and finally finished The Queens Gambit (2020) which was so so satisfying. On the Rocks on Apple was a pleasant if uneventful sit. We also took in Mank  on Netflix and a preview of News of the World (in theaters at Christmas) both of which were lush and great-looking but would have been infinitely better on a big movie screen *cries* where they could totally envelop your senses and thus your mood. What did you see this week? ...

For this week's episode of Murtada's new podcast "Sundays with Cate," I've finally joined in as a special guest. I told him I wanted one of her obscure movies and though my preference was the total oddity The Man Who Cried (2000) which no one ever discusses and which is quite discussable (trust) it is hard to find these days. So we did Paradise Road (1997) instead. This is the movie Dame Blanchett made right before Elizabeth which would of course change everything. 

In the mid 90s she was but one of many rising actresses Hollywood was curious about but not yet besotted with... would this young Aussie deliver? The answer was "and how!" but time hadn't yet provided that spoiler alert. 

Listen in!

At a casual glance, it would seem that British filmmaker Sally Potter is something of a chameleon, moving between subjects as wide-ranging as an person who lives as both a man and a woman over a few hundred years (Orlando), Europe pre-Holocaust (The Man Who Cried), the fashion industry (Rage), a British political drawing-room farce (The Party), and an examination of her own struggles in the film industry (The Tango Lesson). But as my friend and colleague So Mayer titled her book on the multitalented auteur, Potter is interested in the politics of love, in all its variations. For her latest foray into this landscape, she has enlisted (yet again) the services of some incredible acting talent - in this case, Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning,...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Molly

Sally Potter’s ninth feature will be Molly, a narrative taking place across three continents featuring a stellar cast. The project is produced by Christopher Sheppard, Elizabeth Lodge Stepp, and Josh Penn and stars Elle Fanning, (returning to work for Potter after 2012’s Ginger and Rosa – read review), Javier Bardem, Chris Rock, Salma Hayek, Laura Linney and Savion Glover. Potter’s exceptional debut, the experimental Julie Christie headlined The Gold Diggers (1983), played in Berlin’s Forum program. Since then, Potter entered Berlin’s competition in 2009 with Rage and again in 2017 with The Party. Potter’s Tilda Swinton headlined breakthrough, the fascinating adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando competed in Venice, where she would return in 2000 with The Man Who Cried.…...

Back in 1992, Sally Potter was a pretty big deal. She had just released “Orlando” to universal acclaim, which featured an exquisite performance from Tilda Swinton as the titular nobleman who moved through centuries of British history without aging. It was an ambitious film that put Potter on the map and gave us hope that she might be the next important voice in indie cinema. However, with every ensuing movie she made (“The Tango Lesson,” “The Man Who Cried,” “Yes,” “Rage,” “Ginger & Rosa“) it felt like she had hit her peek too early.

Continue reading ‘The Party’ Trailer: Patricia Clarkson, Cillian Murphy & More Let Loose at The Playlist.

Johnny Depp has been keeping a low profile since his divorce from Amber Heard, but the actor couldn’t resist making a surprise appearance at an event honoring his friend, Harry Dean Stanton.

Depp, 53, made an unannounced appearance Sunday night at The Ace Hotel Theater in Los Angeles, where a host of actors and musicians were on hand to celebrate the Vidiots foundation presenting Stanton, 90, with the first ever Harry Dean Stanton Award.

The event included appearances and performances by John C. Reilly, Kris Kristofferson, Father John Misty, Harper Simon, Inara George, David Lynch and host Ed Begley Jr. Depp made a surprise cameo,...

Murtada here. Iconoclastic British filmmaker Sally Potter (Orlando, The Man Who Cried, Ginger & Rosa) started shooting her new movie The Party, this week. The film, which unfolds in real time, revolves around a drinks party held by a London couple to celebrate the wife’s promotion to minister in the Shadow Cabinet. It is described by its producers like so:

a comedy wrapped around a tragedy. It starts as a celebration and ends with blood on the floor.”

Intriguing.

The cast includes Emily Mortimer, Cillian Murphy, Timothy Spall, Bruno Ganz, Cherry Jones and two Tfe favorites Kristin Scott Thomas and Patricia Clarkson. One of whom might be playing the lead role of the celebrated minister. Since the movie is set in London we are guessing Scott Thomas. Not that we don't think Clarkson can rock an English accent...

Johnny Depp took some time out from touring with the Hollywood Vampires to immerse himself deep in Romanian culture on Sunday. Depp - who visited "Dracula's Castle" high in the Transylvanian hills with Tim Burton and bandmate Alice Cooper on Saturday - dropped in on Gypsy musicians Ionita and Viorica Din Clejani and their daughter, singer Marguerita. The family hails from the village of Clejani, 25 miles south of the Romanian capital Bucharest, and are leading figures in the Romany music scene. Ionita is also an old Depp friend, having appeared and performed with Romany band Taraf de Haidouks in the...

Though typical of Peter Greenaway’s predilection for depictions of provocative desires laid out over sometimes subversive subtexts, his 1996 title The Pillow Book feels demure in comparison to the ribald sexuality in more notorious works, such as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and his most recent, Eisenstein in Guanajuato. Premiering in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, the sensual film was warmly received, especially in comparison to the features he made directly before and after (The Baby of Macon; 8 ½ Women, respectively). Based on, or rather inspired by, the love diary of Sei Shonagon, a court lady to Empress Consort Teishi, the text is a compilation of musings and records of trysts. Completed in the year 1002, it is considered to be the first novel, of course reconstituted by the enigmatic auteur for his innovative, hybridized purposes. Compared to several of Greenaway’s other titles,...

'When you push through your limits, it gets painful – it's like a scab coming off'

What first drew you to film-making?

First, watching films as a child. Second, putting a camera to my eye when I was about 14. My uncle and his then partner lent me their 8mm movie camera. I realised that, when you frame the world, you see and feel different things.

What was your big breakthrough?

The premiere of Orlando at the Venice film festival. It was startling: I don't think I'd ever had people appreciate something I'd done on such a scale.

Was it always your intention to take a multidisciplinary approach to your art (1)?

At the time, these life choices don't even feel like choices, and they're very confusing, especially as a young person. But with hindsight, it was the best possible training to be a director, which is very much a mongrel art form:...

The '80s and '90s brought us some of the best cartoons ever made, but one thing that made '90s cartoons so special is how irreverent and pop-culture oriented they were. Suddenly we were inundated with shockingly adult innuendos and obscure movie references that flew over the heads of most children watching these cartoons. Horror films were no exception - these show-runners loved to drop references to everything from horror classics to '80s slashers. Here are ten of my favorites:     The Critic - "Miserable" (1994)   The Critic was short-lived but beloved by fans for its hilarious movie parodies that lampooned everything from Orson Welles to Ace Ventura. The most memorable horror spoof was entitled "Miserable" wherein titular critic Jay Sherman gets kidnapped by his biggest fan in an obvious parody of Misery (1990). Even the gruesome woodblock/sledgehammer scene makes an appearance.     Bobby's World - "Adventures in Bobby Sitting...

After a diverse and lengthy early career that encompassed experimental film, dance, theater and music, and following the success of her 1992 arthouse hit "Orlando," Sally Potter settled into a semi-sustained period of more-or-less narrative filmmaking, directing six pictures from "Orlando" through her newly released "Ginger and Rosa." But even as she began working from such conventional materials as 2000’s coming-of-age-in-soon-to-be-overtaken-by-Nazis-Paris offering "The Man Who Cried," the restless experimental impulse that fueled her earliest 8mm efforts was never far from the surface. Part of the sport in tracking Potter's work over the last two decades has been in observing this push-pull between the director's wildest impulses (the rather misguided decision, in 2004's "Yes," to have the characters speak entirely in verse, for example) and her attempts to hew to a more traditionally story-oriented mode of filmmaking. The truth is, the two impulses never made a very comfortable...

I do not like anything about labeling films, especially if the labels are in any way connected with gender. However, the latest film directed by Sally Potter (Orlando, The Man Who Cried) forces me to double-cross my habits. If there is a film which may be called a girlish one -- hysterical in a stereotypical feminine way; excessively poetic, subtle and erotic -- Ginger & Rosa is that particular one. On one hand, Potter's film is a typical, and bit predictable, coming-of-age story. On the other hand, it is clear that these puberty struggles will not lead anybody to real adolescence. Potter does not portray particular teenagers, but a lost generation that lived in permanent fear; the same one that turned freedom -- obtained during social revolts -- into weapons of self destruction. Michel Houellebecq wrote that the sexual revolution destroyed family bonds and led to tragic isolation of individuals. Ginger (phenomenal Elle Fanning!

Sally Potter is nothing if not original. She made her name writing and directing “Orlando” - an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, previously considered unfilmable due to its 400-year timespan and protagonist who changes gender at will. She chose to follow this international hit with a film (“The Tango Lesson”) starring herself, in a role for which she learned to dance and sang on camera. Her next film (“The Man Who Cried”) starred Johnny Depp. Her next film (“Yes”) was written entirely in verse. Her next film (“Rage”) premiered exclusively on mobile phones. Clearly, then, Potter is a unique artist. But being a woman too has made her something of a poster girl for female auteurs. In Britain at least, it is hard to think of any woman of her generation with a comparable stature or filmography. But despite her trail-blazing status, it is not always helpful to dwell on Potter’s gender.

Sally Potter is nothing if not original. She made her name writing and directing “Orlando” - an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, previously considered unfilmable due to its 400-year timespan and protagonist who changes gender at will. She chose to follow this international hit with a film (“The Tango Lesson”) starring herself, in a role for which she learned to dance and sang on camera. Her next film (“The Man Who Cried”) starred Johnny Depp. Her next film (“Yes”) was written entirely in verse. Her next film (“Rage”) premiered exclusively on mobile phones. Clearly, then, Potter is a unique artist. But being a woman too has made her something of a poster girl for female auteurs. In Britain at least, it is hard to think of any woman of her generation with a comparable stature or filmography. But despite her trail-blazing status, it is not always helpful to dwell on Potter’s gender.

Ginger & Rosa, which charts the friendship of two teenage girls in postwar London, draws on the film-maker's own memories of the Cuban missile crisis

You would never call Sally Potter a ginge. Not just because you wouldn't dare. Or because it would be like squirting ketchup over a slice of Poilane, or programming a double bill of The Tango Lesson and StreetDance 2 3D. You wouldn't even risk "strawberry blonde". The famed Potter mane is a big mingle of lemon and silver and cinnamon, which shimmers, Titian-ish.

Yet there is little doubt that she is, in some sense, Ginger, the carrot-topped hero of her new film. Ginger & Rosa is about baby-boomer best buddies, born on the same day, whose friendship in postwar London comes under strain when Rosa (Alice Englert) starts shagging Ginger's glamorous academic dad (Alessandro Nivola), freshly separated from her housewife mum (Christina Hendricks, doing downtrodden). The plot might not be autobiography,...

Is director Sally Potter finally having her moment? While "Orlando" put her on the arthouse map in 1992, the ensuing years haven't been easy -- Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci and Focus Features could not help "The Man Who Cried" earn more than $1.7 million globally in 2000, and 2004's "Yes" was killed by a scathing review in Variety even though audiences at the festival adored it. That has still made Potter gunshy about festivals, Telluride in particular, where "Yes" was brutalized. But the 63-year-old filmmaker changed her mind about Telluride with this year's "Ginger & Rosa" and it seems the gamble paid off. Met with strong reviews (including ours -- we called it one of the best of the festival), plus raves for the film's sensational lead performance by young Elle Fanning. The new distribution company A24 announced today that they have acquired North American...

Andrea Riseborough in James Marsh's Shadow Dancer Robert Pattinson/Bel Ami, Michael Fassbender/Haywire: Berlin Film Festival 2012 Below is the list of the latest movie additions to the Berlin Film Festival's Official Competition line-up: À moi seule (Coming Home). France. By Frédéric Videau (Le fils de Jean-Claude Videau, Varieté Française). With Agathe Bonitzer, Reda Kateb. World premiere. Bel Ami, Great Britain. By Declan Donnellan, Nick Ormerod (feature debut). With Robert Pattinson (The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, Breaking Dawn Part 2, Eclipse, New Moon, Twilight, Remember Me, Water for Elephants, Cosmopolis), Uma Thurman (Henry & June, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Gattaca, Playing the Field), Kristin Scott Thomas (The English Patient, Dans la maison, Sarah's Key, Love Crime, Nowhere Boy, Tell No One, Gosford Park, The Horse Whisperer, Mission: Impossible), Christina Ricci (Speed Racer, Fear and the Loathing in Las Vegas, The Opposite of Sex,...

The big takeaway from Mad Men is that Christina Hendricks belongs in the 1960s.  In lieu of time travel, we can keep casting her in period dramas.  Writer/director Sally Potter (The Man Who Cried) is doing her part by casting Hendricks in Bomb, which follows two teenage rebels (Elle Fanning and Alice Englert) who "become involved in the Ban the Bomb movement and the sexual revolution."  Alessandro Nivola also stars as a freethinking writer who wrecks his relationship with his daughter (Fanning) when he has an affair with her friend.  According to the Daily Mail, Annette Bening is in talks for an unspecified role. Even before Bening joins, Potter has a nice cast.  Hendricks is terrific.  I have fond memories of Nivola in Junebug.  Fanning is perhaps the best actress in Hollywood who can't drive yet.  I haven't seen Englert in anything, but her mother is Jane Campion, and...

Elle Fanning and Alessandro Nivola are about to get radical.

The duo have joined the cast of Sally Potter's new film, a a period coming-of-age-tale called "Bomb," according to The Playlist.

"Bomb" takes place in 1960s London, where "the Cold War meets the Sexual Revolution," and centers on a 16-year-old girl (Fanning) who wants to save the world from nuclear annihilation but finds it's her own family that's about ready to explode. Nivola will play a her father, a charismatic writer who has a falling out with his daughter after he has an affair with her best friend (to be played by Jane Campion's daughter, Alice Englert).

Sally Potter's films are always interesting even if they sometimes end up a little too overly ambitious. The experimental video and performance artist made her feature debut with "The Gold Diggers" in 1983 but rose to international fame with 1992's "Orlando,...

There aren't many experimental video and performance artists who can also say they've directed a film starring international megastar Johnny Depp, but Sally Potter is one of them. Well, the only one. Making her feature debut with the 1983 Julie Christie film "The Gold Diggers," she came to international attention with her excellent 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf's "Orlando," starring Tilda Swinton, before going on to make "The Tango Lesson," "The Man Who Cried" (which starred Depp and Cate Blanchett), and the underrated, spoken-entirely-in-iambic-pentameter "Yes," with Joan Allen.

In the wake of International Women’s Day, Nick looks at the work of some of the most talented female filmmakers in world cinema...

This week has marked the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, a milestone achievement which has rightly been celebrated around the world and in a myriad of different ways.

It has particularly been celebrated in artistic fields, where it could be argued that women have often found more opportunity to excel than in the fields of business, politics and science. However, it is obvious that, even now, many areas are still male dominated, and film is no exception.

It has often been hard for women to not only succeed in the industry, but even to get started. That is not to say there haven't been exceptions, but sadly, they remain exceptions and not the norm. Film history is littered with talented, driven and inspiring women directors,...

Does anyone hate Johnny Depp? Sure, probably. That same person probably also hates chocolate, delicious potato chips, sex, and 8 year old whiskeys. In short, un-fun dicks. Johnny Depp is just one of those guys you have to love. He hasn’t been perfect over the years (The Man Who Cried) but even his odder films (Cry Baby, Dead Man) and his less than great films (The Astronaut’s Wife, Nick of Time) are generally worth watching. Depp was only briefly a secret, but he was never a true star until Pirates of the Caribbean launched him into the stratosphere. Then that cool, off-kilter actor suddenly became a familiar face on toys, notebooks, t-shirts, and the walls of teenage girls. Do I still love Johnny Depp? Of course. But Johnny, I think it might be time to take a break. Why should Depp, an amazing and entertaining actor, take a break? Simple...

Sally Potter, the award-winning writer/director of Orlando, The Tango Lesson, The Man Who Cried, Yes and Rage is currently casting her new feature.

The film is set in London in 1961 at the time of the "Ban the Bomb" movement. Ginger and Rosa are nearly 16 and lifelong best friends who do everything together. Ginger is the "brainy" one who wants to get involved in the antinuclear protests while Rosa is more interested in boys.

Stars of Sally's previous films include Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Lily Cole, Judi Dench and Tilda Swinton.

She is looking for two teenage girls, aged 14 to 18 from the UK or Ireland, for the leading roles.

If you want to be considered in the casting process visit

http://www.sallypotter.com/casting 

Deadline Extended: because of the enormous level of interest the deadline for submissions has been extended by one week to midnight on Sunday 27 February.

Yesterday, NPR printed an article about the best and worst movie accents of the decade, asking readers to submit their votes on what actor should nab the award in both categories. As the EW writer who a few years ago helmed our Worst Movie Accents gallery, I decided to look at their choices. (And, unfortunately, since film's all-time worst movie accent -- Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves -- was brought to screens in 1991, it is not eligible for this award.) As far as the best accents go, NPR offers up four: Morgan Freeman in Invictus, Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean,...

Jim Jarmusch In Context, London

With their relaxed pace, obsessions about seemingly meaningless detail and contempt for the very concept of plotting, Jarmusch's films are very much a context of their own. But on the back of his latest, The Limits Of Control, this is a good chance to see other fine Jarmusch movies such as Dead Man, Down By Law, and Stranger Than Paradise alongside films that inspired them, like Buster Keaton's The Cameraman, They Live By Night and L'Atalante, as well as kindred spirits such as Wings Of Desire and The Man Without A Past.

Ica Cinema, SW1, Fri to 23 Dec

Phelim O'Neill

Sally Potter, London

With Dennis dead and Harry taking a well-earned rest, the UK's current Potter of choice is award-winning, genre-bending director Sally. Her small but significant body of work includes 1992's critically lauded Orlando, a highly unusual and witty imagining of Virginia Woolf's classic gender-switching novel.

The movie Rage opens to a black screen. The clicking sound of typing and the words "All the Rage" appear. A cursor hesitates before deleting the first two words. The word Rage fills the screen. The audience is then informed that the film to follow is "by Michaelangelo." Although we never see Michelangelo or hear him speak, he adds prefaces in writing to the multitudinous portrait interviews that he films backstage at a New York fashion show. We are introduced to fourteen characters, all filmed against eye-popping solid color backdrops...

Simon Abkarian is the show’s John Galliano-like fashion designer, Merlin. He proclaims "I am an Event!" but also posits himself as both sensitive and dangerous. For him a "dress is not a dress," it is a revelation, "a sacred vessel for the miraculous." As such, he regards himself as a high priest of fashion.

Judi Dench is Mona Carvell,...

In case you’ve forgotten the name of one of America’s most talented and under-appreciated auteurs, let me reintroduce you to Francis Ford Coppola. Forget about Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Trilogy and Bram Stoker’S Dracula for a moment. We all know and love those films, including those of you who don’t No need to raise your hands and make yourselves look silly. Coppola is so much more than these films, but they’re the only ones he ever gets remembered for.

Let me first take you back to 1974 and a little film called The Conversation starring Gene Hackman, perhaps one of the most under-rated films of all time. Next I would like to fast forward a bit to a pair of little films from 1983 called The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. After having first read the 1967 book “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton in school, I fell in love...

Cannes -- Cinetic's digital arm, Cinetic Rights Management, is partnering with digital-media company Babelgum to distribute "Rage," Sally Potter's narrative feature set in the fashion world.

The pic, which screened at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, stars an ensemble cast that includes Steve Buscemi, Judi Dench, Jude Law and Eddie Izzard.

The scripted feature is structured as a series of cell phone interviews of New York fashion figures, with mayhem ensuing in the wake of a murder, a fashion crisis and other misadventures.

Potter ("Yes," "The Man Who Cried") directed "Rage," and Christopher Sheppard and Andrew Fierberg produced.

The companies are planning a day-and-date online, mobile and theatrical release in September, with Babelgum releasing the film in episodic form on its Web site as well as a mobile platform in the U.S., U.K. and Italy.

Alternative distribution has become increasingly appealing for indie productions as new...

Dame Judi Dench

photo source

Dame Jude Law

first spotted at Filmonic

It somehow escaped me that Jude & Judi had made a film together for auteur Sally Potter. I love it when name actors do one for their art. Well played, ladies.

This film, a treatise on the commodification of beauty, is called Rage and Jude plays "Minx" a supermodel whose beauty is deteriorating. Law is almost always at his best when he plays up (or directly against) his considerable beauty so I'm all kinds of excited to see him work his star mojo here. The rest of the cast is equally to die for: Eddie Izzard, Dianne Wiest, Bob Balaban, Adriana Barraza... Someone pinch me! Is Potter trying to possess my very soul?

Her films aren't always "good" but they're always worth grappling with whether they be rhyming oddities (Yes) beautiful disasters (The Man Who Cried) self-involved larks (Tango Lesson) or.

Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival

TORONTO -- Sally Potter (The Tango Lesson, The Man Who Cried) makes films about women liberating themselves, and often that involves them dancing. The tango in her newest film is the dance of relationship politics, in all its forms, shapes, sizes and colors.

Thematically, Yes is certainly her most ambitious work to date. Joan Allen is an Irish-American biogeneticist unhappily married to an English politician (Sam Neill). Escaping this stifling home life, she accepts the amorous advances of a handsome Lebanese man, played with grace and dignity by Paris stage actor Simon Abkarian. Their initial adulterous happiness, though, gets complicated by social-political-racial factors.

She's a privileged, white married woman, he's a Middle Eastern former surgeon reduced to working as a chef ("Where once I picked shrapnel out of people's bodies and cut their flesh to save their lives, now I cut the flesh of animals"). Her elegant circle of family is filled with pretense and vanity; he is shoved by prejudice and conflict into a lonely, claustrophobic corner of lower-class London. Out of this dynamic of interracial attraction, Potter spins a chamber epic of class, values and social justice.

If it all sounds very heavy, it is, even though there are scenes of lyrical wit and wry absurdity. To top it off, Potter has written all the dialogue in iambic pentameter, making the piece a linguistic treat. The performances also are unanimously supreme, from Allen's usual nice work to British comedian Shirley Henderson performing the Greek chorus role as the family maid to Neill's complex and empathetic husband, who likes to play air guitar to B.B. King's blues.

Despite many interesting mise-en-scene moments, the film disappointingly feels as sterile as the family's immaculately clean house. In a sense, the movie is too ambitious. Drawing on issues as far-ranging as Middle East politics, career vs. family, classicism, racism, God and even the morality and ethics of scientific research, Potter stretches the canvas too wide for the audience to get a firm grasp of the gritty personal, intimate struggle of two very appealing adult characters.

Even as the words are splendid and poetic, Potter visually tries a little too hard. The elaborate camera movements, CCTV texturing and stilted frames offer much style without adding that much substance. Like Allen's main character, "Yes" is suffocated by its own self-importance.

As the affair drifts into an emotionally draining abyss, Allen decides to escape to Cuba, hoping her lover will join her there. By this point, we're not clinging to the mystery of whether he will go to her or return to his native Beirut. We're wondering what is the political and symbolic significance of the final act being set in a communist, atheist, anti-capitalist country like Cuba?

YES

Greenstreet Films and U.K. Film Council present

An Adventure Pictures Production in association with Studio Fierberg

Credits:

Writer/Director: Sally Potter

Producers: Christopher Sheppard, Andrew Fierberg

Director of Cinematography: Alexei Rodionov

Production designer: Carlos Conti

Costume Designer: Jacqueline Durran

Sound: Jean-Paul Mugel, Vincent Tulli

Editor: Daniel Goddard

Music: Sally Potter, Fred Frith

Cast:

Cleaner: Shirley Henderson

She: Joan Allen

Anthony: Sam Neill

He: Simon Abkarian

Kate: Samantha Bond

Grace: Stephanie Leonidas

Aunt: Sheila Hancock

Running time: 95 minutes

No MPAA rating...

Christina Ricci's ideal man is her three-time co-star Johnny Depp. The stunning 22-year-old acted with Depp in Sleepy Hollow, The Man Who Cried and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And while she knows he's off-limits as a married man, Ricci reckons the dark-haired star is definitely the coolest guy in Hollywood. She says, "He's the kindest, most loving man ever. There's nobody like him, because nobody can be that fabulous. I've worked with him three times and we have a lot in common. We don't like to talk to other actors while we're working and we just deal with the director. The impact Johnny had on people was amazing to watch. Forget the women - even the guys followed him around. They'd offer to carry his coffee cups, roll his cigarettes or wear a hat from his club The Viper Room. He's the coolest guy ever. That man is 39 and still looks 22. And to those people who might think I'm cool, I'd like to point out that I haven't slept with someone as cool as Kate Moss, like Johnny did. But he's strictly off limits to me. He's married and that rules him out. Also, the first time we met I was nine and he was already 27, so I can't imagine it."...

Dashing Hollywood star Johnny Depp is making an assault on the pop world - penning tracks for girlfriend Vanessa Paradis' new album. Depp has written two songs for Joe Le Taxi singer Paradis' new release - one about their daughter, Lily-Rose. Depp also bonded with the musical Gypsies who co-starred with him in the affecting new movie, The Man Who Cried. Director Sally Potter says the actor is "so immersed in Gypsy history. They hung out in his trailer all the time."...