‘Utterly overwhelmed’: British writer-director’s short film earns Oscar nod

Lee Knight says accolade for A Friend of Dorothy, based on friendship with neighbour, sends message to never give up A writer-director from Stanmore in Middlesex whose short film has been nominated for an Oscar has said he feels “utterly overwhelmed” by the accolade. Lee Knight’s film A Friend of Dorothy , starring Miriam Margolyes and Stephen Fry, is in the running for best live action short. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/e4cqUGs via IFTTT

Maria review – Angelina Jolie plays the diva in magnificent stroll around the cult of Callas

Venice film festival
Jolie is a painting to be stared at in Pablo Larraín’s opulent drama, tottering around Paris in the 70s and drawing us in to tragedy as thoroughly as Bellini or Pucchini

Hide the overflowing ashtrays and move that infernal grand piano – Maria Callas, La Diva, is granting a valedictory TV interview. She’s pacing the halls of her Paris apartment, feeding her poodles and strung out on pills. The visiting journalist is called Mandrax, named after her favourite medication. He takes a seat and checks the mic. By way of introduction, he says, “I’d like to walk with you through your life.”

Callas’s life whisked her from the slums of Nazi-occupied Athens to the concert halls of Europe and the US, through a torrid relationship with Aristotle Onassis to collaborations with Pasolini and Zeffirelli. But Pablo Larraín’s opulent Maria shrewdly homes in on the soprano’s final days, showcasing a stiffly dignified Angelina Jolie as the lioness in winter, four years retired and a legend in her own lunchtime. “Make me an appointment with a hairdresser who doesn’t speak,” she orders her doting servants. “Book me a table at a restaurant where the waiters know who I am.” She is in the mood, she adds, for adulation.

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