First & Last: Macro Micro

Here are the first and last images of a major motion picture.

Can you guess the movie?

A First Look At "Suburbicon"

Chris here. With fall festival lineups beginning to be revealed, that means some of the upcoming films that have been shrouded in secrecy are beginning to lift the veil. One such film that we've seen next to nothing from is George Clooney's Suburbicon, which will be among the Venice and Toronto lineups.

Thus far we've only had the starry cast (Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac) and a script by Clooney, his writing partner Grant Heslov, and the Coen brothers to stoke our curiosity - with a brief plot synopsis about home invasion to have us scratching our heads as to what the actual tone of this thing would be. Now there is a trailer that... leaves us with more questions about the tone.

Take a look at the trailer and I have some burning questions after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Beauty Break: Dog-Loving Natalie Wood

by Nathaniel R

You can find a few photos of the legendary Natalie Wood as a pint-sized actress with cats, but once the child star came into her own in Hollywood as a regular-aged movie star she was inarguably a dog person.

Her most common photo accessories for a time were her white poodle Fifi and her silver poodle Morningstar. Curiously I've never seen them in a photo together (by all accounts she had multiple pets but perhaps these two only overlapped in the late 1950s with Morningstar hogging the camera by the early 60s?).But they were hardly her only four legged Best Friends in her 43 years on earth. 

After the jump more furry beauty shots...

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"Nicky got too close to the flame...

.

...Nicky liked it."

Great Moments in Screen Come-Ons #96
Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992) 

New Oscar Chart ~ Foreign Hopefuls Part 1

We won't start hearing about "official submissions" for Oscar's Foreign Language Film race until September but until then, it's speculation time! The first chart is up looking at countries from Afghanistan through Ethiopia.

The most high profile film from this batch, other than possibly another Austrian submission from Michael Haneke (Happy End), is Chile's A Fantastic Woman. It's a trans drama that took three prizes at Berlinale. If it's as good as director Sebastian Lelio's previous Oscar submission (Gloria) we'll have to riot if he's passed over again. 

Other intriguing prospects include the well reviewed black and white fairy tale November from Estonia and possibly another submission from Oscar winner Jan Sverak of the Czech Republic. Sverak won the foreign film Oscar for his art house sleeper hit Kolya  (1996) about a stepfather and his little boy and his latest called Barefoot is another childhood tale set in the countryside during World War II.

Check out the chart and report back