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Kevin Costner didn't become an Oscar-winning director by being a pushover. He is a notoriously headstrong Hollywood player, and he doesn't have to be directing to exert his influence. There's a great story about Costner butting heads with director Roger Donaldson over a bit of staging while shooting "No Way Out," and how that reignited Gene Hackman's desire for acting. It's not often advisable or appropriate to undercut your director in front of the crew, but sometimes it produces a happy result.

But there's a time and a place, and that time and place is rarely the press tour in support of the movie you should want to be a major hit. The trouble with speaking out this late in the game is that there's nothing to be done; lots of people have a good deal riding on the film's potential success, so inveighing against some shortcoming or perceived...

Put the town on alert! The 1997 volcano film Dante’s Peak will be erupting into a new 4K Ultra-High Definition Blu-ray on February 11th. According to Blu-ray.com, the Universal Pictures film will be getting a new physical media release courtesy of Kino Lorber. The film comes from director Roger Donaldson, who is known for movies like the Kevin Costner suspense thriller No Way Out, the Tom Cruise bartender drama Cocktail, and the sci-fi horror Species. Dante’s Peak stars Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton, Jamie Renée Smith, Jeremy Foley, and Elizabeth Hoffman.

The movie is a part of the often-occurring dual release of movies with similar plots, with examples that include Armageddon and Deep Impact, Antz and A Bug’s Life and White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen. Dante’s Peak would be released the same year as the other notable volcano film Volcano. Volcano would star Tommy Lee Jones and sport a...

Gina Gershon is revealing how her first sex scene didn’t necessarily go as planned.

The Borderlands actress made a recent appearance on Watch What Happens Live, where she shared that her “first love scene ever” was with Tom Cruise in 1988’s Cocktail, noting that he was a complete “gentleman.” However, she was left mortified after she accidentally “kneed him right in the nose” while filming.

“At one point, he starts off under the covers, and I told him I was very ticklish,” Gershon recounted to host Andy Cohen. “I said, ‘No, no, don’t ever do that.’ And in one take — I think he wanted a reaction — and he grabbed my stomach, and I kneed him right in the nose.”

She continued. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I just broke Tom Cruise’s nose.’ He’s like, ‘No, no, you told me.’ I’m like, ‘I’m so sorry,...

Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1Image: Warner Bros.

In this column, I write about actors and directors who have worked together on at least three films, preferably without sequels in the mix. It’s a framework I chose in part because so many filmmakers on either side of the...

Kevin Costner was a rising young actor featuring in minor roles in the early 80s. The future superstar was on the verge of stardom by the mid-80s and was cast in two films that would become his breakout hits. First, he was cast in Roger Donaldson’s action thriller No Way Out. After finishing that film, he was approached by director Brian De Palma for the crime drama The Untouchables.

Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman in No Way Out

Costner was not a big name at the time but Paramount and De Palma seem to know the potential that he had. No Way Out had also not come out yet and the studio led with a generous $800,000 offer for the role of Eliot Ness in The Untouchables. Costner, knowing the responsibility of playing a real-life American hero bargained his way to increase his pay to $1 million.

Kevin Costner Stood...

Zack Norman, the stand-up comic, actor and producer perhaps best known for his turn as a crocodile-loving antiquities smuggler in Romancing the Stone, has died. He was 83.

Norman died Sunday night of natural causes at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, his family announced.

Norman collaborated frequently with director Henry Jaglom, with the two working together on Tracks (1976), Sitting Ducks (1980), Venice/Venice (1992), Babyfever (1994), Déjà Vu (1997), Festival in Cannes (2001), Hollywood Dreams (2006), Irene in Time (2009), Queen of the Lot (2010), The M Word (2014) and Ovation (2015).

In Robert Zemeckis’ action-adventure Romancing the Stone (1984), starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, Norman and Danny DeVito play the smuggling cousins Ira and Ralph, respectively.

“Look at those snappers,” Ira says in admiration whenever he sees a croc.

(He and Douglas would get into a legal spat over a company that they co-founded.)

Norman also appeared on the big screen in James Toback’s Fingers (1978), Milos Forman...

1986's "Top Gun" decidedly propelled Tom Cruise toward stardom, while the actor had already made his mark with "Risky Business" and "The Color of Money," two films that helped underline his dynamic range as a performer before his rise to fame. From this point on, Cruise would go on to star in a string of projects that cemented his superstar status, but like any performer, a few films failed to impress audiences and critics for many reasons. No, I am not talking about the disastrous "The Mummy" — the first and final entry in the doomed Dark Universe — but the lowest-rated Tom Cruise film, at least according to Rotten Tomatoes. I'm talking about Roger Donaldson's 1988 film about making drinks and money: "Cocktail," which currently sports an abysmal 9% on Rotten Tomatoes.

There is good reason for this overwhelmingly negative consensus, as "Cocktail" feels like an unsavory product of its time, what...

As the saying goes, ‘every great man is inspired by another great man to reach their full potential’. Well, this sentiment could not ring truer than in the case of Gene Hackman & Kevin Costner.

For the most part, viewers recognized Costner from the hit drama series Yellowstone, but he was popular throughout the 1990s for other roles as well. Beginning his career as an extra in low-budget productions, he progressed to more mainstream roles in acclaimed flicks, including Dances with Wolves and No Way Out.

Kevin Costner in Yellowstone

Besides, he has shown a tremendous amount of endurance. Costner got up and over the critically panned films Waterworld and The Postman, which could have easily ended his career. And later, he spellbound audiences once again with his exceptional Yellowstone performance on the Paramount Network.

Suggested“Chris will have to wait his turn”: Kevin Costner Denied Chris Hemsworth His New...

Controversial while he may be, Tom Cruise is the quintessential movie star. You can love him or hate him, but his on-screen charisma and willingness to go all in for all his roles is what makes him, even now, a considerable box-office draw.

He embodies cinema, and his dedication to pulling out all the stops in whatever he does—whether riding off a cliff on a bike or carrying out an impossible fight sequence on the top of a moving practically-constructed train—evidences his legacy and brand in Hollywood.

Tom Cruise in Cocktail (1988). Credit: Buena Vista Pictures

But this trait of his isn’t one he cultivated recently. Even before the plethora of Mission: Impossible films showed us Cruise’s knack for committing to the unimaginable, there was one movie, right after Top Gun and The Color of Money, called Cocktail (1988), where the actor’s diligence and tenacity spoke volumes of his character.

Dianne Crittenden, the casting director whose impressive résumé included the first Star Wars film, The In-Laws and the Terrence Malick features Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, has died. She was 82.

Crittenden died Wednesday at her home in Pacific Palisades after a battle with several cancers, fellow casting director Ilene Starger told The Hollywood Reporter.

“Dianne was my mentor, we’ve known each other for 44 years,” Starger said. “She was also my dear friend, more like an older sister, really. So generous, kind, brilliant, funny. A people magnet. Her knowledge of and insight into actors was extraordinary.”

A former head of casting at Warner Bros., Crittenden collaborated with Martin Ritt on Murphy’s Romance (1985) and Stanley & Iris (1990); with Roger Donaldson on Thirteen Days (2000) and The World’s Fastest Indian (2005); and with Peter Weir on Witness (1985), The Mosquito Coast (1986) and Green Card (1990).

Crittenden was born in Queens on Aug.

The actor and voice of Bob the Builder answers your questions about growing up in care, rebooting Men Behaving Badly in midlife and what he’d say to JLo if she called

Anthony Hopkins called The Bounty “a sad mess of a film, such a botched job”, but I think it’s an excellent movie and Hopkins is superb. What’s your view? Catupatree

That was one of my first jobs out of drama school. I think Anthony Hopkins was brilliant. I’d like to know when that quote was from. When we were filming it, I was only 20 years old and having the time of my life in Tahiti with 200 gorgeous extras. I know that Anthony had problems with Roger Donaldson, the director. I don’t know whether it was artistic – I was enjoying myself too much to pay attention – but in my opinion it ended up being a really good film.

There is, a critic will argue, a great deal of value in finding and discussing the worst films of the year. All the films released in a given epoch are a reflection of the trends and ideas that produced them, and scoring the bottom of the barrel for the worst filmmaking, the worst ideas, and the most misguided thinking will provide a valuable analysis of where we are as a society. Worst-of lists are important and vital and should be written with enthusiasm. They also let critics blow off steam a little bit; we don't have the luxury to skip bad movies or avoid talking about the ones we hate. It's our job.

The Golden Raspberries, or the Razzies for short, however, lost sight of that value a while back. The annual Razzies announcement is usually a snarky affair that only serves to pick on the year's least popular blockbusters,...

Some apotheosis of film culture has been reached with Freddy Got Fingered‘s addition to the Criterion Channel. Three years after we interviewed Tom Green about his consummate film maudit, it’s appearing on the service’s Razzie-centered program that also includes the now-admired likes of Cruising, Heaven’s Gate, Querelle, and Ishtar; the still-due likes of Under the Cherry Moon; and the more-contested Gigli, Swept Away, and Nicolas Cage-led Wicker Man. In all cases it’s an opportunity to reconsider one of the lamest, thin-gruel entities in modern culture.

A Jane Russell retro features von Sternberg’s Macao, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Raoul Walsh’s The Tall Men and The Revolt of Mamie Stover; streaming premieres will be held for Yuen Woo-ping’s Dreadnaught, Claire Simon’s Our Body, Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father, the Devil, the recently restored Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles, and The Passion of Rememberance.

While most would say The Untouchables is the movie that made Kevin Costner a star, in many ways, Orion’s No Way Out solidified his stardom. The film was shot before The Untouchables, with him scoring the leading role after being cast by Lawrence Kasdan in the Western classic Silverado (as a way to make up for cutting all his scenes from The Big Chill). No Way Out was the first time he headlined a big film on his own, and it was the perfect showcase. If gave him a chance to do action, drama and romance, with his backseat love scene with Sean Young noted as one of the steamiest in Hollywood history up to that point.

It was part of an essential three-movie deal that Costner signed with the now-defunct Orion Pictures, which included Bull Durham and Dances With Wolves, both of which helped cement him as one...

Elizabeth Hoffman, who portrayed Beatrice Reed Ventnor, the mother of the daughters played by Swoosie Kurtz, Sela Ward, Patricia Kalember and Julianne Phillips during the entire six-season run of the NBC drama Sisters, has died. She was 97.

Hoffman died Aug. 21 of natural causes at her home in Malibu, her son Chris told The Hollywood Reporter.

Hoffman stood out as Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1983 and 1988-89 Herman Wouk miniseries The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, directed by Dan Curtis and starring Robert Mitchum.

She also portrayed Meryl Streep’s mom in Curtis Hanson’s The River Wild (1994) and the elderly Ruth, the mother-in-law of Linda Hamilton’s character who lives in a cabin at the base of the volcano, in Roger Donaldson’s Dante’s Peak (1997).

Hoffman’s depressed Bea sets Sisters in motion when her four daughters reunite to care for her after she turns to alcohol to deal...

The episode of Revisited covering Species was Written by Ric Solomon, Narrated by Kier Gomes, Edited by Joseph Wilson, Produced by Lance Vlcek and John Fallon, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.

The 1990s were famous for Alien Invasion films. Independence Day, The X-Files Movie, Alien 3 and Mars Attacks all come to mind. Yes, those are all great but what about Roger Donaldson’s classic 1995 creature feature Species (watch it Here)? Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is the beautiful Natasha Henstridge and this being her first acting role. She’s an absolute terror and force to be reckoned with here. Species is something of a cult classic and one we need to talk about. So, on this episode of Horror Revisited, let’s dive back into one of the better Sci-fi 90s films.

The initial concept for Species came from a script called The Message...

In the early 1980s, Sean Young was primed for stardom. She'd turned in two strikingly different supporting performances in Ivan Reitman's "Stripes" and Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner," and possessed an ineffable magnetism that drew you in. In "Stripes," she's Louise Cooper, a Fort Arnold MP who's down for a bit of mischief with Harold Ramis' incorrigible Russell Ziskey. It's a thinly written role, but Young's so darn cute and charming that you'd rather spend time with her than the two leads. As Rachael in "Blade Runner," she looks the glam part of a femme fatale, smashingly so, but as a replicant, we feel for her rather than fear her.

After getting lost in the clutter of David Lynch's "Dune" in 1984, she rebounded with a smoldering performance in Roger Donaldson's deliciously nasty B-thriller "No Way Out." Her limousine sex scene with Kevin Costner was so hot it...

Before 1987, Kevin Costner might've been best known in Hollywood for the movie in which he didn't appear.

Lawrence Kasdan's "The Big Chill" gave just about everyone involved a massive career boost, and probably would've done likewise for Costner had he not been cut out of the film. He played Alex Marshall, the character whose death by suicide brings a group of college friends back together for a fall weekend in South Carolina. Though Kasdan shot flashbacks featuring Costner, he ultimately cut them out of the movie, which became a Baby Boomer favorite.

Costner's bid for movie stardom officially began in 1985, with lead roles in Kevin Reynolds' "Fandango" (another Boomer nostalgia piece) and John Badham's "American Flyers." He also landed a flashy supporting role in Lawrence Kasdan's Western throwback, "Silverado." The first two films not only bombed, they barely received a theatrical release, while Kasdan's movie performed well below the studio's commercial expectations.

Science fiction films -- especially ones featuring aliens -- require a suspension of disbelief. Filmmakers use all of the gadgets in their toolbox -- plot, dialogue, score, costuming, and more -- to convince audiences that they're aboard a fantastical, futuristic, or far-away world. Fans appreciate it when alien designs use makeup effects, so a creature feels like it exists in three-dimensional space. There's even a reality show dedicated to this concept: in SyFy's "Face Off," special effects designers compete to see who can create and apply the best look for their models.

Makeup artists and directors often like practical effects as much as fans. "Guardians of the Galaxy" special effects makeup designer David White told Fast Company, "James [Gunn] always pushed for practical and makeup effects. He wanted, like me, to see the real deal there on set." Some of the best alien effects can make it hard to see...

Watch the Short Film Swumpwater: Following its premiere at Tremendicon, the short horror film Swumpwater (from Pop Films and Hustle and Heart Films ) is now available to watch online!

Written by Cullen Bunn and Heath Amodio, Swumpwater is the tale of three down-on-their-luck friends who, after a night of drinking, decide to chance fate in pursuit of a rural legend. In the dark of night, deep in the woods, they face mysterious forces that could either grant them good fortune or kill them in a horrible fashion.

Swumpwater will premiere on 6/17/2022 at Tremendicon (https://www.tremendicon.com/) in Springfield, Missouri. Immediately following the premiere, the short film will be released on Pop Films’ YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF4Y2-uWQ3zISm8ogheKK2g).

Cullen Bunn and Heath Amodio have collaborated on comic book projects such as The Heathens (AfterShock Comics). Together, they founded Hustle and Heart Films...

It was 25 years ago that several Hollywood studios indulged in the town’s occasional and curious practice of releasing two movies about the same subject within months of each other, if not weeks.

On Feb. 7, 1997, Universal Pictures released Dante’s Peak, in which Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton try to save a small Washington town from being obliterated by a long dormant and suddenly active volcano. Just over two months later, on April 25, 1997, 20th Century Fox delivered Volcano, with Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche leading the efforts to stop a newly formed underground vent from erupting and wiping out all of Los Angeles.

Both films were also part of the genre known as the disaster movie, which arguably peaked in the mid-1970s with hits like The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and the gold standard for the category, 1974’s The Towering Inferno (which was actually nominated for Best Picture at that...

Saginaw Grant, the esteemed Native American character actor known for turns in The Lone Ranger, The World’s Fastest Indian and more, died on Wednesday at a private care facility in Hollywood, California. He was 85.

Grant’s publicist and longtime friend, Lani Carmichael, confirmed his death to the Associated Press, saying that he died peacefully in his sleep of natural causes.

The actor was born July 20, 1936, in Pawnee, Oklahoma, amassing nearly 60 credits in film and TV, starting in the late 1980s. The first film he appeared in was Franc Roddam’s 1988 action drama War Party, which starred Billy Wirth, Kevin Dillon and more.

Grant was perhaps best known on the film side for turns in Roger Donaldson’s The World’s Fastest Indian and Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger. He appeared in the former opposite Anthony Hopkins; in the latter, he shared the screen with Johnny Depp.

Grant’s early TV...

Tom Cruise is a hero on the big screen and in real life. A new report from The Sun (via NME) reveals Cruise saved his co-star Elisabeth Shue’s life during the production of the 1988 comedy “Cocktail.” The film’s aerial camera operator Bill Bennett wrote about the incident recently on Facebook, and Cruise reportedly confirmed the story to his “Mission: Impossible” director Christopher McQuarrie. The Sun’s report followed a story from over the weekend in which Cruise was spotted saving a cameraman from falling off a train during a stunt on the production of the latest “Mission: Impossible” movie.

“We were filming the scene from a helicopter, where Tom and Elisabeth are riding horses along the beach,” Bennett writes in his post. “After a couple takes, the pilot would land the helicopter on the beach, and Tom and Elisabeth would come over to watch the shot recordings and get notes from the director.

Exclusive: Eliza Taylor, who starred as the lead on the CW series The 100 for seven seasons, has signed with Verve for representation and lined up her next project.

Taylor got her start on the star-making Australian series Neighbours and will return to her native country for her next project It Only Takes A Night. In addition to playing the lead in the feature, Taylor will also serve as executive producer for the first time on the project.

The film follows four best friends on a girl’s night out, who end up on a path none of them expected and find out it really does only take one night to change your life.

While the film will be set in London, it will actually be shot in Perth, Australia, taking advantage of the countries lack of Covid-19 closures as well as placing Australian talent in front of and behind the camera.

Laetitia Eido, the French actress known to fans of Netflix’s Israeli drama Fauda as Dr. Shirin El Abed, has signed on to co-star in Nhiem, a new high-end television series set during the Vietnam War from New Zealand director Roger Donaldson (The World’s Fastest Indian) and German production group Carte Blanche International.

Nhiem tells the true story of a 19-year-old film student in Vietnam who became the cameraman for the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.

Sebastian Koch (The Lives of Others) is attached to play German news photographer Horst Faas. Eido will play Hannah, a journalist also stationed in Vietnam ...

Laetitia Eido, the French actress known to fans of Netflix’s Israeli drama Fauda as Dr. Shirin El Abed, has signed on to co-star in Nhiem, a new high-end television series set during the Vietnam War from New Zealand director Roger Donaldson (The World’s Fastest Indian) and German production group Carte Blanche International.

Nhiem tells the true story of a 19-year-old film student in Vietnam who became the cameraman for the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.

Sebastian Koch (The Lives of Others) is attached to play German news photographer Horst Faas. Eido will play Hannah, a journalist also stationed in Vietnam ...

For Sam Neill, working creates mental health. “I have had a few periods of my life where I’m not working and I feel that darkness close in,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. in late 2019. “What are you between jobs? And if you think of yourself as an actor, and you’re not actually acting, you’re kind of no one.”

With the pandemic, that struggle took on a global scale when Universal shut down “Jurassic World: Dominion” a few weeks into production. Neill returned to his New Zealand vineyard, Two Paddocks, which sounds like a bucolic retreat — but sent the actor into a panic. “Right now, I’m in a terrible limbo,” he told a journalist. “My life in acting was always a counterbalance to my life on the farm. One was the palliative to the other.”

Around that time, he started playing the ukulele for Instagram.

View...

You can take the boy off the farm, but you can’t keep the farm — especially the dino ones — away from Sam Neill.

From the sheep of his new movie “Rams” to the bunnies of upcoming “Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway,” the Emmy-nominated New Zealand actor is entering his milestone 50th year of professional acting with projects incorporating his love for animals. However, it’s the not-so-farm-friendly dinosaurs of “Jurassic World: Dominion” that mark one of the largest-scale and most memorable projects of the 73-year-old Kiwi’s career.

Neill reprises his role as paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant in the new film — partly filmed during the pandemic and due out in 2022 — and jokes that the cast excitably churned out what could become a six-hour movie.

“It’s going be a big film. [Director] Colin Trevorrow has that childlike sense of wonder, playfulness and inventiveness that [Steven] Spielberg has. We really shot a six-hour movie.

Robert Warner Garland, a Hollywood screenwriter and producer who wrote “No Way Out” and “The Electric Horseman,” died on Saturday in Baltimore, Md., due to complications from dementia, according to his son. He was 83.

Garland was born on May 1, 1937, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and attended St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md. One of his first jobs in the industry was as a talent coordinator for “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in 1969, and he soon became a writer and helped prepare Carson’s nightly monologues.

In addition to “The Tonight Show,” Garland also wrote for several sitcoms, such as “That Girl,” “The Bill Cosby Show,” “Love American Style,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Sanford and Son.”

In the film industry, he wrote the 1979 film “The Electric Horseman,” directed by Sidney Pollack and starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. The film was a box office success, earning $62 million from a...

The most defining and far-reaching decision made by German Chancellor Angela Merkel during her 15 years in office is the focus of a new film making its debut at Berlin’s European Film Market.

“Merkel — Anatomy of a Crisis,” directed by Stephen Wagner, stars Imogen Kogge as the German leader during the dramatic days leading up to her decision in 2015 to allow nearly a million refugees, mostly from war-torn Syria, to enter Germany.

“We can consider this the most important political weeks of Angela Merkel’s life as chancellor,” says Alexander van Dülmen, who produced the film with Wagner via their Potsdam-based company Carte Blanche International.

Penned by Florian Oeller, “Merkel” is based on journalist Robin Alexander’s 2017 bestselling book “The Driven Ones” (“Die Getriebenen”) and examines the political wrangling among Merkel’s cabinet members and European actors like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as they struggle to deal with a...

Berlinale Series will showcase projects from Jason Segel, Damian Chazelle, and Cate Blanchett.

An internationally vibrant and high-calibre Berlinale Series Market and conference kicks of today (February 24), reflecting a sense of opportunity and dynamism in contrast to the somewhat muted air that hangs over the film component of the Efm.

The small screen showcase premieres new shows from opening speaker Jason Segel (Dispatches From Elsewhere), Damian Chazelle (The Eddy), and Cate Blanchett, scheduled to speak with Tony Ayres and Elise McCredie, her co-creators on the detention centre drama Stateless for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Chazelle’s La La Land was...

Exclusive: Roger Donaldson, whose long career in Hollywood has encompassed movies including The Bounty, Species, Cocktail, Dante’s Peak and The World’s Fastest Indian, is attached to direct the German-produced and Vietnam-set TV series Nhiem.

The show comes from local producers Carte blanche International, which is at this week’s European Film Market in Berlin with its feature film Merkel, about the German premier, which Paramount is releasing locally.

Heinrich Hadding, who wrote the 2009 feature Pope Joan, is penning the screenplay with David Wenham and John Goodman. The series will follow titular character Nhiem, a 19-year-old film student who is forced to leave his studies and join the Vietnam War, eventually becoming the Viet Cong’s documentary eye.

Producers are Carte Blanche International’s Alexander van Dülmen and Stephan Wagner. Director Donaldson and van Dülmen previously collaborated on The World’s Fastest Indian starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and Diane Ladd.

Donaldson most...

Exclusive: There has never been a German-language film version of landmark German novel All Quiet On The Western Front. That is set to change with an intriguing new version of the WWI story which brings together BAFTA-winning director Edward Berger (Patrick Melrose), Euro producers Malte Grunert (A Most Wanted Man) and Daniel Dreifuss (No), and actor-producer Daniel Bruhl (Rush).

Rocket Science are also producing and are launching world sales next week at the Efm on the (anti-)war movie, which comes hot on the heels of Oscar-winning WWI story 1917 and local-language smash Parasite. Berger and the producers will be in Berlin to discuss the project.

One of the best-selling German novels of all time, Erich Maria Remarque’s poignant story follows three youngsters who voluntarily enlist in the German army. Full of excitement and patriotic fervour, the boys enthusiastically march into a war they believe in. But once on the Western Front,...

Sam Neill. (Photo: Ross Coffey)

The Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (Aacta) will next month bestow actor Sam Neill with its highest honour, the Longford Lyell Award.

First presented in 1968, the award honours Australian film pioneer Raymond Longford and his partner in filmmaking and life, Lottie Lyell. It recognises a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the enrichment of Australia’s screen environment and culture.

Neill joins previous recipients such as Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, Jan Chapman, David Stratton, Don McAlpine, Al Clark, Jacki Weaver, Andrew Knight, Cate Blanchett, Phillip Noyce and most recently, Bryan Brown.

“I am very thrilled by this honour indeed,” said Neill. “And very surprised! Let me check just in case they’ve made a mistake…”

Neill made his feature debut in Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs in 1979, which led to a breakthrough role in Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career opposite Judy Davis.

Sam Neill in ‘Ride Like A Girl’.

Actor, writer, producer and director Sam Neill has been named the recipient of the 2019 Equity New Zealand Lifetime Achievement Award, after being nominated by the Equity board and other Kiwi performers.

“Sam’s career as an actor is remarkable, but what makes this award so special is that it recognises much more than career success,” says Equity Nz president Jennifer Ward-Lealand.

“It acknowledges those members of our industry who give back at every opportunity, who strive to use their influence for important causes and who continually inspire their peers with their good will and humility. Sam leads by example. This award pays tribute to who he is as a person, as much it does his extraordinary talent.”

Neill joined Equity in 1979, and has more than 75 films and over 45 television programs to his credit. His film debut was in Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs...

Exclusive: Xyz Films is partnering with Matthew Metcalfe’s Gfc Films on historical thriller Immortal, written by Pete Dowling (Flightplan) and to be directed by Roger Donaldson (Species).

The film will be produced by Metcalfe (6 Days) and Gfc Films out of New Zealand, with Xyz Films executive producing and launching worldwide sales at Cannes. Sean Sorensen of Royal Viking Entertainment will also executive produce.

Pic is slated to start production in late 2019 in New Zealand and the UK, with casting currently underway. In the story, hot-shot Detective Byrnes and rookie cop James McCafferty, whose morals are conflicting, work together on the hunt for London’s serial killer Jack the Ripper who, some believe, sailed to New York after his London killings suddenly ceased in 1888.

Veteran director Donaldson is well known for movies including Cocktail with Tom Cruise, Species, Dante’s Peak and The Bank Job with Jason Statham. This project...

Cliff Curtis and Taika Waititi at the Nz premiere of ‘Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen’.

Cliff Curtis has more 50 screen credits as an actor but he is just as passionate about his role as a producer and executive producer – and he may soon direct his first feature.

“My interest in trying to understand my trade and craft took me behind the camera,” Curtis tells If on the line from his home in Rotorua. “When I got into producing I discovered there is a totally different aspect of my brain and how I think about things.

“With acting you are expected to play to the crowd and to be gregarious. I have that part to my nature but there is another part where I’m very private and I like to spend time on my own, isolated and within my head.

”As a producer you are there at the genesis of the project,...

Exclusive: Yorgos Lanthimos is set to write and direct Pop. 1280, an adaptation of the Jim Thompson crime novel for Imperative Entertainment. Element Pictures will produce with Imperative and Lanthimos, in association with Discovery Productions.

Project is high priority. Lanthimos’ The Favourite is up for 10 Oscars this weekend, including Best Picture, and it just won seven of the 12 Batfa Awards for which it was nominated.

Thompson published the novel in 1964. A corrupt sheriff of a small town manipulates the people in his orbit in order to win the next election. The nasty romp has long been a favorite of the director.

Andrew Lowe and Ed Guiney of Element Pictures, Lanthimos, Ryan Friedkin of Imperative Entertainment and John Alan Simon of Discovery Productions will produce. Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas of Imperative Entertainment, Micah Green and Dan Steinman of 30West, Elizabeth Karr of Discovery Productions, Ilene Feldman, and Jon Levin will be executive producers.

Goodbye Pork Pie director helped put his country on the cinematic map in the early 80s before moving to Hollywood

Geoff Murphy, the film-maker who was a key pioneer in the development of the modern New Zealand film industry, has died aged 80, the New Zealand film commission has confirmed. With hits such as Goodbye Pork Pie and The Quiet Earth, Murphy stood alongside Roger Donaldson as a central figure in the creation of a homegrown industry.

Born in Wellington in 1938, Murphy made his mark playing the trumpet in travelling performance co-op Blerta in the 70s, performing at festivals and living as part of a commune. Having made TV shorts in the early 70s, Murphy’s first feature, Wild Man (1977), grew out of his friendship with Blerta founder Bruno Lawrence – who would go on to act in a number of Murphy’s films as well as Donaldson’s 1981 hit Smash Palace.

Geoff Murphy.

Producer, director and screenwriter Geoff Murphy, a leading figure in New Zealand cinema’s renaissance of the late 1970s and early 1980s, died in Wellington on Monday. He was 80.

Murphy was best known as the director of Goodbye Pork Pie, Utu and The Quiet Earth. Action-comedy Goodbye Pork Pie, a road movie starring Kelly Johnson, Tony Barry and Claire Oberman, became the first local film to gain blockbuster status at the box office in 1981, according to the New Zealand Film Commission.

“He deserves every ounce of credit for the brilliant things he did with The Quiet Earth,” writer-director Sam Pillsbury told Stuff Nz. “He was a genius and one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever worked with and I learned a lot from him.”

He was was a founding member of Blerta, the musical and theatrical co-operative that toured New Zealand in the early 1970s. His first feature,...

Cannes 1988 (L-r) John Maynard, whose feature The Navigator was in competition, Nzfc chief executive Jim Booth, Lindsay Shelton and distributor/producer Barrie Everard.

Many of our earliest highlights were at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 1980 we took New Zealand films to the market at Cannes for the first time. We persuaded Geoff Murphy to rush completion of Goodbye Pork Pie and it became New Zealand’s first commercial hit in terms of sales: Six contracts for distribution in 20 countries.

John Laing’s Beyond Reasonable Doubt and Roger Donaldson’s Smash Palace earned success in the market in our second year – with Roger’s film getting one of our first deals for theatrical release in the USA.

In 1982 New Zealand earned official selection at Cannes for the first time with Sam Pillsbury’s The Scarecrow in Directors’ Fortnight.

That was followed in 1983 by Geoff Murphy’s Utu in official selection out...

Exclusive: Eventually released in China much later than anticipated, the Orlando Bloom starring S.M.A.R.T. Chase was not the big box office winner its producers desired but Shanghai-based Bliss Media have come out victors in a long legal BTS battle over the pic.

Almost two years after Stateside set Das Films sued Bliss in Los Angeles Superior Court for kicking them off the project, an arbitration final award has come down strongly in favor of the Wei Han founded company over the action flick that came out last fall in the Middle Kingdom.

“Bliss Media established that Das Films breached the Producer Deal Memo, breached the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing and, through Das, negligently misrepresented Donaldson’s availability,” writes retired Judge Terry Friedman in the August 13 final award arbitration ruling, noting the shell game seemingly played with bringing November Man helmer Roger Donaldson on as S.

Smash Palace

Blu ray

Arrow Video

1982 / 1.85:1 / Street Date May 28, 2018

Starring Bruno Lawrence, Anna Jemison

Cinematography by Graeme Cowley

Directed by Roger Donaldson

Smash Palace is the wryly grandiose name given to a New Zealand junkyard run by Al Shaw, a tight-lipped workaholic up to his elbows in axle grease and resentment. It also describes the wreck Al has made of his own marriage.

At the beginning of Roger Donaldson’s 1982 film, Shaw and his wife Jacqui are already nearing the end of their rocky alliance – both work at the family business but the family is all Al’s – Jacqui has finally come to terms that she wants no part of it.

Shaw, a burly pub crawler with deep set eyes and the thinnest of skins is an occasional auto jockey who appreciates a finely-tuned V8 but understands little about the niceties of married life. Jacqui is tired of Al...

Smash Palace (1981) is currently available on Blu-ray from Arrow Academy

Premiering at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, Smash Palace was Roger Donaldson’s second feature following the success of Sleeping Dogs, a film which had heralded the arrival of the New Zealand New Wave.

Smash Palace concerns itself with the marriage of former racing driver Al and French-born Jacqui. The pair had met when she nursed him back to health following a career-ending injury. They married, returned to Al s native New Zealand to take over his late father s wrecking yard business the Smash Palace of the title and had a child. But over time stagnation has set in, Jacqui s resentment of Al has grown, and things are threatening to spill over…

Playing out as a darker, more haunting New Zealand variation on such Us separation movies as Kramer vs. Kramer or Shoot the Moon, Smash Palace offers a brilliant,...

Director Roger Donaldson is one of those mainstream minded filmmakers whose body of work quickly and quietly dispelled his Australian origins. His glossy Hollywood movies of the 1980s (1987’s The Big Clock remake No Way Out or 1988’s Cocktail) segued into knock-off genre brands, like his remake of Arthur Penn’s The Getaway in 1994, or B-grade sci-fi classic Species (1995). His most noted item might still be 1998’s Dante’s Peak, one of the two dueling volcano action epics which premiered within the same period. Lately, he’s churned out risible fodder for fading action idols, like Nicolas Cage in Seeking Justice…...

To celebrate the release of Sleeping Dogs - available on Blu-ray 16th April from Arrow Academy – we have a copy to giveaway!

Sleeping Dogs is a tour de force action thriller that launched the Hollywood careers of both its director Roger Donaldson and lead actor Sam Neill. It manages to be both nail-bitingly tense and a chilling view of New Zealand as a dictatorship and, as such, it resonated with audiences on a worldwide scale.

Tightly scripted, full of tension and packed with the kind of action you simply wouldn’t expect from such a low budget production, Sleeping Dogs is a masterpiece of the action thriller genre. Sam Neill’s excellent performance as a recluse who’s unwittingly drawn into a civil war situation is, meanwhile, is a perfect example of the everyman sucked into events beyond his control. It really is a must-watch whether you’re a fan...

Director Roger Donaldson has enjoyed a rewarding Hollywood career, but he began in New Zealand where this fantasy mini-epic about resistance to a political takeover became the first Kiwi picture to win an international release and launch a national film industry. The film’s young star didn’t do too badly either — the ‘ordinary guy’ who becomes rebel terrorist is played by none other than Sam Neill. Sold as an action thriller, the show is really a primer on how a democracy can be turned into a police state, with the public’s full approval.

Sleeping Dogs

Blu-ray

Arrow Academy USA

1977 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 107 min. / Street Date April 17, 2018 / 39.95

Starring: Sam Neill, Nevan Rowe, Ian Mune, Warren Oates, Ian Watkin, Clyde Scott, Donna Akersten, Bill Johnson, Don Selwyn, Davina Whitehouse.

Cinematography: Michael Seresin

Film Editor: Ian John

Original Music: Mathew Brown, David Calder, Murray Grindlay

Written by Ian Mune, Arthur Baysting...

The 1977 New Zealand thriller Sleeping Dogs Starring Sam Neill and Warren Oates will be available on Blu-ray from Arrow Academy on April 17th

Adapted from C.K. Stead s novel Smith s Dream, Sleeping Dogs almost single-handedly kickstarted the New Zealand New Wave, demonstrating that homegrown feature films could resonate with both local and international audiences, and launching the big-screen careers of director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, Species) and Sam Neill (Jurassic Park, Possession).

Neill in his first lead role in a feature plays Smith, a man escaping the break-up of his marriage by finding isolation on an island off the Coromandel Peninsula. As he settles into his new life, the country is experiencing its own turmoil: an oil embargo has led to martial law and civil war, into which Smith reluctantly finds himself increasingly involved.

Co-starring Warren Oates (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia) as the commander...

The irrepressible Robin Williams is Joey, a trash-talking Cadillac salesman with three women on the line, who becomes an involuntary hero when Tim Robbins smashes his motorcycle into the car showroom and threatens to kill everybody. Roger Donaldson’s crisis-farce black comedy is still funny — and my favorite Robin Williams feature.

Cadillac Man

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1990 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 97 min. / Street Date January 2, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Robin Williams, Tim Robbins, Pamela Reed, Fran Drescher, Zack Norman, Lori Petty, Annabella Sciorra, Paul Guilfoyle, Bill Nelson, Eddie Jones, Mimi Cecchini, Tristine Skyler, Judith Hoag, Lauren Tom.

Cinematography: David Gribble

Film Editor: Richard Francis-Bruce

Original Music: J. Peter Robinson

Written by Ken Friedman

Produced by Roger Donaldson, Charles Roven

Directed by Roger Donaldson

Perhaps Robin Williams’ biggest impact was through his cable TV comedy specials, teamed up with Whoopi Goldberg and others. An amazing natural humor machine, Williams could go...

"We decided to make it female so it would be more docile and controllable..." Luckily for the men of Earth, she was everything but controllable. A new, carefully crafted Sil sixth scale replica from Threezero is based on the deadly character from Roger Donaldson's 1995 sci-fi movie Species, and ahead of its 2018 release from Sideshow Collectibles, we have a look at photos of the collectible figure that might make a great gift for that special horror and sci-fi fan in your life.

From Sideshow Collectibles: “Sideshow and Threezero are excited to announce the Sil Sixth Scale Figure from Species.

The Sil collectible figure features an original body uniquely crafted to replicate the alien character as seen in the 1995 film. A soft translucent Pvc was used on the torso, arms and legs and Sil features a textured interior-skeleton.

Don't miss your chance to add this Species collectible to your Sci-Fi collection!