75th Golden Globe Awards

The well-traveled winner of several festival awards, including the Jury Grand Prix and Best Actress prize at the 20th Shanghai International Film Festival, Iranian drama Yellow, writer-director Mostafa Taghizadeh’s debut feature, unfolds against a uniquely intense backdrop and tells a tale of friendships ripped apart. What starts off as a road trip movie, with a seemingly carefree and well-integrated mix of male and female friends seeking to pay a fond farewell to their homeland before leaving for Italy to start new jobs on a shared project, quickly detours into more fraught territory after a terrible car accident injures a young boy.

Since they joined forces for a TV movie in their native Bulgaria seven years ago, former TV reporter Kristina Grozeva and art school graduate Petar Valchanov have become one of the most formidable teams in local cinema. Their short film, Jump, was nominated for the European Film Awards, the first time it happened for that country.

Based on the best-selling novel by Cambodian author and human rights activist Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father tells the gripping story of how a young Loung and her siblings survived the deadly Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1978. Told through the eyes of Ung from the ages of five to nine years old, the film depicts the indomitable spirit and devotion of her family as they struggle to stay together during the Khmer Rouge years.

Italian American director Jonas Carpignano’s A Ciambra won a Directors Fortnight prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was acquired for distribution by IFC’s Sundance Select label. It is a film steeped in the Italian neorealist tradition as well as modern documentary influenced dramas (think Andrea Arnold’s American Honey or Chloe Zhao’s The Rider, also at Cannes this year).

Cecil B. deMille Award laureate Morgan Freeman has some words of congratulations – and advice – for our current recipient, Oprah Winfrey.

Oprah Winfrey is the recipient of the Cecil B. deMille Award of the 75th Golden Globes.

Nominations for the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards were announced this morning from the Beverly Hilton Hotel by presenters Alfre Woodard, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Bell, and Sharon Stone, with, Hollywood Foreign Press Association president, Meher Tatna, and executive vice president of television at dick clark productions, Barry Adelman. Big Little Lies leads the TV categories with six nominations, while The Shape of Water takes the top position in the film section, with seven nominations.

The 90s are the breakout decade for Julia Roberts, who wins a Globe for Pretty Woman shooting to superstardom. And Tom Cruise, whose Hollywood stature is confirmed at the very beginning of the decade with Born on the Fourth of July, also worthy of a Golden Globe.

A movie Steven Spielberg would like to forget. For the Hollywood Foreign Press, it wasn’t a problem.

The opening is stunning, breathtaking and spectacularly tragic: the bloodbath on Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. The first 28 minutes of Saving Private Ryan are something to experience and rightly considered one of the most unnerving and realistic in war movie history.