HFPA

You could tell the first weekend was here by the loud music thumping from various Lido locales on Friday. On Day 3 the Venice Film Festival was definitely firing on all pistons with the competition featuring El Cristo Ciego by Chilean director Cristopher Murray, Frantz from French stalwart François Ozon, a disturbing documentary on big game hunting by Austrian Ulrich Seidl (Safari) and Tom Ford’s literary noir Nocturnal Animals  with Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhall, Michael Shannon and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

Three members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association – Janet R. Nepales, Ruben V.

Lorenzo Soria has been re-elected President of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for the 2016-2017 year. This will be Soria’s fourth term in office, following his tenure in 2003-2004, 2004-2005 and 2015-2016.

One of the great sidebars in Cannes is the Classics selection, a favorite of cinephiles and a tribute to the history of cinema and the festival. This year fans can feast their eyes on great movies from Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Milos Forman’s Valmont.

Parties are Cannes’ unique language, and the HFPA speaks it very well – and with a purpose. On Friday, May 13, the Association threw a cocktail party at the glamorous Nikki Beach of the Carlton Hotel, on the Croisette, to benefit and honor FilmAid International.

With two biopics of jazz icons hitting the screens – Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead, exploring Miles Davis’ life and music, and Robert Budreau’s Born To Be Blue, a re-imagining of critical moments in Chet Baker’s tumultuous career, with Ethan Hawke as the jazz legend- this seemed like an appropriate time to look back at how movies expressed this all-American music style. Check the gallery to see what filmmakers and stars  - Golden Globe nominees and winners, most of them -told us about jazzin’ up the screen.

“This film festival is my baby,” says Tiina Lokk, director and founder of the Tallinn Black Nights International Film Festival (POFF). 2016 year marks the 20thanniversary since its inception, and since 2014 it stands alongside such established and prestigious 'A' status festivals as Venice, Berlin and Cannes.

For the third year in a row the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was applauded at the annual Noir City, the San Francisco noir film festival, for its support of the restoration of endangered noir films. The 14th edition of Noir City, currently under way in San Francisco, has an added international flavor: the film restored with HFPA support, Los tallos amargos (The Bitter Stems) is not a USA noir, but an Argentinian classic, the 1956 winner of the Silver Condor award for best feature, given by the Argentinian Film Critics Association.

Pat Harrington Jr. , four-time nominee and Golden Globe winner in 1982 as Best Supporting Actor in a TV Comedy has died at age 86, in Los Angeles.

The biographical drama Trumbo about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo received two Golden Globes nominations in 2015: Bryan Cranston for his portrayal of Trumbo, the highest-paid screenwriter of his day, and Helen Mirren for her role as Trumbo's nemesis, Hollywood actress turned gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. The red scare that stalked America and most visibly Hollywood after the end of the Second World War was one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the United States.