The New York Film Critics' Circle on Monday named United 93, a harrowing dramatization about one of the jets hijacked in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, as its best picture of the year.
The film was the first major movie to tackle the atrocity and recounts how the passengers fought back against their hijackers before the jet crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, killing all 40 passengers and crew on board.
Forest Whitaker won in the best actor category for his portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, while Helen Mirren picked up the best actress award for her performance as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen.
PHOTOS: AGENCIES
The film also picked up the best screenplay award for Peter Morgan.
Martin Scorsese won in the best director category for his hit mafia drama The Departed, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as an undercover cop trying to bring down a mob boss played by Jack Nicholson.
United 93 and Mirren have both notably been tipped as likely winners on Oscar night in February, when the annual Academy Awards will be handed out.
In other awards news, Australia's first Aboriginal language movie has dominated the country's top cinema awards, winning best film and best direction at a star-studded ceremony in Melbourne.
Ten Canoes, the first feature to depict life in an Aboriginal community in the days before European invasion, won six awards at the 48th annual Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards on Thursday night.
Director Rolf de Heer said even though the film was predominantly in the indigenous language of Ganalbingu and portrayed tribal life of a thousand years ago, it resonated with modern audiences.
"Audiences everywhere find something in it," he said.
The film, which won awards for best original screenplay, best cinematography, best editing and best sound, will be entered in the foreign language film category at next year's Oscars.
Filmed in the remote crocodile-infested swamps of northern Australia and starring a clutch of untrained actors, Ten Canoes revolves around the story of a young man who has taken a fancy to an older man's wife.
Emmy-winning actor Peter Boyle, who played the tap-dancing monster in the movie Young Frankenstein and grouchy father Frank Barone in the TV series Everybody Loves Raymond, has died at age 71.
The former Christian Brothers monk and friend of Beatle John Lennon died on Tuesday after a long battle with multiple myeloma and heart disease, his publicists said on Wednesday.
Boyle, who often played cantankerous characters, shot to fame as a foul-mouthed, working-class bigot in the 1970 film Joe.
He also played one of Robert DeNiro's fellow taxi drivers in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver in 1976 and the cruel, racist father to Billy Bob Thornton in 2001s Monster's Ball.
Boyle won an Emmy for outstanding guest actor appearance on The X-Files in 1996.
He is survived by his wife and two daughters.
Julia Roberts is being lined up to star in a big-screen adaptation of Lolly Winston's bestselling novel Happiness Sold Separately, entertainment trade press reported Wednesday.
The movie tells the story of a suburban wife's heartache at discovering her husband has had an affair and their subsequent battle to try to save a failing marriage, according to Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.
Roberts will produce the picture while Scott Coffey will direct and adapt, reports said.
"I couldn't get Julia out of my head when I was reading Lolly's book. Elinor is such a strong, complicated woman, and bringing her to the screen required Julia's integrity, empathy, humor and legs," Coffey said.
Roberts is currently in production on Universal's Charlie Wilson's War opposite Tom Hanks and has a voice-over lead role in children's flick Charlotte's Web.
Two US university students featured in a scene from box-office hit Borat had a request for the scene to be removed from the film rejected by a Los Angeles court this week.
Lawyers for the students — whose names have been withheld — had argued the scene had the potential to harm the two men's reputations in perpetuity if it remained in theater and DVD versions of the movie.
As well the scene's removal, the two students are seeking financial damages from the film's makers, claiming they were misled into appearing in the spoof documentary.
However Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Joseph Biderman turned down the request for the scene to be cut.
In Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, British comic Sacha Baron Cohen plays a fictional Kazakh journalist blundering across America in search of cultural enlightenment.
The two students suing the movie's makers appear in the film when Borat hitches a ride in their motorhome.
The scene shows the men appearing to get drunk and watching the infamous Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex videotape.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not