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.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moving the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight last month symbolized the closest humanity has ever been to global catastrophe In this context, the legislature remains gridlocked over the general budget, mirroring tensions simmering across the globe. According to local soothsayers, this “extreme speed and violent conflict” is no coincidence as the Year of the Horse is the year of bingwu (丙午), the rare “Fire Horse Year” (火馬年) that occurs once every 60 years, a configuration carrying an energy that shapes everything from personal fortunes to international crises. “For some people, it can be a
Feb. 16 to Feb. 22 Pai Ko’s (白克) film career appeared poised to reach new heights in 1962 with the completion of the highly-anticipated, star-studded Romance of Longshan Temple (龍山寺之戀). Despite being mainly in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), the film promoted harmony between those born in China and Taiwan, aligning with the official cultural policy at the time. However, he soon disappeared. Colleagues found out he was arrested and accused of colluding with communists. It was not his first run-in with the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). As a university student in China, he joined the anti-Japanese Anti-Imperialism League and
Taiwan is especially vulnerable to climate change. The surrounding seas are rising at twice the global rate, extreme heat is becoming a serious problem in the country’s cities, and typhoons are growing less frequent (resulting in droughts) but more destructive. Yet young Taiwanese, according to interviewees who often discuss such issues with this demographic, seldom show signs of climate anxiety, despite their teachers being convinced that humanity has a great deal to worry about. Climate anxiety or eco-anxiety isn’t a psychological disorder recognized by diagnostic manuals, but that doesn’t make it any less real to those who have a chronic and
When Bilahari Kausikan defines Singapore as a small country “whose ability to influence events outside its borders is always limited but never completely non-existent,” we wish we could say the same about Taiwan. In a little book called The Myth of the Asian Century, he demolishes a number of preconceived ideas that shackle Taiwan’s self-confidence in its own agency. Kausikan worked for almost 40 years at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reaching the position of permanent secretary: saying that he knows what he is talking about is an understatement. He was in charge of foreign affairs in a pivotal place in
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