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.
It is dangerous to engage in business in China now, and those considering engaging with it should pay close attention to the example Taiwanese businesspeople are setting. Though way down from the heady days of Taiwanese investments in China two decades ago, a few hundred thousand Taiwanese continue to live, work and study there, but the numbers have been declining fast. As President William Lai (賴清德) pointed out approvingly to a visiting American Senate delegation, China accounted for 80 percent of the total overseas investment in 2011, but was reduced to just 11.4 percent last year. That is a big drop.
Last week, the government rejected a petition to amend the law that would allow permanent residents a path to citizenship. This was widely expected, but it came amid a flurry of negative trends about the future of the nation’s labor force. There was much ironic commentary on the juxtaposition of that decision with its idiotic, abusive reasoning with the urgent demand for labor across a wide range of fields. This demand was highlighted by the government’s plans for five NT$10 billion (US$307.6 million) funds to promote development in key fields, including artificial intelligence (AI), “smart” healthcare and green growth announced
Supplements are no cottage industry. Hawked by the likes of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, vitamin gummies have in recent years found popularity among millennials and zoomers, who are more receptive to supplements in the form of “powders, liquids and gummies” than older generations. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop — no stranger to dubious health trends — sells its own line of such supplements. On TikTok, influencers who shill multivitamin gummies — and more recently, vitamin patches resembling cutesy, colorful stickers or fine line tattoos — promise glowing skin, lush locks, energy boosts and better sleep. But if it’s real health benefits you’re after, you’re
About half of working women reported feeling stressed “a lot of the day,” compared to about 4 in 10 men, according to a Gallup report published this week. The report suggests that competing demands of work and home comprise part of the problem: working women who are parents or guardians are more likely than men who are parents to say they have declined or delayed a promotion at work because of personal or family obligations, and mothers are more likely than fathers to “strongly agree” that they are the default responders for unexpected child care issues. And 17 percent of women overall
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