The diverse international programme for the 45th Murphy's Cork Film Festival will include: Woody Allen's latest comedy, Small Time Crooks; Christopher Nolan's complex US thriller, Memento, starring Guy Pearce; the Swedish drama, Faithless, scripted by Ingmar Bergman and directed by Liv Ullmann; Nagisa Oshima's picture of gay Samurai in the Japanese Gohatto; Jamie Thraves's London-set The Low Down with Irish actor Aiden Gillen in the role which won him an award at Edinburgh last month; two critically acclaimed Australian movies, Jonathan Teplizky's Better Than Sex and Andrew Dominik's Chopper; Dominik Moll's clever, teasing French thriller, Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien; Hungarian director Bella Tarr's festival favourite, Werckmeister Harmonies; and Wong Kar-wai's Hong Kong romantic period drama, In the Mood For Love.
The festival opens at Cork Opera House on October 15th with the Irish premiere of Gerry Stembridge's contemporary, Dublin-set romantic comedy, About Adam, with Stuart Townsend as a charming young Dubliner who seduces three sisters from the same family. They are played by Kate Hudson, Frances O'Connor and Charlotte Bradley, with Rosaleen Linehan as their mother.
The closing film, on October 22nd, will be Terence Davies's adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, The House of Mirth, featuring X-Files actress Gillian Anderson cast against type as a New York socialite in the early years of the 20th century.
ONE of the unmissable events in the Dublin Theatre Festival next week has to be the special presentation of Tod Browning's 1931 silent classic, Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, which will be accompanied by a new Philip Glass score to be performed live by Glass with the Kronos Quartet. There will be three performances of the show at the National Concert Hall next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
THE distinguished Indian film and stage actor, Saeed Jaffrey, will be the guest of honour at the celebrations to mark the first anniversary of the Bollywood screenings at the IFC in Dublin. Three of the actor's films will be screened over next weekend - The Chess Players, Masala and My Beautiful Laundrette - and he will participate in a public interview at the IFC on October 8th at 6 p.m. On the same day, he will launch his recently published autobiography, An Actor's Journey, in the IFC bookshop at 3 p.m.
ONE of the most popular indigenous productions with German audiences and critics in recent years, Joseph Vilsmaier's 1997 film Comedian Harmonists, gets a rare Irish screening at the Goethe-Institut, 37 Merrion Square, Dublin, at 8 p.m. on October 11th. The film follows the international career of the eponymous German a capella group from the late 1920s until 1934 when the Nazis branded their music as degenerate and banned the group because three of its six members were Jewish. Admission to the screening is free.
THE imaginative New Zealand screenwriter, Andrew Niccol, is set to follow his screenplays for Gattaca (which he also directed) and The Truman Show with the intriguing-sounding Simone, his second feature as writer and director. Simone will feature Al Pacino as a disillusioned film producer whose leading actress abruptly drops out of his latest project. He clandestinely decides to replace her with a computer-generated actress who becomes an overnight star of such magnitude that he cannot bear to admit his fraud to the world or to himself.
IRISH actor Tom Hickey has joined the cast of the new Neil LaBute film, Possession, adapted by Laura Jones and LaBute himself from A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession. The story deals with the relationship between two Victorian poets, played by Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle, and the romance that ensues when two contemporary academics (Aaron Echhart and Gwyneth Paltrow) study them. The film, which is shooting on Yorkshire locations and at Shepperton Studios outside London, also features Toby Stephens, Anna Massey, Graham Crowden, Trevor Eve and Tom Hollander.
CARRIE Fisher, who wrote the autobiographical Postcards from the Edge, returns to the showbiz milieu with her new screenplay, Those Old Broads, which stars her mother, Debbie Reynolds, along with Joan Collins and Shirley MacLaine as ageing film stars who are reunited after 40 years for a television special. Elizabeth Taylor will play their ruthless agent, and Carrie Fisher and her sister, Tricia Fisher, will feature as prostitutes.