News: Charlotte Gainsbourg

The actress probably still best known for her controversial duet with her father Serge Gainsbourg, “Lemon Incest”, recorded when she was just thirteen, is on good form in this week’s the Science of Sleep, and has a fair few more projects lined up that make the best of her multilingual talents.

First up is Nuovomondo (known as The Golden Door in English), which won a bunch of awards at last year’s prestigious Venice Film Festival. Gainsbourg takes the lead in this tale of Italian immigration to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, and has received much praise – but whether this will be enough for this little Franco-Italian-German production to get a proper release is anyone’s guess. After that there’s more foreign language frolics in the French farcical comedy Prête-moi ta main (or I Do: How to Get Married and Stay Single in English), where Gainsbourg plays a woman called in to pretend to be a friend’s girlfriend to stop his family from forcing him into marriage.

Then it’s back to English language roles in cult director Todd Haynes’ intriguing and much-anticipated experimental Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (alongside the likes of Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Julianne Moore and Adrien Brody), before cropping up in City of Your Final Destination for director James Ivory (of Merchant Ivory fame), alongside Anthony Hopkins and Laura Linney. She’s doing well.

Review: Hollywoodland

UK release date: 24th November

Though it has all the hallmarks of a film noir — a gumshoe, a mysterious death and not one but two femmes fatales — Hollywoodland doesn’t quite fit the genre bill. Instead, it’s more a poignant love letter to the glory days of Tinseltown, personified by George Reeves (Ben Affleck), a struggling bit-part player who found fame in the 1950s as TV’s Superman.

The film takes liberties with the facts of Reeves’s life, starting with his apparent suicide in 1959 and telling his story in flashback through the eyes of private eye Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), who is hired by Reeves’s mother to look into her son’s death. Simo uncovers three possible alternatives, all hinged on Reeves’s involvement with a rich, powerful and married woman (Diane Lane).

Despite the convincingly dark, smoky atmosphere to Simo’s investigation, Hollywoodland works better when it’s evoking Reeves’s heyday — a cosmetically genteel world of zoot suits and jazz bands, in which the studio system protected its investments at any price.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 125mins

Review by Damon Wise

News: Adrien Brody

Oscar-winner Brody puts in a good turn as a noirish detective in this week’s Hollywoodland, though most of the Academy Awards buzz for this film seems to be centred around the “comeback” performance of his co-star Ben Affleck.

It could instead be the upcoming biopic of Spanish bullfighter Manuel Rodríguez Sánchez, Manolete, for which he trained in southern Spain to get the full bullfighting experience, which garners Brody his next batch of nominations. Likely to be a controversial movie for its potential to laud such a cruel sport, and coming from Menno Meyjes, the same writer/director responsible for the John Cusack-starring Hitler biopic Max, word is that the chemistry with co-star Penélope Cruz could make this one to remember on its release in Autumn 2007.

Brody will also be appearing in the experimental director Todd Haynes’ equally experimental exploration of Bob Dylan I’m Not There, alongside a ridiculously impressive cast of the likes of Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett,Charlotte Gainsbourg, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Julianne Moore. Due out next year, Dylan’s life and work is explored through seven characters representing different aspects of the man and music.