Leonard Maltin

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Oscar's Music Masters

By Leonard Maltin
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March 8, 2010 6:53 AM
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0 Comments

The gifted and prolific Alexandre Desplat, whose scores this year alone include Fantastic Mr. Fox, A Prophet, Coco Before Chanel, Julie & Julia, and The Twilight Saga: New Moon, poses with Academy music branch governor Arthur Hamilton, whose many songs include the standard “Cry Me a River.”

By Leonard Maltin
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March 5, 2010 11:45 AM
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By Leonard Maltin
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March 5, 2010 5:00 AM
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67 Comments

How you react to this film will have a lot to do with your expectations. I didn’t expect a work of genius. In fact, I approached it with trepidation, worried that Tim Burton’s weird sensibility layered on top of Lewis Carroll’s already-surreal material would create a kind of overkill. I’m happy to report that I was pleasantly surprised. First things first: with no disrespect to Burton, this struck me more as Linda Woolverton’s Alice. As the principal screenwriter of the Disney features Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Mulan, she has solid experience creating strong female characters. Here, she has reinvented Alice as a willful 19-year-old girl (nicely played by newcomer Mia Wasikowska) who flees from a stifling arranged marriage and falls down a rabbit hole. She has no memory of having visited this magical world once before, as a child.

By Leonard Maltin
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March 4, 2010 5:00 AM
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15 Comments

If you attend the new production of Alice in Wonderland, you’ll not only see Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and other well-known performers onscreen; you’ll hear some familiar voices, especially if you’re fond of British actors. I pinpointed Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar right away; his delivery is unmistakable. But it was my wife Alice—the real Anglophile in the family—who identified Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat and Timothy Spall as Bayard the hound. (After all, she listened to Fry read the Harry Potter books; he’s on the British audiobooks while Jim Dale did the American versions.) Neither one of us could i.d. Michael Sheen as the White Rabbit, nor did we realize that two distinguished veterans, Michael Gough and Christopher Lee, provided the voices of the Dodo Bird and Jabberwocky, respectively.

By Leonard Maltin
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March 3, 2010 5:00 AM
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2 Comments

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland has always held great appeal for Hollywood. Johnny Depp is a big lure, but back in 1933 Paramount put almost all of the studio’s star-power into its production, including Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and virtually every actor it had under contract—including W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.

By Leonard Maltin
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March 3, 2010 2:46 AM
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1 Comment

.syn{font-family:Arial;font-size:11px;padding:5px;width:470px;background:#585858;border-top:1px solid #777777;color:#ccc;} .syn a {color:#ccc;}The Young Victoria Leonard Maltin's Secret's Out | Movie Trailers

By Leonard Maltin
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March 3, 2010 2:40 AM
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0 Comments

.syn{font-family:Arial;font-size:11px;padding:5px;width:470px;background:#585858;border-top:1px solid #777777;color:#ccc;} .syn a {color:#ccc;}Leonard Maltin's Secret's Out Hugh Hefner | Movie Trailers

By Leonard Maltin
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March 1, 2010 4:10 AM
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1 Comment

GEORGE LUCAS’S BLOCKBUSTING(George Lucas Books/It Books) Edited by Alex Ben Block and Lucy Autrey Wilson, with a Foreword by Francis Ford Coppola

This ambitious, indeed sprawling, 945-page volume sets out to trace the history of American film, decade-by-decade. While it ostensibly focuses on 300 so-called blockbuster hits, its chapter-opening essays, sidebar notes and statistics provide an informed and impressive overview of changing trends in moviemaking—and moviegoing—throughout the 20th century and into the dawn of the 21st. While at first glance it appears that the book’s emphasis is on the business end of movies (providing revealing, inflation-adjusted statistics on admission prices, star and director salaries, production costs and box-office figures) it also devotes considerable space to artistic advances and milestones. The silent era is especially well served by contributions by such historians as Robert Birchard and David Kiehn.

By Leonard Maltin
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February 26, 2010 8:28 AM
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2 Comments

Ellen Burstyn in Resurrection (1980)

By Leonard Maltin
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February 25, 2010 9:40 AM
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1 Comment

I like movies that take me on an emotional journey. The central character of A Prophet is Malik, a 19-year-old petty criminal (Tahar Rahim) who’s being sent to prison. We don’t know what he’s done, or very much else about him; he’s quiet and keeps to himself. Then he is targeted by one of the prison kingpins, a tough, Corsican mobster named Cesar (played with quiet intensity by Niels Arestrup), who forces him to commit an unthinkable act. This is the turning point in his life, and it leads him to experiences he never could have planned or predicted.

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Categories

Oscar's Music Masters

My ET Online Oscar Predictions

Alice in Wonderland

Famous Voices For "Alice"—Now And Then

Hollywood's All-Star 'Alice'

secret's out -- Leonard Looks at The Young Victoria

secret's out - The Hugh Hefner Interview

book review — 3 Significant New Film Books

Good Movies—Resurrected

film review - A Prophet (Un Prophète)

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