NYT. Holiday movies.

What, already? Seems like only the day before yesterday that the New York Times was previewing the fall; my, how time flies when you're preoccupied with a fall of an entirely different order. But lo, many of the same films pop up again in this Sunday's "Holiday Movies" package.

• Nancy Hass profiles the very busy producer Scott Rudin behind eight films in 2004 alone, three of which are set to open for the holiday season: Closer, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

• Profiles: David Carr on Peter Sarsgaard, Melanie Thernstrom on Natalie Portman and Karen Durbin offers mini-profiles of five actors to keep an eye on (if you weren't watching them already): Aishwarya Rai, Birol Ünel, Mabel Rivera, Don Cheadle and Lynn Collins.

• A couple of a making-of featurettes, in a way, albeit in print: Kristin Hohenadel on Finding Neverland and David Edelstein on The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.

• Anita Gates talks to Olivia de Havilland, who's seen Gone With the Wind 26 times and still gets caught up in the story just five minutes in each and every time.

• Randy Kennedy breaks down a sequence in Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside.

• Stuart Klawans: "Notre Musique is one of the old master's most direct and heartfelt works, but it is a Godard film all the same: allusive, punning and quotation-mad." Klawans offers a guide to a few of those references.

• Polly Shulman lines up a passage from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with its counterpart in Bride & Prejudice. More screenplay excerpts: In Good Company and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

• Once again, Salon's Stephanie Zacharek and Charles Taylor preview the highlights of the season's DVD releases.

• Dave Kehr and Suzanne O'Conner date and annotate all the noteworthy theatrical releases through January 28.

Posted by dwhudson at November 7, 2004 11:54 AM