New York. Fall preview.

"We wanted to take Marty's genre, the gangster thriller, and find a way to flat-out do it differently, and to push the envelope. And, well, we pushed it." Jack Nicholson tells Logan Hill about cooking up a role meaty enough for him to join The Departed.

Hill also talks with Steven Shainberg about Fur, in which Nicole Kidman plays Diane Arbus: "This is not a biopic at all. It's an imaginary portrait that tries to capture the otherworldly, hallucinogenic, mythological quality of her photographs." And Hill blurbs a few more upcoming highlights.

"In prospect, The Black Dahlia is a disturbingly perfect marriage of filmmaker and subject," writes David Edelstein. For one thing, "De Palma is a kindred spirit to James Ellroy, the traumatized romantic who wrote the novel." For another, "no director this side of David Lynch has the potential to bring out all the meanings in the haunting image of that severed, 'smiling' corpse in that empty Hollywood lot." Related, and via Ray Pride at Movie City Indie: Ellroy in the Los Angeles Times Magazine on leaving LA - and coming back.

Also, Infamous: "As Capote, Toby Jones is dandy; I'd be praising him to the heavens if not for you-know-who." But: "The problem with [Douglas] McGrath's writing is that there's no subtext."

Emma Rosenblum asks Maggie Gyllenhaal about Sherrybaby, about the fallout from those comments she made during the Tribeca Film Festival and about how tough it is to get an indie picture out there. Also, a chat with Cate Blanchett about The Good German: "Steven [Soderbergh] would say, 'If it doesn't feel bizarre, then it's not right.'"

And then, the big, slightly annotated calendar.

Related: Via Anne Thompson, Premiere's fall preview in a slide-show format.

Earlier: Entertainment Weekly and Time.

Posted by dwhudson at August 28, 2006 3:05 AM