LA Weekly. FYC.

The LA Weekly's conducted interviews with three performers and one director who shouldn't be overlooked this frantic awards season. Adam Nayman: "Julie Christie may well earn a bookend Oscar for her performance as a woman in the grip of Alzheimer's disease in Away From Her, but it's the veteran Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent, playing Christie's stoically heartbroken husband, who anchors the picture."

Ella Taylor: "Spend half an hour with Christie, and you'll experience her ambivalence about Hollywood and almost everything else. Plainly shy and gun-shy, the actress hates being interviewed as much as she hates speaking in public. But as luck would have it, we had met two weeks earlier at a panel discussion about Away From Her, with Christie, her genial co-star Gordon Pinsent and a preternaturally confident [Sarah] Polley. Only Christie looked as though she was expecting to be shot at dawn."

Tim Grierson: "Released last February - a fact of timing that usually squashes a movie's Oscar chances - Breach has remained an underdog awards contender thanks to [Chris] Cooper's sterling lead performance as real-life FBI agent Robert Hanssen, a seemingly model government operative until he was arrested in early 2001 (and later convicted to life in prison) for selling US secrets to the Russians."

Scott Foundas: "As all the retrospective acclaim suggests, Zodiac has life in it yet, and seems sure to endure in the cinematic fossil record longer than many of the past year's celluloid causes célèbres. (Atonement, hello?) That's okay by [David] Fincher, who already has another film - an adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's reverse-aging novella The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring his Se7en and Fight Club collaborator Brad Pitt - in the editing room."

Posted by dwhudson at January 10, 2008 2:20 PM