News

The Berlin Film Festival forges a new path next year with the first year under new artistic director Tricia Tuttle, who succeeds Carlo Chatrian and brings a background as a journalist and curator to the annual German showcase. This year’s festival runs February 13-23, and also in new positions this year are Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stütz, both serving as co-directors of programming.

With bigger announcements to come, the Berlinale unveiled its first wave of titles across the Panorama and Berlinale Special gala lineups on Tuesday. As previously announced, Tom Tykwer’s “The Light” is opening this coming 75th edition. Filmmakers getting a boost from today’s announcement include Denis Côté, Michel Gondry, and Ira Sachs, all bringing new films to the festival.

In the Berlinale Special lineup, German director Jan-Ole Gerster debuts the neo-noir thriller “Islands,” starring Sam Riley and Stacy Martin. Per the festival synopsis, in the film,...

The Belin Film Festival has unveiled its Panorama lineup, including new works by Denis Côté, Ira Sachs, Michel Gondry and Shatara Michelle Ford, among others.

Sachs’ movie, “Peter Hujar’s Day,” stars Ben Wishaw and Rebecca Hall. Set for an international premiere in Berlin, the film portrays a 1974 conversation between photographer Peter Hujar and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz, set against the backdrop of the New York art scene of the time.

Côté’s film, “Paul,” is a documentary about a man struggling with depression and social anxiety who found refuge in serving women who invite him to clean their homes.

Gondry’s “Maya, Give Me a Title” is described by the festival as a “stop-motion love letter to his daughter Maya brings to life a poetic and amusing journey that invites you to dream and laugh.” It features the voice of “The Count of Monte-Cristo” star Pierre Niney.

Ford’s “Dreams in Nightmares,...

With snow on the ground and a cloud of uncertainty hanging over its next-to-last edition in Park City, the 41st annual Sundance Film Festival returns to its high-altitude Utah home, where the country’s most important showcase for independent cinema will unspool in person from Jan. 23-Feb. 2, 2025.

While “discovery” remains the focus of the programming team — to the extent that 36 of the 87 features were directed by first-time filmmakers, and three of the six episodic selections — the upcoming edition marks a homecoming for a handful of big names.

Twenty-seven years after “Gods and Monsters,” director Bill Condon returns with his starry take on “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” an adaptation of the stage musical featuring Diego Luna, Tonatiuh and Jennifer Lopez. Festival regular Ira Sachs is back, paying homage to an underground art hero with “Peter Hujar’s Day,” with Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall.

“Jockey” helmer Clint Bentley welcomes audiences aboard “Train Dreams,...

Qatar’s Doha Film Institute (Dfi) has unveiled the 44 titles selected for its 2023 autumn funding round, with titles including Ana Naomi De Sousa’s Naseem, Fight With Grace about the British-Yemeni boxer Naseem Hamed; and Mohamed Jabarah Al Daradji’s Arkala Gilgamesh’s Dream.

Thirty-three of the projects are feature films, plus two TV series in development, and nine shorts.

Scroll down for the full list of selected features

The features are divided into Middle East/North Africa (Mena) titles, and those from outside that region; and then again divided by documentary or narrative; and by production stage.

Currently in post-production,...

Qatar’s Doha Film Institute (Dfi) has announced the recipient projects for its fall 2023 grants cycle, featuring 44 films by first and second-time directors hailing from 32 countries. (scroll down for full list)

The awardee projects span short, medium, feature-length and drama series format, fiction and non-fiction, and are in various stages of development and production.

Highlights include UK director Ana Naomi De Sousa’s documentary Naseem, Fight with Grace about British-Yemeni featherweight boxer Naseem Hamed, aka Prince Naseem and Naz.

Fiction features in the mix include Iraqi director Mohamed Al Daradji new film Arkala Gilgamesh’s Dream about a street child who dreams of bringing back his dead parents through the mythical figure of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk.

Other highly anticipated upcoming features include Moroccan director Alaa Eddine Aljem’s dark comedy Eldorado, the Taste of the South, which is in production, and Palestinian-French-Egyptian filmmaker Rani Massalha’s The Return of The Prodigal Son.

Mohamed Kordofani’s Khartoum-set drama Goodbye Julia made history at Cannes earlier this year as the first Sudanese feature to play in the festival across its 76 editions.

Six months on, the film is achieving a new first at the Egyptian box office.

The drama took the top slot on its opening day on October 25 on just nine screens, ahead of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which was on its second week on release on around 25 screens.

Widening out to some 25 screens, Goodbye Julia drew 13,135 spectators for a gross of $33,650 in its first week, according to locally collated figures.

By comparison, Killers of the Flower Moon went on to take $41,000 in the same week, for a total Egyptian gross of $102,000 by the end of its second week on release.

As of November 6, Goodbye Julia had grossed $56,637 in total.

Exploring the events leading up the 2011 schism between Sudan’s southern and northern populations,...

Welcome to our weekly rundown of the best new music — featuring big singles, key tracks from our favorite albums, and more. This week, Taylor Swift subverts sexism with a sultry 1989 vault track, Brent Faiyaz remains unfazed on a bouncy single, and Mr. Eazi drops his long-awaited debut. Plus, new music from YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Green Day, and Seventeen.

Taylor Swift, “Slut! (Taylor’s Version) [From the Vault]” (YouTube)

Brent Faiyaz feat. Tommy Richman & Felix!, “Upset” (YouTube)

Mr. Eazi, “Fefe No Fefe” (YouTube)

David Guetta feat. Ayra Star and Lil Durk, “Big Fu” (YouTube)

YoungBoy Never Broke Again,...

Fans of Bas, one of the first rappers signed to J. Cole’s Dreamville Records, know that the Paris-born, Queens-bred rapper calls several places home. Prominent among these is Sudan, where he says his friends and family are amongst the displaced and dead in a brutal war between the East African nation’s military and a paramilitary group that has been raging since April. His new single “Khartoum” and its music video are a personal account of the devastation. The United Nations reports that 5.6 million Sudanese have been expelled from their homes,...

Projects from Bhutan to Brazil to receive production and distribution funding.

The Berlinale’s World Cinema Fund (Wcf) has revealed 13 features it will support with a share of $380,000 in production and distribution funding.

Projects include Nothing In Its Place by Turkish filmmaker Burak Çevik, whose features The Pillar Of Salt, Belonging and Forms Of Forgetting each premiered at the Berlinale Forum.

His latest focuses on one of Turkey’s most bloody political massacres, which took place in the country’s capital of Ankara in 1978, and focuses on the night when a group of leftist youths who believed in unarmed revolution...

Quentin Tarantino got the stagecoach wheels rolling on The Hateful Eight when he announced it less than one year after Django Unchained hit theaters. In fact, the announcement wasn’t the only thing that was close. The Hateful Eight actually started as a sequel to Django, with parts of it stemming from an abandoned novelization of his revisionist western.

For this western, Tarantino would use western TV show tropes–chiefly the bottle episodes where a band of vigilantes took the lead hostage–as a launching point. He thought, “What if I did a movie starring nothing but those characters? No heroes…Just a bunch of nefarious guys in a room, all telling backstories that may or may not be true. Trap those guys together in a room with a blizzard outside, give them guns, and see what happens.” And what happened was a lot of anger, a lot of snow and a lot of vomit.

Zia Mohyeddin, the British-Pakistani actor known for his parts in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and ‘Immaculate Conception’, and the stage version of ‘A Passage to India’, died on Monday in a Karachi hospital, ‘Variety’ reports. Mohyeddin, who was 91, was ill and on life support, his family said. His death was condoled by top members of Pakistan’s political establishment, including President Arif Ali, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and his predecessor, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf leader Imran Khan.

Mohyeddin was born in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), British India, in 1931. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in the early 1950s.

After theatre roles in ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ and ‘Julius Caesar’, Mohyeddin in 1960 made his West End debut in ‘A Passage to India’, where he originated the role of Dr Aziz.

The actor featured in David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (1962), playing the role of Arab guide Tafas. Roles in...

Zia Mohyeddin, a British-Pakistani actor known for films “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Immaculate Conception” and the stage version of “A Passage to India,” died on Monday in Karachi. He was 91.

Mohyeddin was ill and was on life support in a Karachi hospital, his family said.

Mohyeddin was born in Lylallpur (now Faisalabad), British India, in 1931. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in the early 1950s. After theater roles in “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and “Julius Caesar,” Mohyeddin made his West End debut in “A Passage to India” in 1960, where he originated the role of Dr. Aziz.

The actor featured in David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), playing the role of Arab guide Tafas. Roles in Alexander Mackendrick’s “Sammy Going South” (1963), Fred Zinnemann’s “Behold a Pale Horse” (1964), Basil Dearden’s “Khartoum” (1966), Ralph Thomas’ “Deadlier Than the Male” (1966), Tony Richardson’s “The Sailor from...

Stars: Linn Bjornland, Eric Roberts, Justin Gordon, Jeff Berg, Alexander Leeb, Robert Okumu, Leonard Kelly-Young, Charles Chiyangwa, Lamont Hendrix, Jeff Grays, Delpaneaux Wills, Guru Singh | Written and Directed by Ted Betz

Escape Through Africa, that’s a title that conjures up visions of films from a bygone era – where soldiers took on the rough terrain and vicious locals of the vast continent, usually with stiff upper lips and a bravado that time and time again was the downfall of many a character. And that’s exactly what writer/director Ted Betz gives us with his film!

Set in 1914, Escape Through Africa follows a British nurse, Anne Corringfield (Linn Bjornland) escapes an attack on the African outpost controlled by her uncle Captain Lockwood (Eric Roberts). When Harold (Jeff Berg) arrives at the outpost and tells of a massacre – as seen in the film’s opening – of a British patrol by locals...

A marvelous, underrated and intelligently scripted epic, the 1966 production of Cinerama's "Khartoum"  seems be more appreciated by movie fans today than it was back in the day. Superb performances and fine direction by the equally underrated Basil Dearden, along with Frank Cordell's magnificent score, make it a marvelous cinematic experience. 

The making of the film is covered in detail in Cinema Retro's special issue devoted to epic films of the 1960s and 1970s. It includes transcriptions of rare interviews with Heston and Olivier.

Veteran filmmakers Michael Relph and Basil Dearden try a hip ‘n’ flip costume comedy about an 1899 consortium that’s the equivalent of Murder Inc.: Killings for hire done with veddy proper civility and good taste. The charming Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg lead a notable cast — Telly Savalas, Curd Jürgens, Philippe Noiret, Beryl Reid, Clive Revill — through mayhem-filled chases in several European capitals. Tossed off in tongue-in-cheek style, it’s shallow but cute, and if you like the stars it can be a lark. Its saving grace is the spirited Ms. Rigg.

The Assassination Bureau

Region-Free Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] 86

1969 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 110 min. / The Assassination Bureau Limited / Street Date October 29, 2021 / Available from [Imprint] or Amazon /

Starring: Oliver Reed, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Curd Jürgens, Philippe Noiret, Warren Mitchell, Beryl Reid, Clive Revill, Kenneth Griffith, Vernon Dobtcheff, Annabella Incontrera, Jess Conrad, George Coulouris.

Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth

Art Director: Michael Relph

Film...

Set in a remote Sudanese village where religion and prophecy are valuable currencies, You Will Die at Twenty beautifully examines misguided notions of faith. After giving birth to her first baby, Sakina (Islam Mubarak) visits the local Sheikh for a formal blessing. Instead of hearing promising words about the child’s bright future, she receives a dire omen: the boy will die on his 20th birthday.

Shockwaves of gossip spread as the entire village mints this premonition as tragic inevitability. Sensing the coming stress of their cursed family situation, her weak husband decides to leave and work abroad, promising to send money back as if that were appropriate compensation to excuse his betrayal. Almost immediately, Sakina’s sense of loss doubles, pushing her into a state of prolonged mourning for someone who has not yet died. She realizes rather quickly that raising her son alone will mean enduring years of isolation and alienation.

I’d never heard of this gem of a British production; now it goes on my list of highly recommended titles. A dock area on the Thames is ‘the pool,’ and the sailors that disembark from the cargo ships are susceptible to the temptations of black market trade. A single eventful weekend traces the fates of a half-dozen young people, the women that like the sailors, and the sailor that gets mixed up in a deadly serious crime. Director Basil Dearden’s excellent cast is mostly unfamiliar to us Yanks, but we get really tied up in their problems. This picture should be much better known. It’s the first English movie to depict an interracial romance, and it does so without sensationalism or special pleading. The best new extra is an interview with actor Earl Cameron, who at 103 years of age has his act (and his memories) totally together.

Chicago – Occasionally our reality needs a super sizing, and what better media than the movies to deliver that expansion. The historic Music Box Theatre of Chicago presents its annual 70Mm Film Festival – now through March 19th, 2020 – celebrating movies that were rendered, historically and now, in the large format screen size. Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com recently appeared on Mike Crowley’s “You’ll Probably Agree” Podcast to preview the festival.

The 70Mm size of film gauge is three-and-a-half times larger than the 35Mm standard, and was tinkered with since the earliest days of film. In 1928, the Fox Film Corporation developed their “Grandeur” 70Mm film for commercial films, but that was dropped during the Depression. When television started to siphon off movie goers in the 1950s, 70Mm formats like Todd-ao and Panavision expanded the possibilities for filmmakers and exhibiters, but it was costly and films were also still released in 35Mm.

The Weinstein Company (TWC) announced today that Academy Award® winning writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming feature The Hateful Eight, will premiere in 70mm on December 25, 2015exclusively for a 1-week roadshow opening that will be featured in glorious 70mm in 100 theaters nationwide. Following the 1-week engagement, the film will open with a theatrical digital release nationwide on December 31, 2015, while continuing to be shown in 70mm as well. The film premieres tonight in New York in 70mm at the Ziegfeld theater.

Starting today, moviegoers can purchase tickets for the 70mm roadshow showings at tickets.thehatefuleight.com. To mark the occasion, Quentin and TWC are commemorating the opening with the “12 Days of Hateful Eight Giveaways”, where each day a different Hateful Eight prize, memorabilia or once-in-a-lifetime experience will be given away to moviegoers who buy roadshow tickets in advance leading up to the Christmas day opening.

The exclusive roadshow engagement that...

The Weinstein Company announced today that Academy Award winning writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming feature The Hateful Eight, will premiere in 70mm on December 25, 2015 exclusively for a 1-week roadshow opening that will be featured in glorious 70mm in 100 theaters nationwide. Following the 1-week engagement, the film will open with a theatrical digital release nationwide on December 31, 2015, while continuing to be shown in 70mm as well. The film premieres tonight in New York in 70mm at the Ziegfeld theater.

Starting today, moviegoers can purchase tickets for the 70mm roadshow showings at tickets.thehatefuleight.com.

To mark the occasion, Quentin and TWC are commemorating the opening with the “12 Days of Hateful Eight Giveaways”, where each day a different Hateful Eight prize, memorabilia or once-in-a-lifetime experience will be given away to moviegoers who buy roadshow tickets in advance leading up to the Christmas day opening.

The exclusive roadshow engagement that The Hateful Eight...

It's not just the cast — Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demian Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Channing Tatum, Zoe Bell, and many more — of Quentin Tarantino's 'The Hateful Eight' that's a big deal. The movie finds the filmmaker going full throttle with 70mm and the new poster for the movie puts that element up there for all to see. Peek down at the right hand corner of this new one sheet, and you'll see Ultra Panavision 70 brand standing proud. The last movie to be shot and presented in the format was the 1966 Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier joint "Khartoum," so Tarantino is really taking it back with his effort that will spend two weeks playing roadshow style analog only before getting a digital wide release in 2016. Take a look at the poster below — a trailer soon? Fingers crossed. [EW]...

Richard Johnson (far right) in the 1963 supernatural masterpiece "The Haunting" with Claire Bloom, Russ Tamblyn and Julie Harris.

 

By Lee Pfeiffer

Cinema Retro mourns the loss of our friend, actor Richard Johnson, who has passed away at age 87. Johnson was a classically trained actor, having attended Rada and was also one of the founding members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His acting career was interrupted by service in the Royal Navy during WWII but Johnson resumed his profession at the end of the war. He alternated between playing small parts in feature films and leading roles in stage productions. In 1959, he got his first significant screen role starring with Frank Sinatra and young Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson in the WWII film "Never So Few".  He was initially offered the role of James Bond but turned down the opportunity. He later told Cinema Retro that he had no regrets because...

Richard Johnson with Gemma Jones and Tom Brown at Glasgow Film Festival. Photo: Eoin Carey Richard Johnson has died at the age of 87, his family announced today.

He died at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea after a short illness.

The London-born actor - who was a founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company - had a career spanning 60 years on stage, television and film.

Most recently, he starred in Radiator which won the inaugural Audience Award at Glasgow Film Festival. He attended the festival to discuss it. Other film roles included Khartoum - alongside Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier - and The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas.

Glasgow Film Festival co-director Allan Hunter said: “I think we all realised how lucky were to have Richard as a guest at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival. He was unfailingly gracious and charming, deservedly proud of his work in Radiator but...

By Lee Pfeiffer

Since its initial release fifty years ago, director Cy Endfield's British war epic Zulu has grown in stature. The film was understandably a hit in England but was deemed a boxoffice disappointment in the United States perhaps due to the fact that, like Khartoum (1966), the story relates to a historic battle that is well known by Brits by is virtually unknown to American audiences. What no one can dispute is that the film represents masterful movie making. Again, like Khartoum, it is a thinking man's war epic. The film relates the story of the Battle of Rorke's Drift, a tiny British outpost in southern Africa directly in the heart of the Zulu kingdom. A haunting pre-titles sequence shows the bloody aftermath of the Battle of Isandlwana, in which a British expeditionary force was massacred by Zulus in a sophisticated attack that stunned the government in London.

Blu-ray Release Date: Jan. 21, 2014

Price: Blu-ray $Tba

Studio: Twilight Time

Charlton Heston heads into battle in Khartoum.

The 1966 historical action adventure movie Khartoum makes its Blu-ray debut in January, 2014 from Twilight Time.

The exotic epic film concerns the ill-fated expedition of British General Charles Gordon (Charlton Heston, The Ten Commandments) in late 19th-century Sudan, an attempt to halt the incursion of the fanatical Muslim leader, Muhammad Ahmad (Laurence Olivier, Richard III), the self-styled Mahdi (“The Expected One”).

Directed by Basil Dearden and Elliot Elisofon and written by Robert Ardrey, Khartoum is a large-scale widescreen (it was shot in Cinerama) roadshow extravaganza filled with battle sequences, stunning desert landscapes, and political intrigue involving British Prime Minister Gladstone (Ralph Richardson, The Four Feathers).

As supplier Twilight Time prints up only 3,000 copies of each title, be prepared to pre-order this one directly from distributor Screen Archives as soon as the prebook date is announced,...

The art of the glass shot or matte painting is one which originated very much in the early ‘teens’ of the silent era. Pioneer film maker, director, cameraman and visual effects inventor Norman Dawn is generally acknowledged as the father of the painted matte composite, with other visionary film makers such as Ferdinand Pinney Earle, Walter Hall and Walter Percy Day being heralded as making vast contributions to the trick process in the early 1920’s.

Boiled down, the matte process is one whereby a limited film set may be extended to whatever, or wherever the director’s imagination dictates with the employment of a matte artist. In it’s most pure form, the artist would set up a large plate of clear glass in front of the motion picture camera upon which he would carefully paint in new scenery an ornate period ceiling, snow capped mountains, a Gothic castle or even an alien world.

The Four Feathers Directed by: Zoltán Korda Written by: R. C. Sherriff Starring: John Clements, Ralph Richardson, C. Aubrey Smith, June Duprez Billed as a sort of adventure film, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from The Four Feathers. Even though the tale has been told on film multiple times, I went in to it knowing nothing about the story and was pleasantly surprised. The film is set in the 1890's during the Mahdist War. I won't claim to have heard of this particular war previous to this film, nor will I act as any sort of expert on the background of this conflict (something to do with the British colonization of Africa). The lead character, Harry Faversham (played by John Clements) was brought up in a family rooted in military history. He's a member of the British Army but resigns on the eve of a massive deployment to Khartoum.

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“The Four Feathers” (The Criterion Collection)

On DVD and Blu-Ray

By Raymond Benson

Based on A.E.W. Mason’s classic 1902 adventure novel, The Four Feathers had been made three times before this definitive version of a “British Empire Adventure Film” was released in 1939. Produced by Hungarian-born but UK-based Alexander Korda, one of the great filmmakers of British cinema, and directed by his brother Zoltan Korda, The Four Feathers represents the best of what England had to offer during its day, as well as the epitome of the kind of yarns spun by Kipling and his ilk.

In vivid Technicolor and sporting a cast of hundreds of ethnic extras, the picture captures the grand Victorian era of the British military and takes place mostly in Africa some ten years or so after the fall of Khartoum. The story is simple (albeit somewhat improbable):...

Your Weekly Source for the Newest Releases to Blu-Ray Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

Aspen Extreme (1993)

Synopsis: T.J. and his friend Dexter quit their jobs in Detroit to become ski-instructors in Aspen. While T.J. advances to the most popular instructor of the school during the season, he has to take care for Dexter, who’s future is less bright and who’s eventually thinking about jobbing as drug courier – bringing their friendship to a test. Meanwhile the rich business woman Brice supports T.J. in his writing ambitions and invites him to live at her home. But in her absence he falls in love with the stunningly beautiful blond radio moderator Robin. (highdefdigest.com)

Special Features:

Unknown

The Bad Seed (1956)

Synopsis: An ideal housewife begins to suspect her loving eight-year-old daughter may be a heartless killer. (blu-ray.com)

Special Features:

Audio Commentary Featurette Theatrical Trailer

Beautiful Boy (2010)

Synopsis: Bill and...

Tuesday, DVD roundup day, is a fine day for taking a look at the new Summer 2011 issue of Cineaste, particularly since, among the online samplings this time around, DVD reviews outnumber all other types of articles combined.

To begin, Darragh O'Donoghue on Harun Farocki's Still Life (1997): "Five aphoristic essays on 17th-century Dutch still-life painting, of about three minutes each, bracket four documentary sequences of photographers creating modern still lifes for magazine advertisements. These two levels, though defined by opposites — stasis/motion, tell/show — are linked by visual motifs and rhymes, just as the modern products echo the subjects of the paintings. The documentary sequences have no commentary, mostly last ten to fifteen minutes, and take their cue from Farocki's earlier An Image (Ein bild, 1983). In that short, he recorded the shooting of a German Playboy centerfold spread, from the building of sets and the arrangement of props (including...

Heston in his magnificent portrayal of Gordon of Khartoum. (Photo: William Burge Collection)

 

Here's a gem of a still from reader (and resident Charlton Heston expert) William Burge. Heston portrayed General Gordon in the superb 1966 epic Khartoum, co-starring with Laurence Olivier. As much as I admire Heston's great performance in the film (the best of his career, in the opinion of many), I'm even more in awe of his ability to ride camels in the film. Having recently attempted to do so in Egypt, I can firmly say that I have been taken out of consideration to play General Gordon in any future remake of the film. - Lee Pfeiffer

Click here for YouTube tribute to Heston...

Just about everyone involved in this 1966 epic about Britain's imperial adventure in Sudan deserves to have sand kicked in their faces

Director: Basil Dearden

Entertainment grade: D+

History grade: C–

Muhammad Ahmad was a Sudanese theocrat and general who in 1881 proclaimed himself Mahdi, a redeemer expected by some Muslims to appear before the day of judgment. He conquered large swathes of the Nile valley and annihilated three Egyptian armies. Gradually, Britain became involved on the Egyptian side. Khartoum covers the section of the war that pitted Muhammad Ahmad against General Charles "Chinese" Gordon.

Casting

In the 1960s, casting agents must have actually said things like: "So, we need a Sudanese Nubian … how about Laurence Olivier?" Olivier, in blackface, looks nothing like Muhammad Ahmad. Things don't improve when he speaks. His stab at a Sudanese accent sounds like Sebastian, the singing Caribbean crab from Disney's The Little Mermaid, pretending to be a Russian spy.

Lee Pfeiffer reports on Cinema Retro's fourth and final day at the festival.

Although the film festival was to conclude the following day with widescreen showings of The Electric Horseman and Year of the Dragon, this would be the last day Dave Worrall and I could attend. As such, we had to devote a good deal of time to business meetings and schmoozing with friends and colleagues. However, in the morning we attended Cineramacana, a fun potpourri of weird short films, odd reels and (inexplicably) a trailer for Yentl which only serves to remind us that middle-aged Barbra Streisand posing as a teenage boy was the least convincing casting since Duke Wayne played Ghengis Khan in The Conqueror. Oy vey! Couldn't someone have stopped this ludicrous vanity piece from going into production? This segment of the festival also presented a lovely nature film sans narration that was produced on a budget of fifty pounds!

Charlton Heston, the square-jawed movie star who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Ben-Hur and was famed for a number of other epic films, died Saturday night at the age of 84. Though an official cause of death was not initially released, the actor had announced in 2002 that he was battling Alzheimer's disease, and had withdrawn from professional appearances after the diagnosis. An actor at first well-known for his portrayal of historical figures -- in addition to his role as Ben-Hur, he also played Michelangelo, El Cid, Moses, and John the Baptist -- Heston's fame later in life was highlighted by his polarizing views on gun control, as the actor was elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1998 and vigorously defended the rights of gun owners throughout the country. Indeed the role of political activist, which he embraced throughout his life, almost overshadowed his impressive acting career, which started in theater and television before graduating to the silver screen.

Born in Evanston, IL, Heston was the son of a mill owner who found his life's ambition in acting and found his first big breaks on the Broadway stage and in the nascent medium of television. He made his debut in the 1950 film noir thriller Dark City, and within two years headlined (alongside established stars Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde) the 1952 Best Picture Oscar winner, The Greatest Show on Earth, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Though he continued to work in a number of lower-profile films, including Ruby Gentry and The Naked Jungle, it was DeMille who in 1956 gave the actor one of his most iconic roles, that of Moses in the Biblical epic The Ten Commandments, a sweeping, captivating, over-the-top film that pioneered cinematic special effects with its parting of the Red Sea, and in its depiction of the turbulent political lives and love lives of its stars -- Heston, Yul Brynner as the Pharoah and Anne Baxter as the woman torn between them -- became the quintessential studio epic of its time, favored as much for its close-to-camp emotional broadness as well as its impressive scale. Heston did a 180-degree turnaround from that statuesque role with 1958's Touch of Evil, the Orson Welles thriller that remains a classic to this day in which he played a Mexican narcotics officer drawn into a lurid drug ring. Heston won his Best Actor Oscar in 1959 for another lavish, larger-than-life historical epic, Ben-Hur, which with its famed chariot race and story set against the backdrop of ancient Rome won a record 11 Academy Awards, a feat not equalled until Titanic's similar win in 1997.

After Ben-Hur, Heston's status as a star was firmly cemented, and throughout the 1960s roles in such films as El Cid, 55 Days at Peking, The Greatest Story Ever Told (where he played John the Baptist), The Agony and the Ecstasy (his Michelangelo going up against Rex Harrison's Pope Julius II), and Khartoum followed. He found another legendary screen character in 1968's Planet of the Apes, as an astronaut who finds himself on a futuristic Earth now populated by evolved simians who have enslaved the human race. As with his other roles, Heston perfectly balanced the camp aspects of the story with a gravitas that helped ground the sci-fi thriller with a modern-day resonance that helped audiences identify with the hero's plight. (Heston briefly reprised his role in the sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes). The 1970s saw the actor again in futuristic roles in The Omega Man (based on the same story as last year's I Am Legend) and Soylent Green, as well as the disaster epics Airport 1975 and Earthquake. Heston's later film career was made up primarily of thrillers (Gray Lady Down, Two-Minute Warning, The Awakening), television appearances (most notably in Dynasty and its spinoff, The Colbys), and cameos in a variety of high-profile films (Wayne's World 2, Tombstone, True Lies, Hamlet, Any Given Sunday, and the remake of Planet of the Apes, among others). By 1978, Heston had received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild; on the down side, he also regrettably won a Razzie award in 2002 for his supporting performances in Cats & Dogs and Town and Country.

Heston's film career often became overshadowed by his political activities. In the 1960s he was an early, vocal and visible participant in the Civil Rights movement; joining Martin Luther King's march on Washington. In the 1980s and onward, as the former president of the Screen Actors Guild and onetime chairman of the American Film Institute he championed conservative causes and campaigned aggressively against gun control, becoming president of the National Rifle Association in 1998 and speaking out against then-President Bill Clinton on the subject. Becoming yet another icon, Heston found himself revered and reviled by supporters on both sides of the issue and became the surprising center of a highly emotional culture war, using his fame to speak out in favor of a number of conservative issues (he changed his political stance from Democrat to Republican in the late 1980s). Using his position as a Time-Warner stock holder he castigated the company for profiting from the sales of an Ice-T album which included the song "Cop Killer," reading the lyrics to the song aloud at a stockholder meeting. His career as gun-control opponent reached an apotheosis with his appearance in 2000 when he vowed that they could take his guns when they pried the weapons "from my cold, dead hands." Later, in Michael Moore's 2002 Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine, a visibly diminished Heston refused to answer Moore's barrage of questions regarding gun deaths, particularly for the callousness of Heston attending an NRA meeting in Denver shortly after the nearby Columbine school massacres. A year later, Heston received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and he officially disclosed that he was battling Alzheimer's; he consequently withdrew from public life.

Heston is survived by his wife Lydia Clarke, to whom he was married 64 years, and their two children, Fraser Clarke Heston and Holly Heston Rochell. --Mark Englehart, IMDb staff...