‘Dead For A Dollar’ Review: Walter Hill Rides Again In A Fun, Flimsy Western Adventure [Venice]

Congratulations! After a jury vote, Taylor Hale became the winner of Big Brother season 24, taking home the impressive $750,000 prize during live Sunday, September 25, finale.

Olivia Rodrigo is supporting Alanis Morissette on her big night!

Natalie Hall finds a true companion in a blue and gold macaw in Hallmark Channel’s new movie, Fly Away With Me.

trailer for the third and final season of “Dead to Me” as part of its Tudum fan event, announcing that the series’ final episodes would be released on November 17. The series starring Christina Applegate, Linda Cardellini and James Marsden has been on a two-year pause since its second season came out thanks to delays in production by both the COVID-19 pandemic and Applegate’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis, which she announced last year.

K.J. Yossman The worlds of publishing and screen have paid tribute to author Hilary Mantel, who died on Thursday (Sept. 22) at the age of 70. Peter Kosminsky, who directed the BBC adaptation of Mantel’s novel “Wolf Hall,” told Variety: “A great light has gone out. The word ‘great’ is used very easily these days but nobody could dispute that it’s an appropriate epithet for Dame Hilary Mantel. If you look at the scale of her achievements, the impact she’s had, the breadth of her knowledge and reading… She’s someone whom people went to for thoughts and opinions on a variety of different novels ad nonfiction works. People recognized her for the massive intellect as she was. It’s hard to imagine a world without her.”

the Booker Prize-winning author who turned Tudor power politics into page-turning fiction in the acclaimed “Wolf Hall” trilogy of historical novels, has died. She was 70.Mantel died “suddenly yet peacefully” surrounded by close family and friends, publisher HarperCollins said Friday.Mantel is credited with reenergizing historical fiction with “Wolf Hall” and two sequels about the 16th-century English powerbroker Thomas Cromwell, right-hand man to King Henry VIII.The publisher said Mantel was “one of the greatest English novelists of this century.”“Her beloved works are considered modern classics.

lot, “Rocketman” set out to be true not in a literal sense but only in an emotional one (and was all the better for making its fakery transparent), and “Elvis” was a freewheeling mixture of semi-reality and extravagant fantasy.So if it’s the case that regular rock biopics are weird, what of one whose title begins with the word weird? It certainly doesn’t figure to be one for the nitpickers (which at times have definitely included me) who point out that a song is in the wrong place chronologically or that this character is a composite or that so-and-so never did such-and-such.Questions like that don’t mean a damn thing when it comes to “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” a churning and very entertaining load of poppycock that makes not the slightest pretense of being an accurate retelling of the story of everybody’s favorite song parodist, Weird Al Yankovic.In fact, the whole point is that it isn’t accurate, that it’s a whacked-out alternate reality in which young Al got his first accordion after his father beat a door-to-door accordion salesman to a bloody pulp, Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” was a parody of Weird Al’s “Eat It” and Madonna (played by Evan Rachel Wood with gum-snapping zest) was both Al’s girlfriend and a murderous psychopath.The film, directed by Eric Appel, produced by Funny or Die and distributed by Roku, takes Weird Al’s approach to music – take a well-known song and change the words to make them funnier – and applies it to the rock biopic.

Blonde” debuted to a massive 14-minute long standing ovation during its world premiere at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Ana de Armas, who plays Marilyn Monroe, was in tears at the screening, her face glowing as tears streamed down. Before the film’s world premiere Brad Pitt, who is among the film’s producers, de Armas, director Andrew Dominik, Adrien Brody and Julianne Nicholson created commotion on the red carpet, largely for Pitt who worked the crowds wearing a black Covid mask when he came into close contact with fans to sign autographs and do selfies. Pitt made a surprise appearance in Venice since he was not present at the film’s press conference earlier in the day. Dede Gardner, who is also among “Blonde” producers, was also on hand.

One of the first post-WWII trials to hold Germans to account, the January 1946 Kiev trial took place in the USSR and has since become known as the Kiev Nuremberg. Overlapping in both time and scope with that infamous trial, the tribunal took place over the course of two days where 15 Germans stood trial for war crimes, ultimately being convicted and hanged for atrocities committed.  Utilizing three hours of courtroom footage that he found in an archive while constructing his 2021 documentary “Babi Yar.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent “I see a lot of rich people here!” said Jodie Turner-Smith as she took to the stage to open the Venice Film Festival AmfAR gala and auction held Wednesday evening in the Arsenale, a former shipyard complex on the edge of the city’s Grand Canal. Urging guests to be generous, Turner-Smith, who looked stunning in a yellow corset top, reminded everyone that, “It’s easy to forget that AIDS still remains one of the world’s most serious health threats.”  Though undoubtedly lower key than the event held at Cannes, AmfAR Venice had its fair share of glamour and star power with Heather Graham, Patricia Clarckson, Marisa Tomei and Rachel Brosnahan among chairs. 

For many years now Venice has been a respectful platform for those big-name directors of the 1970s and early ’80s who are happy to go back into the fray long after those juicy studio budgets dried up: Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Paul Verhoeven, John Carpenter and — to a lesser extent — George Romero all found a home here for their late-period passion projects. Walter Hill, now 80, joins their ranks with an improbably youthful horse opera, and while it shows up the limitations of both writing and shooting a Western in the modern age (concessions to modern sensitivities have to be made, and digital cinematography somehow just doesn’t cut it with the subject matter), it’s nevertheless a wickedly enjoyable genre romp and full of violent surprises.

Jodie Turner-Smith stepped out in another colorful look for the 2022 amfAR Venice Gala held at Arsenale on Wednesday night (September 7) in Venice, Italy.

Melissa McBride has teased future storylines for her character Carol Peletier. The 57-year-old’s comments come weeks ahead of the zombie drama’s finale episode, after more than a decade on our screens. While the original series will draw to a close, it has spawned several upcoming spin-offs which will delve further into key characters’ lives such as Dead City, focused on Maggie and Negan.

Willem Dafoe and Christoph Waltz have joined the raft of famous faces making appearances at the Venice International Film Festival. The Hollywood heavyweights were pictured in apparent good spirits, as they arrived for the event on Tuesday evening ahead of the premiere of their film Dead For A Dollar. The pair star in the Western, which is written and directed by Walter Hill, alongside actress Rachel Brosnahan.

Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe buddy up on the red carpet for the premiere of their movie, Dead For A Dollar, during the 2022 Venice Film Festival on Tuesday (September 6) in Venice, Italy.

can judge a film by its title. Consider “Dead for a Dollar:” It certainly sounds like a Western, doesn’t it? The “dollar” might call to mind some of the classics of the genre, while the “dead” at least promises a few good shoot-outs, a bit of bloody fun.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The title of Walter Hill’s “Dead for a Dollar” makes it sound like a spaghetti Western, and the picture opens with stunning vistas and a wistfully valorous neo-Morricone score that gives you the impression — maybe the hope — that it will be. It ends on a very different note: a series of titles explaining, with precise dates and details, what happened to each of the main characters, as if the film were based on a true story. It’s the “American Graffiti” gambit of treating fictional characters as though they were real, only in this case it ends up revealing something essential about the drama we’ve been watching. Namely, how it could be so avid, specific, and scrupulously carpentered…yet remote.

Dead For A Dollar stars Christoph Waltz, Rachel Brosnahan, Willem Dafoe and Benjamin Bratt pose with director Walter Hill at the film’s photo call during the 2022 Venice Film Festival on Tuesday (September 6).

Ahead of accepting the Venice Film Festival’s Glory to the Filmmaker Award this evening, legendary filmmaker Walter Hill met with the press corps here on the Lido to talk about his new western, Dead For A Dollar.