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Dog Attacks: Postal Service Announces Top Dog Attack Cities

The Postal Service released statistics  highlighting the cities where the most dog attacks occur nationwide. Houston tops the list with 62 letter carriers attacked in 2010. Nationwide last year, 5,669 postal employees were attacked in more than 1,400 cities, yet that pales in comparison to the 4.7 million Americans bitten annually — the majority of whom are children.
U.S. Government News

Tags: Announces, Attack, Attacks, Cities, Postal, Service

Woody Attacks America’s Shrink Culture

Woody Allen has made a good film. The shock at the Venice Film Festival yesterday was palpable. After 14 years and as many attempts to recapture his old magic, the New York director has finally made a film which holds up to his earlier work.

And in another twist which will send a shiver through the world of Freudian therapy, Allen turns on psychoanalysis in Anything Else.

Critics who endured such dross as Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, can’t help but wonder whether the two are related.

They had been expecting more of the self-indulgent schtick that has characterized most of the 15 films Allen has churned out since his last masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989.

But for once Allen, now 67, has not cast himself in the romantic lead, and suddenly the old formula of gravely funny Manhattan neurotics turning themselves inside out appears to be working again.

Jason Biggs of American Pie fame plays a novice comic writer who falls for Christina Ricci’s manipulative minx, with Allen chipping in advice as his paranoid mentor. Matters are given a hilarious tweak when Ricci tells Biggs’s character that while she loves him, she can only have sex with other men.

As ever, it is Allen’s aging comedian who has all the best lines. But the philosophical and oddly serious David Dobel is far from the self-obsessed Allen cipher of old.

For a start, he categorically trashes psychoanalysis in the most heartfelt way. His post-September 11 New York is also a darker, more dangerous city. Dobel, despite all his literary pretensions, has assembled a fearsome arsenal of guns and survival equipment in his apartment ready for a final showdown.

Allen said that as a Jew who felt besieged and had consequently armed himself to the teeth, Dobel was a metaphor for Israel.

“The world obviously is in a particularly tense state at the moment,” Allen added. “Of course, it always is tense. But at the moment it is even more exaggerated than usual. The character I play in the movie is a sort of paranoid product of the enormous tension that rains down on everyone.”

Yet Venice is the one city where the notoriously edgy director appears to be at ease. Allen, who secretly married his “adopted daughter”, Soon-Yi, here six years ago, has given money towards the restoration of the fire-gutted Venice opera house, and has previously won the Golden Lion.

That won’t happen this year, for despite its rave reviews, Anything Else is not in the main competition.

With a mouth-watering line-up of films that leaves the Cannes festival dawdling in its wake, competition for the Golden Lion will be particularly intense.

But already there is a great deal of excitement around the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow up to Amores Perros, 21 Grams, his first film in English, as well as Imagining Argentina, written and directed by Britain’s Christopher Hampton and starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson.

If Manchester-born Michael Winterbottom were to win with his sci-fi love story, Code 46, he would become the first director to win both the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear in the same year, having taken the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival with his In This World, his story about Afghan refugees.

Outside the main competition, the big draws are the Coen brothers’ latest film, Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney as a divorced lawyer who falls in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones’ much-divorced gold digger.

The Human Stain, based on the Philip Roth novel and starring Anthony Hopkins, is also likely to make a splash.

Although Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent film, Kill Bill, was not finished in time, Venice is replete with big budget American films which failed to make the deadline for Cannes.

Tarantino’s old sparring partner, Robert Rodriguez, is back with the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, in which Johnny Depp plays a corrupt CIA agent who involves Antonio Banderas’ Mariachi in a plot to sabotage an assassination attempt on a Mexican president.

The British director, Ridley Scott, is also back after a trio of epics that culminated in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, with Matchstick Men, a dark comedy about a conman, played by Nicolas Cage, who is planning a heist.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s much anticipated film about the student uprising in Paris in May 1968 has also attracted a buzz. It is adapted from Gilbert Adair’s novel, Holy Innocence, while James Ivory, a past master of turning novels into screen gold, returns with Le Divorce, taken from Diane Johnson’s best-selling book.

The cult director, Jim Jarmusch, has expanded a series of award-winning shorts into Coffee and Cigarettes, with a cast including Roberto Benigni, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray and Tom Waits.

The king of agents provocateurs, Lars von Trier, is sure to hit the headlines again after his controversial film, Dogville, at Cannes, with a documentary about the way he makes films, made jointly with his even more eccentric friend, Jørgen Leth.

Five movies to make a splash

21 Grams

Having taken the world by storm with Amores Perros, the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has reputedly got another firecracker on his hands in an English-language thriller that stars Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro

Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola, the daughter of you know who, appears to have conquered the second-film syndrome with her follow-up to The Virgin Suicides. Set in a Tokyo hotel, it includes a much-lauded performance by Bill Murray

Twenty-nine Palms

Having wowed critics with The Life of Jesus, and divided them with the Cannes winner L’Humanité, French auteur Bruno Dumont has made another apparently creepy and compelling chiller

Code 46

Fresh from winning the Golden Bear at Berlin with In This World, British director Michael Winterbottom managed to bag Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton for this sci-fi love story which spans Shanghai, Dubai and London

Casa De Los Babys

John Sayles, the American maverick who wears his conscience on his sleeve, has created another emotional potboiler with the story of a group of American women stuck in a South American motel, waiting to adopt local babies

Tags: America's, Attacks, Culture, Shrink, Woody

Woody Attacks America’s Shrink Culture

Woody Allen has made a good film. The shock at the Venice Film Festival yesterday was palpable. After 14 years and as many attempts to recapture his old magic, the New York director has finally made a film which holds up to his earlier work.

And in another twist which will send a shiver through the world of Freudian therapy, Allen turns on psychoanalysis in Anything Else.

Critics who endured such dross as Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, can’t help but wonder whether the two are related.

They had been expecting more of the self-indulgent schtick that has characterized most of the 15 films Allen has churned out since his last masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989.

But for once Allen, now 67, has not cast himself in the romantic lead, and suddenly the old formula of gravely funny Manhattan neurotics turning themselves inside out appears to be working again.

Jason Biggs of American Pie fame plays a novice comic writer who falls for Christina Ricci’s manipulative minx, with Allen chipping in advice as his paranoid mentor. Matters are given a hilarious tweak when Ricci tells Biggs’s character that while she loves him, she can only have sex with other men.

As ever, it is Allen’s aging comedian who has all the best lines. But the philosophical and oddly serious David Dobel is far from the self-obsessed Allen cipher of old.

For a start, he categorically trashes psychoanalysis in the most heartfelt way. His post-September 11 New York is also a darker, more dangerous city. Dobel, despite all his literary pretensions, has assembled a fearsome arsenal of guns and survival equipment in his apartment ready for a final showdown.

Allen said that as a Jew who felt besieged and had consequently armed himself to the teeth, Dobel was a metaphor for Israel.

“The world obviously is in a particularly tense state at the moment,” Allen added. “Of course, it always is tense. But at the moment it is even more exaggerated than usual. The character I play in the movie is a sort of paranoid product of the enormous tension that rains down on everyone.”

Yet Venice is the one city where the notoriously edgy director appears to be at ease. Allen, who secretly married his “adopted daughter”, Soon-Yi, here six years ago, has given money towards the restoration of the fire-gutted Venice opera house, and has previously won the Golden Lion.

That won’t happen this year, for despite its rave reviews, Anything Else is not in the main competition.

With a mouth-watering line-up of films that leaves the Cannes festival dawdling in its wake, competition for the Golden Lion will be particularly intense.

But already there is a great deal of excitement around the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow up to Amores Perros, 21 Grams, his first film in English, as well as Imagining Argentina, written and directed by Britain’s Christopher Hampton and starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson.

If Manchester-born Michael Winterbottom were to win with his sci-fi love story, Code 46, he would become the first director to win both the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear in the same year, having taken the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival with his In This World, his story about Afghan refugees.

Outside the main competition, the big draws are the Coen brothers’ latest film, Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney as a divorced lawyer who falls in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones’ much-divorced gold digger.

The Human Stain, based on the Philip Roth novel and starring Anthony Hopkins, is also likely to make a splash.

Although Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent film, Kill Bill, was not finished in time, Venice is replete with big budget American films which failed to make the deadline for Cannes.

Tarantino’s old sparring partner, Robert Rodriguez, is back with the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, in which Johnny Depp plays a corrupt CIA agent who involves Antonio Banderas’ Mariachi in a plot to sabotage an assassination attempt on a Mexican president.

The British director, Ridley Scott, is also back after a trio of epics that culminated in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, with Matchstick Men, a dark comedy about a conman, played by Nicolas Cage, who is planning a heist.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s much anticipated film about the student uprising in Paris in May 1968 has also attracted a buzz. It is adapted from Gilbert Adair’s novel, Holy Innocence, while James Ivory, a past master of turning novels into screen gold, returns with Le Divorce, taken from Diane Johnson’s best-selling book.

The cult director, Jim Jarmusch, has expanded a series of award-winning shorts into Coffee and Cigarettes, with a cast including Roberto Benigni, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray and Tom Waits.

The king of agents provocateurs, Lars von Trier, is sure to hit the headlines again after his controversial film, Dogville, at Cannes, with a documentary about the way he makes films, made jointly with his even more eccentric friend, Jørgen Leth.

Five movies to make a splash

21 Grams

Having taken the world by storm with Amores Perros, the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has reputedly got another firecracker on his hands in an English-language thriller that stars Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro

Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola, the daughter of you know who, appears to have conquered the second-film syndrome with her follow-up to The Virgin Suicides. Set in a Tokyo hotel, it includes a much-lauded performance by Bill Murray

Twenty-nine Palms

Having wowed critics with The Life of Jesus, and divided them with the Cannes winner L’Humanité, French auteur Bruno Dumont has made another apparently creepy and compelling chiller

Code 46

Fresh from winning the Golden Bear at Berlin with In This World, British director Michael Winterbottom managed to bag Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton for this sci-fi love story which spans Shanghai, Dubai and London

Casa De Los Babys

John Sayles, the American maverick who wears his conscience on his sleeve, has created another emotional potboiler with the story of a group of American women stuck in a South American motel, waiting to adopt local babies

Tags: America's, Attacks, Culture, Shrink, Woody

Woody Attacks America’s Shrink Culture

Woody Allen has made a good film. The shock at the Venice Film Festival yesterday was palpable. After 14 years and as many attempts to recapture his old magic, the New York director has finally made a film which holds up to his earlier work.

And in another twist which will send a shiver through the world of Freudian therapy, Allen turns on psychoanalysis in Anything Else.

Critics who endured such dross as Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, can’t help but wonder whether the two are related.

They had been expecting more of the self-indulgent schtick that has characterized most of the 15 films Allen has churned out since his last masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989.

But for once Allen, now 67, has not cast himself in the romantic lead, and suddenly the old formula of gravely funny Manhattan neurotics turning themselves inside out appears to be working again.

Jason Biggs of American Pie fame plays a novice comic writer who falls for Christina Ricci’s manipulative minx, with Allen chipping in advice as his paranoid mentor. Matters are given a hilarious tweak when Ricci tells Biggs’s character that while she loves him, she can only have sex with other men.

As ever, it is Allen’s aging comedian who has all the best lines. But the philosophical and oddly serious David Dobel is far from the self-obsessed Allen cipher of old.

For a start, he categorically trashes psychoanalysis in the most heartfelt way. His post-September 11 New York is also a darker, more dangerous city. Dobel, despite all his literary pretensions, has assembled a fearsome arsenal of guns and survival equipment in his apartment ready for a final showdown.

Allen said that as a Jew who felt besieged and had consequently armed himself to the teeth, Dobel was a metaphor for Israel.

“The world obviously is in a particularly tense state at the moment,” Allen added. “Of course, it always is tense. But at the moment it is even more exaggerated than usual. The character I play in the movie is a sort of paranoid product of the enormous tension that rains down on everyone.”

Yet Venice is the one city where the notoriously edgy director appears to be at ease. Allen, who secretly married his “adopted daughter”, Soon-Yi, here six years ago, has given money towards the restoration of the fire-gutted Venice opera house, and has previously won the Golden Lion.

That won’t happen this year, for despite its rave reviews, Anything Else is not in the main competition.

With a mouth-watering line-up of films that leaves the Cannes festival dawdling in its wake, competition for the Golden Lion will be particularly intense.

But already there is a great deal of excitement around the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow up to Amores Perros, 21 Grams, his first film in English, as well as Imagining Argentina, written and directed by Britain’s Christopher Hampton and starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson.

If Manchester-born Michael Winterbottom were to win with his sci-fi love story, Code 46, he would become the first director to win both the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear in the same year, having taken the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival with his In This World, his story about Afghan refugees.

Outside the main competition, the big draws are the Coen brothers’ latest film, Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney as a divorced lawyer who falls in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones’ much-divorced gold digger.

The Human Stain, based on the Philip Roth novel and starring Anthony Hopkins, is also likely to make a splash.

Although Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent film, Kill Bill, was not finished in time, Venice is replete with big budget American films which failed to make the deadline for Cannes.

Tarantino’s old sparring partner, Robert Rodriguez, is back with the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, in which Johnny Depp plays a corrupt CIA agent who involves Antonio Banderas’ Mariachi in a plot to sabotage an assassination attempt on a Mexican president.

The British director, Ridley Scott, is also back after a trio of epics that culminated in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, with Matchstick Men, a dark comedy about a conman, played by Nicolas Cage, who is planning a heist.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s much anticipated film about the student uprising in Paris in May 1968 has also attracted a buzz. It is adapted from Gilbert Adair’s novel, Holy Innocence, while James Ivory, a past master of turning novels into screen gold, returns with Le Divorce, taken from Diane Johnson’s best-selling book.

The cult director, Jim Jarmusch, has expanded a series of award-winning shorts into Coffee and Cigarettes, with a cast including Roberto Benigni, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray and Tom Waits.

The king of agents provocateurs, Lars von Trier, is sure to hit the headlines again after his controversial film, Dogville, at Cannes, with a documentary about the way he makes films, made jointly with his even more eccentric friend, Jørgen Leth.

Five movies to make a splash

21 Grams

Having taken the world by storm with Amores Perros, the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has reputedly got another firecracker on his hands in an English-language thriller that stars Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro

Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola, the daughter of you know who, appears to have conquered the second-film syndrome with her follow-up to The Virgin Suicides. Set in a Tokyo hotel, it includes a much-lauded performance by Bill Murray

Twenty-nine Palms

Having wowed critics with The Life of Jesus, and divided them with the Cannes winner L’Humanité, French auteur Bruno Dumont has made another apparently creepy and compelling chiller

Code 46

Fresh from winning the Golden Bear at Berlin with In This World, British director Michael Winterbottom managed to bag Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton for this sci-fi love story which spans Shanghai, Dubai and London

Casa De Los Babys

John Sayles, the American maverick who wears his conscience on his sleeve, has created another emotional potboiler with the story of a group of American women stuck in a South American motel, waiting to adopt local babies

Tags: America's, Attacks, Culture, Shrink, Woody

Woody Attacks America’s Shrink Culture

Woody Allen has made a good film. The shock at the Venice Film Festival yesterday was palpable. After 14 years and as many attempts to recapture his old magic, the New York director has finally made a film which holds up to his earlier work.

And in another twist which will send a shiver through the world of Freudian therapy, Allen turns on psychoanalysis in Anything Else.

Critics who endured such dross as Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, can’t help but wonder whether the two are related.

They had been expecting more of the self-indulgent schtick that has characterized most of the 15 films Allen has churned out since his last masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989.

But for once Allen, now 67, has not cast himself in the romantic lead, and suddenly the old formula of gravely funny Manhattan neurotics turning themselves inside out appears to be working again.

Jason Biggs of American Pie fame plays a novice comic writer who falls for Christina Ricci’s manipulative minx, with Allen chipping in advice as his paranoid mentor. Matters are given a hilarious tweak when Ricci tells Biggs’s character that while she loves him, she can only have sex with other men.

As ever, it is Allen’s aging comedian who has all the best lines. But the philosophical and oddly serious David Dobel is far from the self-obsessed Allen cipher of old.

For a start, he categorically trashes psychoanalysis in the most heartfelt way. His post-September 11 New York is also a darker, more dangerous city. Dobel, despite all his literary pretensions, has assembled a fearsome arsenal of guns and survival equipment in his apartment ready for a final showdown.

Allen said that as a Jew who felt besieged and had consequently armed himself to the teeth, Dobel was a metaphor for Israel.

“The world obviously is in a particularly tense state at the moment,” Allen added. “Of course, it always is tense. But at the moment it is even more exaggerated than usual. The character I play in the movie is a sort of paranoid product of the enormous tension that rains down on everyone.”

Yet Venice is the one city where the notoriously edgy director appears to be at ease. Allen, who secretly married his “adopted daughter”, Soon-Yi, here six years ago, has given money towards the restoration of the fire-gutted Venice opera house, and has previously won the Golden Lion.

That won’t happen this year, for despite its rave reviews, Anything Else is not in the main competition.

With a mouth-watering line-up of films that leaves the Cannes festival dawdling in its wake, competition for the Golden Lion will be particularly intense.

But already there is a great deal of excitement around the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow up to Amores Perros, 21 Grams, his first film in English, as well as Imagining Argentina, written and directed by Britain’s Christopher Hampton and starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson.

If Manchester-born Michael Winterbottom were to win with his sci-fi love story, Code 46, he would become the first director to win both the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear in the same year, having taken the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival with his In This World, his story about Afghan refugees.

Outside the main competition, the big draws are the Coen brothers’ latest film, Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney as a divorced lawyer who falls in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones’ much-divorced gold digger.

The Human Stain, based on the Philip Roth novel and starring Anthony Hopkins, is also likely to make a splash.

Although Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent film, Kill Bill, was not finished in time, Venice is replete with big budget American films which failed to make the deadline for Cannes.

Tarantino’s old sparring partner, Robert Rodriguez, is back with the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, in which Johnny Depp plays a corrupt CIA agent who involves Antonio Banderas’ Mariachi in a plot to sabotage an assassination attempt on a Mexican president.

The British director, Ridley Scott, is also back after a trio of epics that culminated in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, with Matchstick Men, a dark comedy about a conman, played by Nicolas Cage, who is planning a heist.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s much anticipated film about the student uprising in Paris in May 1968 has also attracted a buzz. It is adapted from Gilbert Adair’s novel, Holy Innocence, while James Ivory, a past master of turning novels into screen gold, returns with Le Divorce, taken from Diane Johnson’s best-selling book.

The cult director, Jim Jarmusch, has expanded a series of award-winning shorts into Coffee and Cigarettes, with a cast including Roberto Benigni, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray and Tom Waits.

The king of agents provocateurs, Lars von Trier, is sure to hit the headlines again after his controversial film, Dogville, at Cannes, with a documentary about the way he makes films, made jointly with his even more eccentric friend, Jørgen Leth.

Five movies to make a splash

21 Grams

Having taken the world by storm with Amores Perros, the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has reputedly got another firecracker on his hands in an English-language thriller that stars Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro

Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola, the daughter of you know who, appears to have conquered the second-film syndrome with her follow-up to The Virgin Suicides. Set in a Tokyo hotel, it includes a much-lauded performance by Bill Murray

Twenty-nine Palms

Having wowed critics with The Life of Jesus, and divided them with the Cannes winner L’Humanité, French auteur Bruno Dumont has made another apparently creepy and compelling chiller

Code 46

Fresh from winning the Golden Bear at Berlin with In This World, British director Michael Winterbottom managed to bag Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton for this sci-fi love story which spans Shanghai, Dubai and London

Casa De Los Babys

John Sayles, the American maverick who wears his conscience on his sleeve, has created another emotional potboiler with the story of a group of American women stuck in a South American motel, waiting to adopt local babies

Tags: America's, Attacks, Culture, Shrink, Woody

Woody Attacks America’s Shrink Culture

Woody Allen has made a good film. The shock at the Venice Film Festival yesterday was palpable. After 14 years and as many attempts to recapture his old magic, the New York director has finally made a film which holds up to his earlier work.

And in another twist which will send a shiver through the world of Freudian therapy, Allen turns on psychoanalysis in Anything Else.

Critics who endured such dross as Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, can’t help but wonder whether the two are related.

They had been expecting more of the self-indulgent schtick that has characterized most of the 15 films Allen has churned out since his last masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989.

But for once Allen, now 67, has not cast himself in the romantic lead, and suddenly the old formula of gravely funny Manhattan neurotics turning themselves inside out appears to be working again.

Jason Biggs of American Pie fame plays a novice comic writer who falls for Christina Ricci’s manipulative minx, with Allen chipping in advice as his paranoid mentor. Matters are given a hilarious tweak when Ricci tells Biggs’s character that while she loves him, she can only have sex with other men.

As ever, it is Allen’s aging comedian who has all the best lines. But the philosophical and oddly serious David Dobel is far from the self-obsessed Allen cipher of old.

For a start, he categorically trashes psychoanalysis in the most heartfelt way. His post-September 11 New York is also a darker, more dangerous city. Dobel, despite all his literary pretensions, has assembled a fearsome arsenal of guns and survival equipment in his apartment ready for a final showdown.

Allen said that as a Jew who felt besieged and had consequently armed himself to the teeth, Dobel was a metaphor for Israel.

“The world obviously is in a particularly tense state at the moment,” Allen added. “Of course, it always is tense. But at the moment it is even more exaggerated than usual. The character I play in the movie is a sort of paranoid product of the enormous tension that rains down on everyone.”

Yet Venice is the one city where the notoriously edgy director appears to be at ease. Allen, who secretly married his “adopted daughter”, Soon-Yi, here six years ago, has given money towards the restoration of the fire-gutted Venice opera house, and has previously won the Golden Lion.

That won’t happen this year, for despite its rave reviews, Anything Else is not in the main competition.

With a mouth-watering line-up of films that leaves the Cannes festival dawdling in its wake, competition for the Golden Lion will be particularly intense.

But already there is a great deal of excitement around the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow up to Amores Perros, 21 Grams, his first film in English, as well as Imagining Argentina, written and directed by Britain’s Christopher Hampton and starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson.

If Manchester-born Michael Winterbottom were to win with his sci-fi love story, Code 46, he would become the first director to win both the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear in the same year, having taken the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival with his In This World, his story about Afghan refugees.

Outside the main competition, the big draws are the Coen brothers’ latest film, Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney as a divorced lawyer who falls in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones’ much-divorced gold digger.

The Human Stain, based on the Philip Roth novel and starring Anthony Hopkins, is also likely to make a splash.

Although Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent film, Kill Bill, was not finished in time, Venice is replete with big budget American films which failed to make the deadline for Cannes.

Tarantino’s old sparring partner, Robert Rodriguez, is back with the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, in which Johnny Depp plays a corrupt CIA agent who involves Antonio Banderas’ Mariachi in a plot to sabotage an assassination attempt on a Mexican president.

The British director, Ridley Scott, is also back after a trio of epics that culminated in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, with Matchstick Men, a dark comedy about a conman, played by Nicolas Cage, who is planning a heist.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s much anticipated film about the student uprising in Paris in May 1968 has also attracted a buzz. It is adapted from Gilbert Adair’s novel, Holy Innocence, while James Ivory, a past master of turning novels into screen gold, returns with Le Divorce, taken from Diane Johnson’s best-selling book.

The cult director, Jim Jarmusch, has expanded a series of award-winning shorts into Coffee and Cigarettes, with a cast including Roberto Benigni, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray and Tom Waits.

The king of agents provocateurs, Lars von Trier, is sure to hit the headlines again after his controversial film, Dogville, at Cannes, with a documentary about the way he makes films, made jointly with his even more eccentric friend, Jørgen Leth.

Five movies to make a splash

21 Grams

Having taken the world by storm with Amores Perros, the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has reputedly got another firecracker on his hands in an English-language thriller that stars Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro

Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola, the daughter of you know who, appears to have conquered the second-film syndrome with her follow-up to The Virgin Suicides. Set in a Tokyo hotel, it includes a much-lauded performance by Bill Murray

Twenty-nine Palms

Having wowed critics with The Life of Jesus, and divided them with the Cannes winner L’Humanité, French auteur Bruno Dumont has made another apparently creepy and compelling chiller

Code 46

Fresh from winning the Golden Bear at Berlin with In This World, British director Michael Winterbottom managed to bag Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton for this sci-fi love story which spans Shanghai, Dubai and London

Casa De Los Babys

John Sayles, the American maverick who wears his conscience on his sleeve, has created another emotional potboiler with the story of a group of American women stuck in a South American motel, waiting to adopt local babies

Tags: America's, Attacks, Culture, Shrink, Woody

Woody Attacks America’s Shrink Culture

Woody Allen has made a good film. The shock at the Venice Film Festival yesterday was palpable. After 14 years and as many attempts to recapture his old magic, the New York director has finally made a film which holds up to his earlier work.

And in another twist which will send a shiver through the world of Freudian therapy, Allen turns on psychoanalysis in Anything Else.

Critics who endured such dross as Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, can’t help but wonder whether the two are related.

They had been expecting more of the self-indulgent schtick that has characterized most of the 15 films Allen has churned out since his last masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989.

But for once Allen, now 67, has not cast himself in the romantic lead, and suddenly the old formula of gravely funny Manhattan neurotics turning themselves inside out appears to be working again.

Jason Biggs of American Pie fame plays a novice comic writer who falls for Christina Ricci’s manipulative minx, with Allen chipping in advice as his paranoid mentor. Matters are given a hilarious tweak when Ricci tells Biggs’s character that while she loves him, she can only have sex with other men.

As ever, it is Allen’s aging comedian who has all the best lines. But the philosophical and oddly serious David Dobel is far from the self-obsessed Allen cipher of old.

For a start, he categorically trashes psychoanalysis in the most heartfelt way. His post-September 11 New York is also a darker, more dangerous city. Dobel, despite all his literary pretensions, has assembled a fearsome arsenal of guns and survival equipment in his apartment ready for a final showdown.

Allen said that as a Jew who felt besieged and had consequently armed himself to the teeth, Dobel was a metaphor for Israel.

“The world obviously is in a particularly tense state at the moment,” Allen added. “Of course, it always is tense. But at the moment it is even more exaggerated than usual. The character I play in the movie is a sort of paranoid product of the enormous tension that rains down on everyone.”

Yet Venice is the one city where the notoriously edgy director appears to be at ease. Allen, who secretly married his “adopted daughter”, Soon-Yi, here six years ago, has given money towards the restoration of the fire-gutted Venice opera house, and has previously won the Golden Lion.

That won’t happen this year, for despite its rave reviews, Anything Else is not in the main competition.

With a mouth-watering line-up of films that leaves the Cannes festival dawdling in its wake, competition for the Golden Lion will be particularly intense.

But already there is a great deal of excitement around the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow up to Amores Perros, 21 Grams, his first film in English, as well as Imagining Argentina, written and directed by Britain’s Christopher Hampton and starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson.

If Manchester-born Michael Winterbottom were to win with his sci-fi love story, Code 46, he would become the first director to win both the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear in the same year, having taken the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival with his In This World, his story about Afghan refugees.

Outside the main competition, the big draws are the Coen brothers’ latest film, Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney as a divorced lawyer who falls in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones’ much-divorced gold digger.

The Human Stain, based on the Philip Roth novel and starring Anthony Hopkins, is also likely to make a splash.

Although Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent film, Kill Bill, was not finished in time, Venice is replete with big budget American films which failed to make the deadline for Cannes.

Tarantino’s old sparring partner, Robert Rodriguez, is back with the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, in which Johnny Depp plays a corrupt CIA agent who involves Antonio Banderas’ Mariachi in a plot to sabotage an assassination attempt on a Mexican president.

The British director, Ridley Scott, is also back after a trio of epics that culminated in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, with Matchstick Men, a dark comedy about a conman, played by Nicolas Cage, who is planning a heist.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s much anticipated film about the student uprising in Paris in May 1968 has also attracted a buzz. It is adapted from Gilbert Adair’s novel, Holy Innocence, while James Ivory, a past master of turning novels into screen gold, returns with Le Divorce, taken from Diane Johnson’s best-selling book.

The cult director, Jim Jarmusch, has expanded a series of award-winning shorts into Coffee and Cigarettes, with a cast including Roberto Benigni, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray and Tom Waits.

The king of agents provocateurs, Lars von Trier, is sure to hit the headlines again after his controversial film, Dogville, at Cannes, with a documentary about the way he makes films, made jointly with his even more eccentric friend, Jørgen Leth.

Five movies to make a splash

21 Grams

Having taken the world by storm with Amores Perros, the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has reputedly got another firecracker on his hands in an English-language thriller that stars Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro

Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola, the daughter of you know who, appears to have conquered the second-film syndrome with her follow-up to The Virgin Suicides. Set in a Tokyo hotel, it includes a much-lauded performance by Bill Murray

Twenty-nine Palms

Having wowed critics with The Life of Jesus, and divided them with the Cannes winner L’Humanité, French auteur Bruno Dumont has made another apparently creepy and compelling chiller

Code 46

Fresh from winning the Golden Bear at Berlin with In This World, British director Michael Winterbottom managed to bag Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton for this sci-fi love story which spans Shanghai, Dubai and London

Casa De Los Babys

John Sayles, the American maverick who wears his conscience on his sleeve, has created another emotional potboiler with the story of a group of American women stuck in a South American motel, waiting to adopt local babies

Tags: America's, Attacks, Culture, Shrink, Woody

Woody Attacks America’s Shrink Culture

Woody Allen has made a good film. The shock at the Venice Film Festival yesterday was palpable. After 14 years and as many attempts to recapture his old magic, the New York director has finally made a film which holds up to his earlier work.

And in another twist which will send a shiver through the world of Freudian therapy, Allen turns on psychoanalysis in Anything Else.

Critics who endured such dross as Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, can’t help but wonder whether the two are related.

They had been expecting more of the self-indulgent schtick that has characterized most of the 15 films Allen has churned out since his last masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989.

But for once Allen, now 67, has not cast himself in the romantic lead, and suddenly the old formula of gravely funny Manhattan neurotics turning themselves inside out appears to be working again.

Jason Biggs of American Pie fame plays a novice comic writer who falls for Christina Ricci’s manipulative minx, with Allen chipping in advice as his paranoid mentor. Matters are given a hilarious tweak when Ricci tells Biggs’s character that while she loves him, she can only have sex with other men.

As ever, it is Allen’s aging comedian who has all the best lines. But the philosophical and oddly serious David Dobel is far from the self-obsessed Allen cipher of old.

For a start, he categorically trashes psychoanalysis in the most heartfelt way. His post-September 11 New York is also a darker, more dangerous city. Dobel, despite all his literary pretensions, has assembled a fearsome arsenal of guns and survival equipment in his apartment ready for a final showdown.

Allen said that as a Jew who felt besieged and had consequently armed himself to the teeth, Dobel was a metaphor for Israel.

“The world obviously is in a particularly tense state at the moment,” Allen added. “Of course, it always is tense. But at the moment it is even more exaggerated than usual. The character I play in the movie is a sort of paranoid product of the enormous tension that rains down on everyone.”

Yet Venice is the one city where the notoriously edgy director appears to be at ease. Allen, who secretly married his “adopted daughter”, Soon-Yi, here six years ago, has given money towards the restoration of the fire-gutted Venice opera house, and has previously won the Golden Lion.

That won’t happen this year, for despite its rave reviews, Anything Else is not in the main competition.

With a mouth-watering line-up of films that leaves the Cannes festival dawdling in its wake, competition for the Golden Lion will be particularly intense.

But already there is a great deal of excitement around the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow up to Amores Perros, 21 Grams, his first film in English, as well as Imagining Argentina, written and directed by Britain’s Christopher Hampton and starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson.

If Manchester-born Michael Winterbottom were to win with his sci-fi love story, Code 46, he would become the first director to win both the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear in the same year, having taken the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival with his In This World, his story about Afghan refugees.

Outside the main competition, the big draws are the Coen brothers’ latest film, Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney as a divorced lawyer who falls in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones’ much-divorced gold digger.

The Human Stain, based on the Philip Roth novel and starring Anthony Hopkins, is also likely to make a splash.

Although Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent film, Kill Bill, was not finished in time, Venice is replete with big budget American films which failed to make the deadline for Cannes.

Tarantino’s old sparring partner, Robert Rodriguez, is back with the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, in which Johnny Depp plays a corrupt CIA agent who involves Antonio Banderas’ Mariachi in a plot to sabotage an assassination attempt on a Mexican president.

The British director, Ridley Scott, is also back after a trio of epics that culminated in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, with Matchstick Men, a dark comedy about a conman, played by Nicolas Cage, who is planning a heist.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s much anticipated film about the student uprising in Paris in May 1968 has also attracted a buzz. It is adapted from Gilbert Adair’s novel, Holy Innocence, while James Ivory, a past master of turning novels into screen gold, returns with Le Divorce, taken from Diane Johnson’s best-selling book.

The cult director, Jim Jarmusch, has expanded a series of award-winning shorts into Coffee and Cigarettes, with a cast including Roberto Benigni, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray and Tom Waits.

The king of agents provocateurs, Lars von Trier, is sure to hit the headlines again after his controversial film, Dogville, at Cannes, with a documentary about the way he makes films, made jointly with his even more eccentric friend, Jørgen Leth.

Five movies to make a splash

21 Grams

Having taken the world by storm with Amores Perros, the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has reputedly got another firecracker on his hands in an English-language thriller that stars Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro

Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola, the daughter of you know who, appears to have conquered the second-film syndrome with her follow-up to The Virgin Suicides. Set in a Tokyo hotel, it includes a much-lauded performance by Bill Murray

Twenty-nine Palms

Having wowed critics with The Life of Jesus, and divided them with the Cannes winner L’Humanité, French auteur Bruno Dumont has made another apparently creepy and compelling chiller

Code 46

Fresh from winning the Golden Bear at Berlin with In This World, British director Michael Winterbottom managed to bag Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton for this sci-fi love story which spans Shanghai, Dubai and London

Casa De Los Babys

John Sayles, the American maverick who wears his conscience on his sleeve, has created another emotional potboiler with the story of a group of American women stuck in a South American motel, waiting to adopt local babies

Tags: America's, Attacks, Culture, Shrink, Woody

Woody Attacks America’s Shrink Culture

Woody Allen has made a good film. The shock at the Venice Film Festival yesterday was palpable. After 14 years and as many attempts to recapture his old magic, the New York director has finally made a film which holds up to his earlier work.

And in another twist which will send a shiver through the world of Freudian therapy, Allen turns on psychoanalysis in Anything Else.

Critics who endured such dross as Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, can’t help but wonder whether the two are related.

They had been expecting more of the self-indulgent schtick that has characterized most of the 15 films Allen has churned out since his last masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989.

But for once Allen, now 67, has not cast himself in the romantic lead, and suddenly the old formula of gravely funny Manhattan neurotics turning themselves inside out appears to be working again.

Jason Biggs of American Pie fame plays a novice comic writer who falls for Christina Ricci’s manipulative minx, with Allen chipping in advice as his paranoid mentor. Matters are given a hilarious tweak when Ricci tells Biggs’s character that while she loves him, she can only have sex with other men.

As ever, it is Allen’s aging comedian who has all the best lines. But the philosophical and oddly serious David Dobel is far from the self-obsessed Allen cipher of old.

For a start, he categorically trashes psychoanalysis in the most heartfelt way. His post-September 11 New York is also a darker, more dangerous city. Dobel, despite all his literary pretensions, has assembled a fearsome arsenal of guns and survival equipment in his apartment ready for a final showdown.

Allen said that as a Jew who felt besieged and had consequently armed himself to the teeth, Dobel was a metaphor for Israel.

“The world obviously is in a particularly tense state at the moment,” Allen added. “Of course, it always is tense. But at the moment it is even more exaggerated than usual. The character I play in the movie is a sort of paranoid product of the enormous tension that rains down on everyone.”

Yet Venice is the one city where the notoriously edgy director appears to be at ease. Allen, who secretly married his “adopted daughter”, Soon-Yi, here six years ago, has given money towards the restoration of the fire-gutted Venice opera house, and has previously won the Golden Lion.

That won’t happen this year, for despite its rave reviews, Anything Else is not in the main competition.

With a mouth-watering line-up of films that leaves the Cannes festival dawdling in its wake, competition for the Golden Lion will be particularly intense.

But already there is a great deal of excitement around the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow up to Amores Perros, 21 Grams, his first film in English, as well as Imagining Argentina, written and directed by Britain’s Christopher Hampton and starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson.

If Manchester-born Michael Winterbottom were to win with his sci-fi love story, Code 46, he would become the first director to win both the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear in the same year, having taken the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival with his In This World, his story about Afghan refugees.

Outside the main competition, the big draws are the Coen brothers’ latest film, Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney as a divorced lawyer who falls in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones’ much-divorced gold digger.

The Human Stain, based on the Philip Roth novel and starring Anthony Hopkins, is also likely to make a splash.

Although Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent film, Kill Bill, was not finished in time, Venice is replete with big budget American films which failed to make the deadline for Cannes.

Tarantino’s old sparring partner, Robert Rodriguez, is back with the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, in which Johnny Depp plays a corrupt CIA agent who involves Antonio Banderas’ Mariachi in a plot to sabotage an assassination attempt on a Mexican president.

The British director, Ridley Scott, is also back after a trio of epics that culminated in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, with Matchstick Men, a dark comedy about a conman, played by Nicolas Cage, who is planning a heist.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s much anticipated film about the student uprising in Paris in May 1968 has also attracted a buzz. It is adapted from Gilbert Adair’s novel, Holy Innocence, while James Ivory, a past master of turning novels into screen gold, returns with Le Divorce, taken from Diane Johnson’s best-selling book.

The cult director, Jim Jarmusch, has expanded a series of award-winning shorts into Coffee and Cigarettes, with a cast including Roberto Benigni, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray and Tom Waits.

The king of agents provocateurs, Lars von Trier, is sure to hit the headlines again after his controversial film, Dogville, at Cannes, with a documentary about the way he makes films, made jointly with his even more eccentric friend, Jørgen Leth.

Five movies to make a splash

21 Grams

Having taken the world by storm with Amores Perros, the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has reputedly got another firecracker on his hands in an English-language thriller that stars Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro

Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola, the daughter of you know who, appears to have conquered the second-film syndrome with her follow-up to The Virgin Suicides. Set in a Tokyo hotel, it includes a much-lauded performance by Bill Murray

Twenty-nine Palms

Having wowed critics with The Life of Jesus, and divided them with the Cannes winner L’Humanité, French auteur Bruno Dumont has made another apparently creepy and compelling chiller

Code 46

Fresh from winning the Golden Bear at Berlin with In This World, British director Michael Winterbottom managed to bag Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton for this sci-fi love story which spans Shanghai, Dubai and London

Casa De Los Babys

John Sayles, the American maverick who wears his conscience on his sleeve, has created another emotional potboiler with the story of a group of American women stuck in a South American motel, waiting to adopt local babies

Tags: America's, Attacks, Culture, Shrink, Woody

Woody Attacks America’s Shrink Culture

Woody Allen has made a good film. The shock at the Venice Film Festival yesterday was palpable. After 14 years and as many attempts to recapture his old magic, the New York director has finally made a film which holds up to his earlier work.

And in another twist which will send a shiver through the world of Freudian therapy, Allen turns on psychoanalysis in Anything Else.

Critics who endured such dross as Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, can’t help but wonder whether the two are related.

They had been expecting more of the self-indulgent schtick that has characterized most of the 15 films Allen has churned out since his last masterpiece, Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989.

But for once Allen, now 67, has not cast himself in the romantic lead, and suddenly the old formula of gravely funny Manhattan neurotics turning themselves inside out appears to be working again.

Jason Biggs of American Pie fame plays a novice comic writer who falls for Christina Ricci’s manipulative minx, with Allen chipping in advice as his paranoid mentor. Matters are given a hilarious tweak when Ricci tells Biggs’s character that while she loves him, she can only have sex with other men.

As ever, it is Allen’s aging comedian who has all the best lines. But the philosophical and oddly serious David Dobel is far from the self-obsessed Allen cipher of old.

For a start, he categorically trashes psychoanalysis in the most heartfelt way. His post-September 11 New York is also a darker, more dangerous city. Dobel, despite all his literary pretensions, has assembled a fearsome arsenal of guns and survival equipment in his apartment ready for a final showdown.

Allen said that as a Jew who felt besieged and had consequently armed himself to the teeth, Dobel was a metaphor for Israel.

“The world obviously is in a particularly tense state at the moment,” Allen added. “Of course, it always is tense. But at the moment it is even more exaggerated than usual. The character I play in the movie is a sort of paranoid product of the enormous tension that rains down on everyone.”

Yet Venice is the one city where the notoriously edgy director appears to be at ease. Allen, who secretly married his “adopted daughter”, Soon-Yi, here six years ago, has given money towards the restoration of the fire-gutted Venice opera house, and has previously won the Golden Lion.

That won’t happen this year, for despite its rave reviews, Anything Else is not in the main competition.

With a mouth-watering line-up of films that leaves the Cannes festival dawdling in its wake, competition for the Golden Lion will be particularly intense.

But already there is a great deal of excitement around the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow up to Amores Perros, 21 Grams, his first film in English, as well as Imagining Argentina, written and directed by Britain’s Christopher Hampton and starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson.

If Manchester-born Michael Winterbottom were to win with his sci-fi love story, Code 46, he would become the first director to win both the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear in the same year, having taken the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival with his In This World, his story about Afghan refugees.

Outside the main competition, the big draws are the Coen brothers’ latest film, Intolerable Cruelty, starring George Clooney as a divorced lawyer who falls in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones’ much-divorced gold digger.

The Human Stain, based on the Philip Roth novel and starring Anthony Hopkins, is also likely to make a splash.

Although Quentin Tarantino’s ultra-violent film, Kill Bill, was not finished in time, Venice is replete with big budget American films which failed to make the deadline for Cannes.

Tarantino’s old sparring partner, Robert Rodriguez, is back with the final part of his El Mariachi trilogy, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, in which Johnny Depp plays a corrupt CIA agent who involves Antonio Banderas’ Mariachi in a plot to sabotage an assassination attempt on a Mexican president.

The British director, Ridley Scott, is also back after a trio of epics that culminated in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, with Matchstick Men, a dark comedy about a conman, played by Nicolas Cage, who is planning a heist.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s much anticipated film about the student uprising in Paris in May 1968 has also attracted a buzz. It is adapted from Gilbert Adair’s novel, Holy Innocence, while James Ivory, a past master of turning novels into screen gold, returns with Le Divorce, taken from Diane Johnson’s best-selling book.

The cult director, Jim Jarmusch, has expanded a series of award-winning shorts into Coffee and Cigarettes, with a cast including Roberto Benigni, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray and Tom Waits.

The king of agents provocateurs, Lars von Trier, is sure to hit the headlines again after his controversial film, Dogville, at Cannes, with a documentary about the way he makes films, made jointly with his even more eccentric friend, Jørgen Leth.

Five movies to make a splash

21 Grams

Having taken the world by storm with Amores Perros, the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has reputedly got another firecracker on his hands in an English-language thriller that stars Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro

Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola, the daughter of you know who, appears to have conquered the second-film syndrome with her follow-up to The Virgin Suicides. Set in a Tokyo hotel, it includes a much-lauded performance by Bill Murray

Twenty-nine Palms

Having wowed critics with The Life of Jesus, and divided them with the Cannes winner L’Humanité, French auteur Bruno Dumont has made another apparently creepy and compelling chiller

Code 46

Fresh from winning the Golden Bear at Berlin with In This World, British director Michael Winterbottom managed to bag Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton for this sci-fi love story which spans Shanghai, Dubai and London

Casa De Los Babys

John Sayles, the American maverick who wears his conscience on his sleeve, has created another emotional potboiler with the story of a group of American women stuck in a South American motel, waiting to adopt local babies

Tags: America's, Attacks, Culture, Shrink, Woody