Group wants R rating for any film with smoking

Smoking in youth-rated movies has not declined despite a pledge two years ago by Hollywood studios to encourage producers to show less "gratuitous smoking," according to an anti-smoking group. The American Medical Association Alliance, pointing to research that big-screen smoking leads teens to pick up the tobacco habit, called for an R rating for any movie with smoking scenes. The head of the group that gives U.S

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Veteran new wave filmmaker seduces French starlet Sagnier

When a woman dates a much older man, bystanders often speculate that she has only the most superficial of motives. In “The Girl Cut in Two,” veteran French filmmaker Claude Chabrol tells the story of one young woman for whom just the opposite is true. It stars French starlet Ludivine Sagnier as a young woman who rejects the amorous advances of a flashy, wealthy man her age, in favor of a sleazy affair with a fickle, 60 year-old father figure

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The Scene: Robots dominate ‘Terminator’

Thirty-eight years ago, Joseph McGinty Nichol was a boy in Kalamazoo, Michigan, playing with toy robots. Today “McG,” as he is better known, builds and blows up real robots. The prominent filmmaker is the driving force behind one of the season’s summer blockbusters, “Terminator Salvation,” which is filled with very expensive and very explosive robots.

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Hollywood eyes $70 zombie movie wowing Cannes

A budding British director is enjoying success on a shoestring at Cannes with "Colin," a new zombie feature that cost a scarcely believable $70 to make. Japanese distributors are currently in negotiations for the rights to the film and buzz around the no-budget zombie chiller has attracted interest from some major American distributors — all of which is a very nice surprise for the team behind “Colin.” “We were almost fainting at the list of people who were coming [to the final market screening of the film],” said Helen Grace of Left Films who is helping the film’s director Marc Price publicize the film in Cannes

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Have Tarantino and his ‘Inglourious Basterds’ got what it takes?

Quentin Tarantino didn’t give himself any breaks while making his latest film "Inglourious Basterds," which premiered at Cannes this week. The 46 year-old director transformed the WWII wartime-thriller-cum-spaghetti-western from script to finished product in just eight months, he told CNN’s The Screening Room, so that it would be ready to show at the prestigious film festival

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‘Drag Me to Hell’: Sam Raimi’s Genre Curse

If there’s one film magazine connected with the Cannes festival, it’d probably be Positif or Cahiers du Cinema, French journals whose passionate seriousness perfectly suits the movies that usually show here. This year, though, the festival’s journal of record should be the American horror-movie mag Fangoria. The official Cannes selection has included all manner of genre films: a sexy vampire shocker , a guns-n-guts crime film and two gory psycho-thrillers about devoted mothers gone bad .

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