Joan Allen

This year’s New York Film Festival opened Friday night with a screening of French director Laurent Cantet’s The Class.

The film, which has already won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, focuses on a multicultural classroom in Paris’ rapidly gentrifying 20th Arrondissement. With the exception of the role of the teacher, who is played by the author of the memoir that inspired the movie, the cast is made up of a group of amateur teenage actors, most of whom had traveled to New York for the festival.

Maybe it was the serious, relatively low-profile film—The Darjeeling Limited was last year's selection, and The Queen opened the year before that—or the rain or the presidential debates on TV, but the red carpet was particularly quiet.  read more »

Trumbo
Running time 96 minutes
Written by Christopher Trumbo
Directed by Peter Askin
Starring Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy, Michael Douglas and others

Peter Askin’s Trumbo is based on the play, Trumbo, by Christopher Trumbo, and is clearly a labor of love and ideological affinity for all the Hollywood celebrities who participated in the production. The Hollywood blacklist ensnared the playwright’s father, Dalton Trumbo, and many other talented people in the period of the cold war, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover and other cruel relics of a bygone era. Trumbo’s withering take on these instruments of his torture could be used as a club against the Bush-Cheney administration for its perceived assault on the Bill of Rights in the name of national security.  read more »

Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons are coupling up for a return to Broadway. The Tony winners (and experts in aging gracefully) will get back on stage together in the world premiere of Impressionism, a new American play by Michael Jacobs (Cheaters), according to BroadwayWorld.com. The production, about a jet-setting photojournalist and a New York gallery owner who fall for each other and discover the "art to repairing broken lives," will come to Broadway in Spring 2009. BWW.com reports that this play will mark Ms. Allen’s first return to Broadway since The Heidi Chronicles in 1989, and Mr. Irons’ first time on Broadway since The Real Thing in 1984.

On a recent blustery February morning, Jessica Lange and Joan Allen sat at a conference table, joking around with each other about the ills of fluorescent lighting. The two women co-star, along with Kathy Bates, in Bonneville, a film about three friends who drive from Utah to Southern California after Ms. Lange’s character’s husband passes away. “I have always wanted to do a road movie,” said Ms. Lange, 59, naming Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde as two of her favorites.  read more »

BONNEVILLE
Running Time 93 minutes
Directed by Christopher N. Rowley
Written by Daniel D. Davis  read more »