In honor of the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birthday, the city of Vienna commissioned a special festival of visual art, music, dance, architecture, and film called New Crowned Hope. The name refers to the Masonic lodge Mozart co–founded, a venue in which he made his last public appearance. more ›

reviews Agnes Jaoui's Look At Me and the NY Times is also asking readers for questions for Jaoui, Pedro Almodovar, and Mike Leigh this week. Related: Newsday's John Anderson notes how this year's festival has controversial topics in it (priestly pedophilia in Almodovar's Bad Education, abortion in Leigh's Vera Drake). more ›

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the lineup for the New York Film Festival 2004, and it looks like NY will again benefit from being, arguably, the world's last major film festival by getting films that have played at other festivals by the time the NYFF starts October 1. Opening the festival will be Agnes Jaoui's Look At Me (premiered at Cannes); Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education (also at Cannes) is the centerpiece, as well there being a Pedro retrospective (Viva Pedro!); and Alexander Payne's Sideways will close the festival. Indiewire has a good article about the festival's lineup, and we've taken their lineup list and reproduced it here (after the jump). more ›

Others prizes: Grand prize (like a runner-up prize) to Korean film Old Boy, director Park Chan-Wook; actress Maggie Cheung in Olivier Assayas' Clean; actor Yuuya Yagira in Hirokazu Kore-eda's Nobody Knows (Yagira wasn't able to accept because he had to go back to Japan for exams!); director Tony Gatlif for Exils; screenplay Agnes Jaoui and Jean Pierre Bacri for Comme une Image, which Jaoui directed; and special prizes to (1) Irma P. Hall in The Ladykillers and (2) the Thai film Tropical Malady by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. See full list of prize winners here. And Gothamist on Cannes 2004. more ›