With big name film festivals like Cannes and Sundance often dominating the news, people sometimes forget that there’s a great film festival right here in the heart of the filmmaking community. That’s right, the Los Angeles Film Festival is coming next month and today the fest announced the full lineup of films and shorts showing in competition and having their premieres at the fest.

Among the highlights are Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love, which will open the fest, the world premiere of Alex Kurtzman’s People Like Us, starring Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks and Olivia Wilde, and Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, which will close the festival. For all the scoop on the fest, check out the full press releases after the break.

The Los Angeles Film Festival runs June 14-24 at downtown Los Angeles’ LA Live complex.

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Woody Allen is a talented writer, director and actor. He is generally very funny, and often provides a very unique perspective that feels familiar but is undeniably his own. Now he will finally achieve the final peg for total life victory, he will play John Turturro’s pimp.

Turturro’s next project as a writer and director is Fading Gigolo, and he has been able to pull in a very impressive cast.

Variety is reporting Allen will co-star in the film with Turturro with Sharon Stone and Sofia Vergara likely to sign on in supporting roles.

Turturro and Allen [play] cash-strapped best friends who decide to go into the gigolo business together and subsequently attract the suspicion of the Hasidic Jewish community in which they live. Duo take on the pseudonyms Virgil and Bongo, with Allen pimping out Turturro’s character until he falls for a Jewish widow.

The movie sounds incredibly interesting, and pulling in Woody Allen just as an actor likely speaks volumes about script.

This will be Allen’s first project since winning this year’s Academy Award for best screenplay, for his film Midnight in Paris. Turturro has recently been seen fighting giant robots in a certain loud and explodey trilogy, so this next picture is an interesting change of pace for the both of them.

As with writers, Directors are pretty high on our list of important pieces of the film and TV making puzzle. If writers are the initial creative force that takes an idea from nothing and makes it into something, directors are the force that shapes that something into a clear vision and fulfills its potential for greatness. Or, they get it as close as it’s ever going to get.

With that in mind, the Directors Guild of America President Taylor Hackford today announced the five nominees for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for 2011.

“The directors nominated this year for the Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film Award have each demonstrated an inspired command of the medium. The fact that their prodigious talents have been recognized by their peers is the highest honor a director can achieve,” said Hackford. “I offer my most sincere congratulations to each of the nominees.”

The winner will be named at the 64th Annual DGA Awards Dinner on Saturday, January 28, 2012, at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland.

The nominees are (in alphabetical order):

WOODY ALLEN
Midnight in Paris
(Sony Pictures Classics)
Mr. Allen’s Directorial Team:
Unit Production Managers: Matthieu Rubin, Helen Robin
First Assistant Director: Gil Kenny
Second Assistant Director: Delphine Bertrand

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In what will surely come as a surprise to many people who don’t follow the Internets (also, most likely to mainstream audiences), Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life was the top film at the 15h annual Online Film Critics Society Awards. The awards are given out by the Online Film Critics Society, an organization made up of film reviewers, journalists and scholars based in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Latin America and the Asia/Pacific Rim region.

Malick’s film took the top prize for best picture as well as director, supporting actress (Jessica Chastain), editing and cinematography. No other film won more than one award.

Michael Fassbender took best actor for Shame and Tilda Swinton was best actress for We Need To Talk About Kevin. Best supporting actor went to Christopher Plummer for Beginners.

Click through for the full list of winners:

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There’s a moment in Radio Days when a young Allen and his parents have a chance encounter with a “Whiz Kid,” one of those freakish adolescents who spend every moment of their day memorizing trivia. Allen’s parents are in awe of the kid’s diction and “intelligence” while to Allen and ourselves he comes off as a stuffy automaton.

That single scene exemplifies the theme of Midnight in Paris: (and I take this line from Tyler Cowen’s excellent summation) “if we somehow managed to meet the cultural titans of previous eras, how many of them would come across as blowhard hacks, if only because their own subsequent work has made their personae obsolete?”

The Allen surrogate is Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), an American Hollywood hack in Paris with his shrewish fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her disapproving parents John (Kurt Fuller) and Wendy (Mimi Kennedy). Gil, currently engaged in his novel, longs for the Paris of the 1920s and, after a walk one night, meets a cab that whisks him back in time to a party with F. Scott (Tom Hiddleston) and Zelda (Alison Pill) Fitzgerald.

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It is remarkable to think just how long and varied of a career Woody Allen has had.  His decades long body of work has already earned him the status of a legendary filmmaker, yet that has hardly slowed him down from constantly pushing himself to be a better writer and director.  And recently, we are seeing a freshness in his work that only reaffirms his true talent as a filmmaker.

To be honest, it use to be that Woody Allen was kind of hit-or-miss.  Of course, he has his classic films like Annie Hall and Manhattan, but more recently, for every Match Point or Vicky Christina Barcelona we would find films like Whatever Works which, despite starring Larry David, seemed to fall flat and felt more like an off-Broadway play than a feature film.

Luckily, Allen seems to be on a roll recently.  Midnight in Paris is one of his films that is able to achieve that rare combination of brilliant dialogue and strong performances that we have come to know and love.

It is here that I would normally give a quick plot recap of the film to give context to the review, but I really do think this film is most enjoyable if you go in knowing nothing more than what was given in the trailer.  I know some people don’t like going into films completely blind, but I do suggest that you skip the next paragraph if you want the full experience.

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Here we are, week 3 into a seemingly never-ending summer of huge named blockbusters, and the first film to come close to $100 million in the domestic box office is the fourth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

With a budget of nearly $250 million, the film opened wide this weekend to over 4,100 screens across the country and pulled in an estimated $90.1 million since Friday. Not to mention its overseas numbers, which totaled in over $250 million worldwide.

Coming in behind the film, Bridesmaids only went down $4 million from last weekend’s $26 million to an estimated $21 million. This is a perfect example of word-of-mouth helping a film out, as the marketing normally dies down after the first weekend of a film’s release.

Doing less impressive, Paramount’s Thor lost half of its totals from last weekend, bringing it in at third with an estimated $15.5 million. Worry not, however, as the film has brought in nearly $400 million worldwide since its release date.

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I spent this weekend in my hometown of Lake Placid, New York, and it was also the weekend of the Lake Placid Film Forum.  As a college student at St. Bonaventure University, I interned at this film festival run by former New York Daily News film critic Kathleen Carroll. Working there summers in between semesters was always the highlight of my summer break until I graduated and had to move into the “real world.”  So this weekend was a nice reprieve to go back and see the familiar faces and the many people I greatly respect who run that festival.

I also saw Woody Allen’s latest film Whatever Works.

Starring Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and Evan Rachel Wood (Thirteen and Marilyn Manson’s ex-girlfriend) this stunted, half-thought out movie’s  sole highlight was just listening to Larry David talk.  I’m a Curb fan, and to be honest I could listen to Larry David talk about anything.  His cynicism and sharp comebacks are a highlight and this movie is a natural progression from his work on the HBO series. And in that sense, this film is like Woody Allen directing an episode of David’s Curb and not a Woody Allen film which happens to star Larry David.

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