(CANADA) An Atopia presentation. Produced by Pascal Maeder. Directed by Federico Hidalgo. Screenplay, Hidalgo, Paulina Robles. Camera (color, Super 16mm). Francois Dagenais; editor, Maxime Chalifoux; music, Robert Marcel Lepage; production designer, Gabriel Tsampalieros; art director, Carlos Salom; set decorator, Sylvain Paveau;...

STEPHANIE BOUCHARD News Assistant Portland Press Herald (Maine) 02-08-2007 Silent movies' musical champion Byline: STEPHANIE BOUCHARD News Assistant Edition: FINAL Section: GO Memo: IF YOU GO FRIENDS OF THE KOTZSCHMAR ORGAN PRESENTS "THE IRON HORSE" WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday WHERE: Merrill Auditorium, 20...

Studio owner NBC Universal unveiled an ambitious plan to revamp its 390-acre Universal City complex that includes movie sets, office space and a theme park.The 25-year master plan outlined Wednesday envisions an 80,000-square-foot expansion of the theme park, new high-tech soundstages and a residential development...

Martin Scorsese wants to save the world cinema.The Academy Award-winning director said Tuesday it was a "dream come true" to launch his international project at the Cannes Film Festival, where his "Taxi Driver" won the top prize in 1976.He's backed by an advisory board of...

[In Silent Movie] Brooks has concocted a talkie with a gimmick. The gimmickry here involves parodies of silent-movie jokes and simplistic plotting. The absence of realistic sound and speech is complete with the exception of one word—spoken, of course, by the mime Marcel Marceau. Above all, it's an oral comedy, with its verbal humor obvious in signs, names, and title cards. Like Blazing Saddles, the Brooks film this most closely parallels, Silent Movie is clearly the work of gag writers…...

Mel Brooks's comic gift, such as it is, is largely verbal and stands to lose too much in a silent movie; and … what was once done so well was done out of necessity, the need to overcome the limitations of a mute medium. Remove the necessity, which is the mother of invention, and you come up with test-tube babies of scant viability. In the event, Silent Movie has some quite funny sight gags, though the invention wears progressively thinner; it also has exaggerated sound effects that have good a...

[Silent Movie is Brooks's] best picture to date. That's limited praise, surely, still this is his most organic film, the least desperately outrageous. No one sequence stands out like the punching of the horse in Saddles or the monster-doctor vaudeville routine in Frankenstein, but those were highlights amidst messy frenzy. Silent Movie takes a comic line and hews to it fairly consistently, fairly inventively. Some viewers have assumed that, by making a silent film, Brooks is automatically chal...