Allen Lawsuit Over Billboards Turns Racy

'Homeland' also does well at the Golden Globes

(NEWSER) - Be honest: You tuned in to the Golden Globes tonight mostly to see what Ricky Gervais would say . But awards were handed out too, and The Artist and The Descendants were the big film winners. Both won best picture and best actor in their respective categories (comedy or musical for the former, drama for the latter), and The Artist also won best original score. In the TV categories, Homeland did well, winning best drama series and best actress in a drama series. More big winners: More»

Actress recalls romance in upcoming memoir

(NEWSER) - Diane Keaton fondly recalls her romance with Woody Allen in upcoming memoir Then Again, out next month, writing that she “was in love with him before I knew him.” Her family often watched him on TV before she first worked with him in 1968, and she loved “his manner, his way of gesturing, his hands, his coughing and looking down in a self-deprecating way while he told jokes.” More»

His firing from Two and a Half Men costing producers a bundle

(NEWSER) - Who's crazy now? Charlie Sheen is hammering out a settlement with Warner Bros. for his firing from Two and a Half Men amounting to $25 million, TMZ and the Los Angeles Times are reporting. The whacked-out actor filed a $100 million lawsuit for wrongful termination against Warner Bros. when he was axed from the program after his public battles with substance abuse and tirades against the studio and the program's producer. More»

The latest from Woody Allen, Gus Van Sant, Pedro Almodóvar, and more

(NEWSER) - Cannes kicks off on Wednesday, and the Daily Beast rounds up 10 of the most buzzed-about movies featured at the 64th annual film festival:

• The Tree of Life: From filmmaker Terrence Malick, the story of a Texas boy (played in adulthood by Sean Penn) torn between the worldviews of his father, played by Brad Pitt, and his mother, played by newcomer Jessica Chastain.
• Melancholia: Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier's version of an Armageddon story, which centers around two sisters (played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who are drifting apart.

They tackle life's Big Questions, writes Juliet Lapidos

(NEWSER) - Juliet Lapidos has spent, by her conservative estimate, five full days of her life watching Woody Allen movies. She’s seen every single one of them: his 40 feature-length films, his shorts, the earlier movies he wrote but didn’t direct, even a TV movie and a short mockumentary that never actually aired. And though Allen “returns compulsively to the same creative ground”— recycling not just actors and themes but even, sometimes, his own dialogue—Lapidos continues to find meaning in his films, she explains on Slate . His characters face “the likelihood that we live in a godless universe,” and “Allen answers the question of what we should make of nothingness differently in different movies. Sometimes nothing means everything, sometimes nothing much.” More»