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ScreenDaily - In exhuming Tennessee Williams’s unproduced screenplay from 1980, actress-turned-director Jodie Markell has delivered a respectable 1920’s-set upstairs-downstairs story of a vain heiress (Bryce Dallas Howard) who looks beyond her Memphis surroundings but struggles for the respect of a man below her means.
Just producing The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond automatically sets the film in the Williams oeuvre, and elevates its status beyond the reputation of its cast or director. Demand from festivals should be high, mostly in the US, where the film is assured a berth on television, with strong demand from home video and the educational market. Foreign interest is likely to be limited to English-speaking countries, where the limited audiences for Williams’ stage works will be the film’s primary market.
Teardrop Diamond’s protagonist, bored and impulsive Fisher Willow (Howard), is a rich planter’s daughter. A younger twist on Alexandra Del Lago from Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth, she approaches Jimmy Dobyne (Evans), to be her escort to the lavish social gatherings of her milieu, clothing him and driving him around in her Pierce Arrow. “I just know that I’ll have to buy most everything I want,” she tells the handsome young man of humble background.
The young woman’s family is loathed for her father’s recent demolition of a levee which drowned some modest farmers. Revenge ripens when Fisher loses a costly teardrop diamond earring while descending from her car at a party and suspicions fall on Jimmy… [Full Story]
/Film - At every film festival, I try to pack in as many screenings as humanly possible (At TIFF this year, I’ve been rather unsuccessful…). This leads to seeing a lot of films you wouldn’t normally watch just because it fits nicely on the schedule between two other films. I call these movies the “nothing better to see movies”.
Ain’t It Cool News - The past two nights, I had the pleasure of being a part of the first North American audience to see Steven Soderbergh’s two-part meditation (to be certain, this is NO biopic) on the career of Ernest “Che” Guevera. Introduced both times by the director, producer (Laura Bickford), and star (Benicio Del Toro), ‘Che (
Variety.com - ”
Variety.com - A naive, between-the-wars French painter is brought to vivid life in the satisfying fact-inspired drama “
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ScreenDaily - After sitting on the shelf for the better part of two years, Gavin O’Connor’s bruising Manhattan melodrama charges into a congested festival lineup breathing fire and smoke. A coiling police saga about the clash between family and career loyalties, 
/Film - Larry Charles’ 
Cinematical - At any large film festival, it’s easy to get caught up in the buzz and the biz of it - most of the time, the press screenings are really press and industry screenings, which means that the person sitting next to you is not some fellow ink-stained wretch who will watch the film and have to write a review but, rather, an acquisitions person who will watch the film and, perhaps, write a check. This doesn’t just lead to seat-hopping and movie-jumping as the acquisitions people shrug No, not for us and leave so they can continue their quest; it also leads to getting caught up in an atmosphere where questions of commerce can come more readily to mind than questions of art.
