Latest in Sergio Leone

It’s been a long time coming, but the Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off tomorrow, has now officially outlined its closing-night festivities. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the birth of the Spaghetti Western in 1964, the festival will screen a newly restored 4K version of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars…

The Cannes Film Festival is firming up plans for the 67th edition at a rapid clip this week, announcing jury members on Monday, followed by new Official Selection titles this morning and now the Cannes Classics sidebar lineup. Sophia Loren has been named the Cannes Classics guest of honor this year. Winner of the 1961…

‘Blue Is The Warmest Color’ Nabs France's Prix Louis Delluc France's prestigious Prix Louis Delluc has gone to Blue Is The Warmest Color. The Cannes Palme d'Or winner directed by Abdellatif Kechiche is famously not France's Oscar entry this year due to the timing of its release, but just nabbed a Golden Globe nominatio…

The Italian scribe who had a long-running collaboration with Dino De Laurentiis and co-wrote two classic Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns died Sunday of cancer in Rome at 87. Luciano Vincenzoni is best known stateside for providing quotable lines for the Man With No Name, played by Clint Eastwood in Leone’s mid-’60s…

EXCLUSIVE: Kevin Costner has dropped out of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, an exit I’m told is due to a combination of scheduling and personal reasons. Costner had agreed to play the supporting role of Ace Woody in the Sergio Leone-style Spaghetti Western. The problem was it would have tied up about two months…

EXCLUSIVE: Talks are about to get underway for Leonardo DiCaprio to play the role of villainous ranch owner Calvin Candie in Django Unchained, the Sergio Leone-style spaghetti Western that Quentin Tarantino wrote and will direct as his next film. DiCaprio is being courted to play a charming but ruthless proprietor of…

EXCLUSIVE: Sources tell me that international on Quentin Tarantino’s new Spaghetti Western Django Unchained is going to Sony to co-finance production later this year and distribute sometime in 2012. This after the filmmakers met with every major studio except Warner Bros. Of course, The Weinstein Company is taking…

Back when I saw him in late February at Harvey Weinstein’s Oscar night party for The King’s Speech, Quentin Tarantino told me that his script for a Western was just pouring out of him easily, that he’d finished a draft and expected to turn in a final version within two months. As a web leak of the cover page of his…

EXCLUSIVE: Javier Bardem is close to sealing his deal with Universal Pictures to play gunslinger Roland Deschain in The Dark Tower, the mammoth adaptation of the Stephen King 7-novel series that'll span three movies and a limited run TV series in between each film. Director Ron Howard begins production on the first…

EXCLUSIVE: After Javier Bardem’s terrifying Oscar-winning turn as the assassin in No Country For Old Men, is there any doubt he’d fit as the gunslinger Roland Deschain in The Dark Tower, the mammoth adaptation of the Stephen King 7-novel series that'll span three movies and a limited run TV series in between? I’m told…