The annual Berlin film festival is opening with a costume drama set at the beginning of the French revolution — the first of 18 movies competing at the event.

“Farewell My Queen,” from French director Benoit Jacquot and starring Diane Kruger as Marie Antoinette, was making its debut at the start of the 11-day event on Thursday, the first of the year’s major European film festivals.

An eight-member jury led by British director Mike Leigh will choose this year’s winner of the Golden Bear, the festival’s top prize, and other awards.

The jury also includes actor Jake Gyllenhaal and Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian director of last year’s winning film, “A Separation.”

Leigh says he enjoys the midwinter Berlin festival for “its spirit, its atmosphere, its informality.”

Humphrey Bogart

The son of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall is opening the first film festival at the Smithsonian’s new movie theater on the National Mall with screenings of several of his father’s films, beginning with “Casablanca.”

Sixty-three-year-old Stephen Bogart says he only really knew his famous father from the movies. Humphrey Bogart died when he was just 8 years old.

Still, he says his father would have been shocked to find himself featured at the National Museum of American History. Stephen Bogart says his father wasn’t full of himself but was just an actor devoted to his craft.

The American Film Institute has ranked Humphrey Bogart as the greatest male legend from the screen.

Stephen Bogart is a real estate agent in Florida after a career in TV news.

Clint Eastwood (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

The Smithsonian Institution is honoring Clint Eastwood on Wednesday for his six decades of work in American film, and the actor and director will cut the ribbon to open a new movie theater to showcase film history at the National Museum of American History.

Eastwood will visit the museum Wednesday evening to help dedicate the new Warner Bros. Theater as a space to present the history of Hollywood. Warner Bros. Entertainment donated $5 million in 2010 to renovate the museum’s old Carmichael Auditorium into a modern theater with 3D projection capability.

The new theater gives the Smithsonian its first space dedicated to film history, museum spokeswoman Melinda Machado. The 264-seat theater will be able to screen silent films and first-run movies.

“Films are an integral part of our culture and our daily lives,” said Marc Pachter, interim director of the museum.

Warner Bros. will help present four film festivals at the museum this year and into the future, Machado said. Most programs at the theater will be free to visitors, rather than charging for tickets as the Smithsonian does at its IMAX theaters.

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A new movie from Billy Bob Thornton and a turn as Marie Antoinette by Diane Kruger will rub shoulders with offerings from Asia to Africa at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.

Organizers on Tuesday presented the program for the event, the first of the year’s major European film festivals, which runs Feb. 9-19.

Outside the main competition, highlights include Meryl Streep being honored for her lifetime achievement; Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut, the Bosnian war movie “In the Land of Blood and Honey”; and documentaries and discussions on the Arab world in the wake of the past year’s upheaval.

“There are a lot of films in this festival about changes happening in the world,” festival director Dieter Kosslick said.

The competition for the festival’s top Golden Bear award opens with French director Benoit Jacquot’s “Farewell My Queen,” a drama centering on the drama inside the queen’s palace as the French Revolution broke out, and starring Kruger as Marie Antoinette.

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A mythical film starring an 8-year-old girl and a documentary about the war on drugs took top honors at the Sundance Film Festival.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” won the grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition, and “The House I Live In” won the same award in the U.S. documentary category Saturday in Park City, Utah.

Directed and co-written by 29-year-old first-time filmmaker Benh Zeitlin, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” follows a girl named Hushpuppy who lives with her father in the southern Delta. The film also won the cinematography prize.

Eugene Jarecki’s documentary “The House I Live In” examines the social, human and financial costs of the war on drugs. Jarecki won the same award in 2005 for his documentary “Why We Fight.”

Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana came to the Sundance Film Festival to promote their closing-night film, “The Words.”

The two actors play a married couple in the movie, which follows an aspiring writer who gains fame when he finds an old manuscript and passes it off as his own.

The pair avoided any appearance of their reported off-screen romance by staying apart from one another while posing for photos and giving interviews to support the film. Saldana did affectionately touch Cooper as they passed in a hallway, though.

Both had been to Sundance before, where snow fell throughout the festival and the weather dipped into the teens. Still, Saldana maintained her fashionista edge.

“I did bring warm stuff but I also brought fashion-y stuff. Come on. You’ve got to pay the price, even if it’s too cold,” she said. Read the full story

Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki focuses on America’s war on drugs in his documentary in competition at the Sundance Film Festival.

Jarecki examines the social, human and financial costs of drug policies in “The House I Live In.”

Jarecki says he was moved to explore the issue because, while his parents escaped persecution in Nazi Germany, he sees another kind of Holocaust taking place in poor communities targeted by drug laws and mandatory minimum sentences.

In an interview in Park City, Utah, Jarecki criticized the criminal justice system for its targeting and sentencing of non-violent drug addicts.

The Sundance Film Festival continues through Sunday.

Regardless of the outcome of the presidential primaries, Ice-T already has his mind made up about the forthcoming election.

The rapper and actor, who is making his directorial debut at the Sundance Film Festival with the documentary “Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap,” says he expects President Barack Obama to be re-elected. After that, he predicts Hillary Clinton will be the next president.

The 53-year-old entertainer said, “She did the Secretary of State job, she was a G, she held it down, she didn’t cry,” referring to the former New York Senator with the hip-hop term for gangster (a positive thing).

“Obama will support her,” he said, “and she’ll be the first woman president.”

Ice-T’s documentary premiered at the Sundance festival, which continues through Sunday in Park City, Utah.

Image via Wikipedia

Comedian and “30 Rock” cast member Tracy Morgan is back at work in New York after a brief hospitalization in Utah.

Morgan’s publicist, Lewis Kay, says Morgan appreciates fans’ concern. The actor was hospitalized Sunday while attending the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, where the elevation is 7,000 feet.

Kay says Morgan suffered from exhaustion and altitude. Morgan also has diabetes.

Kay says no drugs or alcohol were found in Morgan’s system.

Recordings of 911 calls made on the night he collapsed, and obtained by The Associated Press, indicate Morgan passed out at the Blue Iguana restaurant.

One caller says he didn’t know if the actor had been drinking, but said he was unconscious. An ambulance later took him to a nearby hospital. He was released a day later.

Nine years later, Cillian Murphy is back at the Sundance Film Festival, where he got such great exposure that people finally learned to pronounce his name.

The Irish actor — whose first name begins with a hard K sound — was a breakout star at Sundance in 2003 with the horror hit “28 Days Later.”

The film about a London man who wakes from a coma to find the land overrun by a plague that has turned people into raging zombies already was a hit in Great Britain when it played at the festival.

The rousing reception at Sundance built U.S. buzz for the film and for Murphy, who went on to appear in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins,” ”The Dark Knight” and “Inception” and returned to this year’s festival with the thriller “Red Lights.”

“When it was well-received here, that had a big impact on its release in the States,” said Murphy, who had a handful of credits behind him when director Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting,” ”Slumdog Millionaire”) cast him in the lead of “28 Days Later.” Read the full story