ENTERTAINMENT
September 7, 2012 | By Steven Zeitchik
TORONTO--It's been a long time since Woody Allen acted in a film he didn't direct. It's probably even longer - as in never - since he's played a pimp. The 76-year-old bespectacled one will do just that in “Fading Gigolo,” a movie conceived and written by John Turturro. Turturro will direct and - of course - play the hooker. The johns? Those would be Sofia Vergara, Vanessa Paradis and Sharon Stone. There are plenty of highly touted Hollywood movies at the Toronto International Film Festival playing to the eager masses and media.
ENTERTAINMENT
December 21, 2007 | Carina Chocano, Times Staff Writer
How weird is John Turturro's "Romance & Cigarettes"? Almost indescribably weird, though also strangely involving. A Coen brothers-produced postmodern musical in the vein of "The Singing Detective," it's set in a rundown section of Queens where Nick Murder (James Gandolfini), a middle-aged ironworker, is cheating on his wife, Kitty (Susan Sarandon), with a redheaded Irish nymphomaniac named Tula (Kate Winslet) while resolutely smoking himself to death.
ENTERTAINMENT
December 20, 2007 | Tom Roston, Special to The Times
While John Turturro recounts the "Kafkaesque nightmare" he's been through over the last three years -- struggling to get his third film as a director, "Romance and Cigarettes," into theaters -- there's little hint of the desperadoes ("Miller's Crossing"), hotheads ("Do the Right Thing") and weirdos ("Barton Fink") he's played so well as a go-to character actor. Instead, he convincingly inhabits the role of resilient director. "I hear people complaining, 'Ooh, my movie didn't do this.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 21, 2005 | John Clark, Special to The Times
SUSAN SARANDON is belting out "Piece of My Heart," really throwing herself into it, as if she were in a karaoke bar or driving across country. As the cameras look on, her fists are clenched, her face turns red, her eyes bug out. Accompanying her on an organ in a church in Brooklyn, N.Y., is British actor-comic-transvestite Eddie Izzard, his hair in a '70s shag. His manner is both agreeable and grave, like a choirmaster, which is precisely the role he's playing.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 6, 1999 | KEVIN THOMAS, TIMES STAFF WRITER
John Turturro's "Illuminata," a rhapsodic celebration of love and life in the theater, is about as close to an all-out art film in the grand traditional manner as an American movie ever gets, recalling such films as Max Ophuls' "La Ronde" and Ingmar Bergman's "Smiles of a Summer Night."
ENTERTAINMENT
June 22, 1996 | JOHN ANDERSON, FOR THE TIMES
It was the early '90s, and Nick Turturro--part-time actor, part-time hotel doorman--was doing a series of one-act plays called "Siddown (Conversations With the Mob)." He wasn't on Broadway. He wasn't off-Broadway. "We were off, off, off Broadway--way down, below sea level." And yet . . . Turturro somehow became possessed of the often disastrous notion that he and the rest of the cast and crew could make a movie.