The London Film Critics Circle announced their Film Award nominations today and Anna earned a nomination for Actress Of The Year for Margaret. Kenneth Lonergan also recieved a nomination for Screenwriter Of The Year.

Good news for New Yorkers! Margaret will be back on the screen starting this Friday at Cinema Village. It will be screening twice each day at 3:50p and 9:15p. More information about the theatre location, as well as ordering tickets online can be found here.

Margaret is expanding in London this week. So, if you’re in the area, I highly recommend you find time to see it. As I’ve previously said on the site, the film was worth the wait and Anna is fantastic.

From The Guardian:

The One Screen Wonder
Originally slated for release back in 2007, Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret finally hit UK screens at the weekend, or rather screen: it arrived only at the Odeon Panton Street in London. Not exactly venerated by the capital’s cinemagoers as a preferred venue, audiences nevertheless turned out there in force to see Lonergan’s long-awaited followup to You Can Count on Me, with ticket sales of £4,595. That number gave Margaret the highest screen average of any film on release, by some margin. This, despite the film only receiving one evening showtime per day (at 8pm), due to its hefty duration of 150 minutes.

The length of the film was one cause of dispute between Lonergan and backers Fox Searchlight, which had initially hoped for a two-hour edit, before compromising at two-and-a-half hours. Margaret earned five-star reviews from Time Out, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian’s own Peter Bradshaw. It expands to 10 screens from Friday.

Margaret is out today in New York and Los Angeles for an exclusive engagement at the Landmark Theatres in both cities. The film will be in San Francisco, Detroit, Philadelphia and San Diego on October 7th. If you’re in either city, go support Anna and the film.

ETA: I’ve just returned from seeing the film this evening and it was worth the wait, Anna was fantastic in the film.

Whilst I don’t normally post reviews on the site, The Hollywood Reporter has compiled a nice list of what critics are saying about Anna’s performance in the film.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

The Hollywood Reporter’s Sheri Linden wrote that the actress is convincing in the role and gives credit to the director.

“Lonergan has a sure touch with actors, and his portrait of upper-middle-class, intellectual New Yorkers never feels false, even if the dramatic impact remains more theoretical than felt,” she wrote.

The Associated Press critic Jake Coyle was more effusive in his praise of the actress.

“Paquin is exceptional,” he wrote. “Even if she hadn’t become a star from True Blood since Margaret was filmed, this performance — searching, ferocious — would have done the trick.”

Time’s Mary Pols echoed that sentiment.

“Paquin is spectacular,” she wrote. “The character is almost too precocious, prone to dropping George Bernard Shaw phrases into her speech — ‘Not that I want to make this woman’s death into my own personal moral gymnasium.’Yet in Paquin’s hands, Lisa is completely believable, and the realization of the potential the actress showed in supporting roles in 25th Hour and The Squid and the Whale.”

Rex Reed of the New York Observer also had praise for the actress, if not the movie itself.

“Anna Paquin delivers a very fine performance in the very odd starring role of a very bewildering film,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times film critic Betsy Sharkey had a hard time believing Paquin in the role.
“Paquin, as good as she is, is such an old soul that it’s hard to buy her as a teenager, even a precocious one,” she wrote.

The trailer for Margaret is below or can be found on YouTube.