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Category: Academy Awards
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Life moves slowly. Loss. Grief. So much happens in Drive My Car, Japan’s entry for the Best International Film Academy Award, it is amazing that the movie is only two and a half hours long. That it has been named Best Film by the venerable NY and LA Film Critics can make you think, Parasite…
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Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers Closes The New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz is Spain’s Sophia Loren loves women. He also loves actors. He could not have been more passionate introducing the stars of his new movie, Parallel Mothers, closing night of the New York Film Festival: Penelope Cruz and Milena Smit. Beautiful women, one older,…
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One could suspect from the way the Oscars were put together at LA’s Union Station, this was an unusual year. How do you dress for well, the imperative to simply show up? Some women took the Hollywood glam route: Amanda Seyfried’s red ball gown seemed from every camera angle to fill the room. Ditto for…
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This week, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures sent out a Timeline featuring many “firsts:” among them citing Midnight Cowboy (1969), the first X-rated film to win Best Picture. With Glenn Frankel’s new book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, much has been written clarifying that X-rating:…
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“You want my soul?” “I want your back.” Provocative and transactional, the dialogue illustrates the film, The Man Who Sold his Skin’s pact with the Devil. From Tunisia, the film frames director Kaouther Ben Hania’s central conceit for the state of Syrian refugees, and is nominated for this year’s Best International Feature Academy…
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Okay, we did see it coming. Parasite certainly made a big impression. A stylish hoot, the feature was the edgiest, artiest of the lot. Director Bong Joon Ho needed a drink after his writing win; maybe he thought his run would end after that, but the academy shed its love for him over top honors.…
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Whatever else happens, no matter what other Oscar nominations The Irishman garners, Best Picture is guaranteed. The New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review, to name two groups, have already augured its success. But of course, winning is anyone’s guess. After decades of movies, Martin Scorsese seems to take the award season…
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The latest entry into the Oscar race is Cats, a feature adaptation of the now iconic Andrew Lloyd Weber musical based on T. S. Eliot. I must mention “The Wasteland” poet because at no time during the state of the art premiere this week at Alice Tully Hall did anyone acknowledge this bona fide cred.…
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Back in 2002, the one and only time I attended the Cannes Film Festival, I was at dinner with D. A. Pennebaker, his wife and film partner Chris Hegedus, and my friend Roger Friedman who had made a film with the documentary team called Only the Strong Survive, an important historical exploration of R&B and…
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The annual fete de films, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, a collaboration between Unifrance and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, opened this week with a comedy, The Trouble with You. Director Pierre Salvadori introduced the film noting that most filmmakers in France are French New Wave influenced, but he is more inspired by Hollywood. “It’s…
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Now that the Academy Award nominations are out, with Roma, Capernaum, The Shoplifters, Cold War and Never Look Away the academy’s picks for Best Foreign film, the winner in this category will be hard to predict. Opening in theaters this week, Germany’s Oscar entry, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away, provides a glimpse into…
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When the category of Best Picture swells to nine, you can be sure that your favorites will be covered. Throughout “the season,” prognosticators haggled –with one another and themselves– over the supremacy of The Shape of Water over Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Lady Bird over Get Out, Dunkirk over The Darkest Hour. An excellent…
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The Oscar winning actress Gloria Grahame was hardly Hollywood royalty, a sulky blond bombshell playing bad girls and good. The movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, directed by Paul McGuigan and based on Peter Turner’s memoir of his affair with the American actress, takes you from her saucy time meeting Turner, a Brit much…
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Sting and J. Ralph composed the song, “The Empty Chair” for the documentary Jim: The James Foley Story. As you see the clip of Sting performing that song at Bataclan, the historic Paris theater, for its opening one year after ISIS terrorists gunned down 89 people there, you cannot help but register that in “The…
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Why is this night different from all other [awards] nights? New York Magazine film critic and emcee for this annual awards fete David Edelstein had some answers about honoring the storytelling but Mark Ruffalo, on hand to present the Best Screenplay award to Kenneth Lonergan for “Manchester By the Sea,” put it succinctly: the speeches…
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How do you bring the brilliant, Pulitzer Prize winning Fences, to the screen? You stick close to August Wilson’s jazz poetry. This week Fences was celebrated with a screening at Lincoln Center’s jazz venue, Rose Hall. The movie’s director Denzel Washington led his killer hand-picked cast including Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Mykelti Williamson, Russell Hornsby—Denzel…
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Todd Haynes’ film Carol, an evocative love story set in the 1950’s, adapted from an edgy Patricia Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt, is nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Original Score, composed by Carter Burwell. His music can be heard in several current movies including the Oscar nominated animated Anomalisa, and the Coen…
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The Hunting Ground, a powerful documentary from filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, shines a light on the widespread phenomenon of rape on college campuses. The film’s music supervisor Bonnie Greenberg called Diane Warren to write the music. The prolific and popular songwriter with 7 Oscar nods immediately said yes. Now, with “Til it Happens…
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If you’ve been following the Oscar prognosticators, you know the big favorites have been Spotlight, The Big Short, The Revenant, and Carol. All but Carol were honored with nominations this morning. With such a good year, other awards groups, the Golden Globes, the Directors Guild, the New York Film Critics Circle, and more, groups that…
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A film set in Auschwitz, Son of Saul is the one to beat for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. As this import from Hungary makes its rounds through the festivals, achieving accolades and nominations galore, a question arises: is it that juries favor Holocaust films, or is Son of Saul a really good film?…
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Labyrinth of Lies, a new Holocaust themed movie, the German entry for the Foreign Language Film Oscar, takes place in the era after World War II, when 22 “ordinary” German men who committed anti-human crimes at Auschwitz were brought to justice in Frankfurt. Filmmaker Giulio Ricciarelli, a Milan born German from Munich is proud to…
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J. K. Simmons’ music teacher from hell may earn him an Oscar, but he is also having an unanticipated nightmare effect on anyone who has had rigorous training, no matter what the field. We’ve seen movies about cordon bleu culinary school. Can cooking school really be as severe as the blood-letting in Whiplash? Last week…
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It’s a cliché of the season to list award favorites, but it is also a thrill to be able to recommend so many good films: at this moment the pundit’s favorites are Boyhood, Birdman and Selma, with additional mention of Unbroken and The Theory of Everything. In a rich year, many films deserve our attention:
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