recent posts
- Zach Bryan Buys the On the Road Scroll/ Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!
- William S. Burroughs/ Nova ’78 at MoMA/ Remembering James Grauerholz
- Jacob Elordi in Wuthering Heights: Monster Mash
- Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent: A Cool Brazilian Gets an Oscar Nod
- Now on Oscar’s Short List: Holding Liat, a Documentary about the Harrowing Wait for a Hostage Freed from Gaza
Category: Film
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In Paolo Sorrentino’s movie Youth, Michael Caine plays a retired composer on holiday at a spa in the Swiss Alps. He hears a young student practicing the composition for which he is best known. The precocious boy says his professor finds it easy to learn, and continues, “It’s more than that. It is beautiful.” Caine’s character…
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In Atom Egoyan’s new feature, Remember, Christopher Plummer, more commonly seen as a German—think The Sound of Music—plays a Jew, a survivor of Auschwitz. In the assisted living facility where his wife Ruth has just died, a fellow survivor Max (Martin Landau) now asks him to live up to a promise, to avenge the concentration camp…
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When PBS announced their American Masters documentary on Mike Nichols, I was relieved. Like so many admirers of his work –as a comedian with his partner Elaine May, as a director of theater (Death of a Salesman starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, to name one) and film (The Graduate, THE film of its era, to name…
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With Downton Abbey back in its final season, Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess of Grantham is back too, in all her vinegar wit and finery. She’s also back in the movie of Alan Bennett’s stage play, The Lady in the Van, by contrast, an eccentric living in modest accommodations, downsized to her vehicle. Penned…
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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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Leonardo DiCaprio had a formidable foe in Alejandro G. Inarritu’s The Revenant, and I do not mean the bear, a CGI construct, that some rumor raped him. Throughout the entertaining Golden Globes Awards Ceremony last night, there were murmurings of his real opponent, played by Tom Hardy. Jonah Hill’s cuddly bear head provided comedy that landed…
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At Tao on Monday night, at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Julianne Moore said she has known Kristin Stewart since the Twilight actress was 12, which would explain their close connection in last year’s Still Alice. In an awkward acceptance speech, Stewart found the Best Supporting Actress honor unexpected, given the movie Clouds of…
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Samuel L. Jackson accepted a special award for The Hateful Eight composer Ennio Morricone at the New York Film Critics Circle 81st Gala at Tao on Monday night. Morricone was commissioned to compose The Hateful Eight’s elegant overture. Morricone’s note to the critics group for this stellar evening was addressed to all, including “The Haters,”…
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Call it anything, but do not call Creed Rocky VII. Explaining why he agreed to come out of Rocky retirement for Ryan Coogler’s movie in which the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed persuades Rocky to train him, Stallone said it was Ryan Coogler’s vision. The occasion was a celebratory dinner at Patsy’s, the legendary Italian…
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Two of the most powerful performances in movies this year have perhaps the least dialogue: Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant and Benicio del in Sicario. For a two-and half hour movie, the dialogue in Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu’s The Revenant could probably fill a page. The story, about a survivor of a bear attack seeking revenge in…
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The Bolshoi Ballet, the very symbol of Russian culture around the world, gets a backstage look in the new documentary Bolshoi Babylon, to air on HBO on December 21. The film has made the rounds of festivals including DOC NYC in November, when I had a chance to talk to the filmmakers: Nick Read and…
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The eight gunslingers in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight really are hateful, so why do we like watching them so much, and so long, 3 and a half hours, give or take, including an overture and intermission. Not only can’t you take your eyes off them, you want to catch every word of Quentin Tarantino’s clever…
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In the era of television, Susan Lucci reigns supreme. In Joy, David O. Russell’s latest movie, the Mangano household, an alternate universe of domestic dysfunction, Joy’s mom Terry has taken to bed, and to watching a soap with Lucci in the lead. A gun is an option for solving the soap’s operatic greed. In Joy’s story,…
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Steve Jobs, a biopic about the famed Apple founder starring Michael Fassbender, opened in early fall, and has been holding steady in the wake of the award season roll-out. Audiences will be taking another look at this excellent film now that Steve Jobs is getting some awards attention: Golden Globes, SAG, among them.
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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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Like the comedy teams of old, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Fey and Poehler offer irresistible side splitting guffaws in Sisters, their new movie that opened this week at the Ziegfeld with a party at MoMA. The art museum’s lobby was transformed into a lavish party space with a tropical theme, echoing the party…
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When the New York Film Critics Circle named Michael Keaton Best Actor, the game changed for Spotlight. The ensemble cast had been honored at the Gotham Awards the night before; up until that point critics and pundits found it difficult to discern a lead actor among the fine ones in this movie. But this win…
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Harvey Weinstein threw a swell party for Helen Mirren this week at House of Elyx, a chic loft in the Meatpacking that Mickey Rourke used to own. Standing and greeting guests for two hours, Mirren chatted with admirers of her work in Woman in Gold, based on the true story of Maria Altmann, who with…
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That Spotlight won Best Feature at the Gotham Awards last night was not a surprise. These awards, usually celebrating the edgy in filmmaking, noted Carol and Tangerine and The Diary of a Teenage Girl, but the win for Spotlight, for many, is an indication of a sweep in the months ahead. Tom McCarthy and Josh…
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If you are going to celebrate a movie following a group of guys who make a lot of money, The Four Seasons is a good place to be. So it seemed as director Adam McKay, his stars Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling, Pitt’s Plan B producing partners DeDe Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, and co-screenwriter with…
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The Oscar buzz around Todd Haynes’ new movie Carol may focus on the two women Cate Blanchett’s Carol and Rooney Mara’s Therese, but Phyllis Nagy’s adapted screenplay, from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, will surely garner an Oscar nod too. The story of two women, an upper class suburban housewife and mother, and…
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At 21 Club this week, screenwriter/ director Oren Moverman spoke excitedly about his new vocation as activist. Co-writer of Love & Mercy, Moverman was largely responsible for crafting a script, not your standard issue biopic about Beach Boy Brian Wilson, but a complex view of this iconic musician at two distinct points of his life.…
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Philippe Sands, an eminent London-based human rights lawyer, stands in a grassy field near Lvov, the Polish/Ukrainian home of his grandfather in the documentary, What our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy. By the end of the Holocaust, eighty members of his family had been murdered and disposed of in this place. He stands in this…
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