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- 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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While many quibble with this year’s Oscar list for its lack of female directors, this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema; a yearly event hosted by Film at Lincoln Center and Unifrance, features two women with superb films. For Opening Night, Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris, translating to Paris Memories, stars this year’s Cesar winner for Best…
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Billy Crudup "has the kind of good looks that appeal even to straight guys,” quipped Bill Irwin, setting off the evening’s theme. Jokes about Billy Crudup involve his handsome, age-defying movie star mien. As the actor was honored and roasted at the Edison Ballroom this week by longtime friends and co-stars, among them Sam Rockwell,…
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It is a truth widely acknowledged, don’t mess with gray haired ladies, (and others in Barbarella wigs). Based on a true story of four fans in love with Tom Brady, the new movie, 80 for Brady, features the Frankie & Gracie team, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, plus Sally Field and Rita Moreno; these women…
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Oscar watchers did not see Andrea Riseborough coming, even though she was on the tip of Cate Blanchett’s lips as she accepted a Critics Choice award for Best Actress for her tour de force performance in Tar. In almost a whisper, the formidable Blanchett, a frontrunner who has already won a slew of awards, noted…
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Everyone gets a kick out of Jennifer Coolidge’s loopy discourse. As demonstrated at the Golden Globes ceremony this week, nobody does it better, but the antic Ke Huy Quan, whose award for Best Supporting Actor-Motion Picture for his work in Everything Everywhere All at Once started the evening off, comes close. In a flash of…
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Joining the party at Tao Downtown on a screen, Martin Scorsese looked genuinely bewildered as he presented the Best Picture award to the movie Tar, noting the extraordinary performance of its star Cate Blanchett. As Lydia Tar, a genius orchestra conductor, Blanchett rages and purrs, at times in impeccable German. Scorsese has indeed worked with…
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The musical Some Like It Hot, based on the beloved movie, tweaks its source, seeing in the original the chance to be both color and gender savvy. To recap the basic storyline, Joe and Jerry are a couple of working musicians who land a gig at a swank Chicago joint run by the mob. In…
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If you think scenic Sicily is having a moment in this season’s White Lotus, check out the Italy of Bruce Weber’s ravishing The Treasure of his Youth: The Photographs of Paolo di Paolo. Opening with archival shots of children on the street, a girl on communion day, Anna Magnani with her dog, Marcello Mastroanni, Pier…
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As Harvey Weinstein sits in court in California on charges of rape and the former president Donald Trump, an alleged abuser, announces he will run again, the new movie, She Said, is a ripped-off-the-headlines thriller, telling the story of two investigative journalists who exposed the practice of abuse in the workplace. Of course, for Weinstein,…
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One of the highest grossing films in the history of movies, Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel decades after the first 1986 Top Gun film, exemplifies why old-fashioned story-telling wins. As producer Jerry Bruckheimer said following a special screening at the Whitby Hotel this week, it’s an action movie wrapped around a love story. You cannot…
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Taking liberally from his own biography, Steven Spielberg creates a portrait of the artist as a young man in his latest film, The Fabelmans. It is no accident that the word fable echoes within this title, nor that the child to adolescent to teen and adult depicted is on a journey to discover his unique…
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It’s a far cry from The Music Man’s River City, Iowa to the swell NYC apartments and boardrooms of Florian Zeller’s The Son. The film is the latest in a trilogy that began with The Father, based on a stage play, with The Mother to follow. In The Father, you may recall, Anthony Hopkins won…
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At this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival, blame it on the vagaries of programming, but on one day two films featured such egregious abuse of the body, as if to highlight human excesses of all kinds. I speak of copious consumption of junk food, fine champagne to wash down, and then up projectile vomit, and…
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You cannot take your eyes off Bill Nighy in his superb performance in Living, Oliver Hermanus’ film, the Hamptons International Film Festival opening night feature. A remake of Akira Kurasawa’s Ikiru with a script by Kazuo Ishigura, Living follows a man played by Nighy, a higher up in a bureaucracy that specializes—as is the nature…
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The 60th New York Film Festival opens with a lot of noise, White Noise, that is. Noah Baumbach’s movie, adapted from Don DeLillo’s classic American 1985 novel, features the kind of ambient sound that barely registers, punctuated by the boom of train/freighter collisions in combustible flames exuding plumes of smoke. It’s a canvas of the…
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“I’ve gone epic,” exuded the director David O. Russell at the lavish premiere of this movie Amsterdam at Alice Tully Hall this week. Epic and a surprise, Drake, one of the producers, introduced the screening. Epic might also refer to the scope of the film, set in World War I, the so-called Great War, The…
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Entering its 4th decade, the upcoming Hamptons International Film Festival features an impressive slate of offerings: Empire of Light, The Son, My Policeman, The Banshees of Inisherin, to name just a few that have wowed audiences at Toronto and other festivals. One documentary that premiered in Venice and played in Telluride is coming too: Nancy…
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No one will ever fall asleep at a screening of Beast, a new movie directed by Baltasar Kormakur and starring Idris Elba who goes mano a eh, mano with a rogue lion. Very Hemingway. Man against beast. He’s protecting his daughters in the wilds of Africa, a place that is at once beautiful with animals…
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The abortion debate is personal. If you were around in 1973, as I was, a new hire in the English Department at Brooklyn College, you were privy to the harrowing stories of colleagues who had had unwanted pregnancies. This happened, not because they were reckless, but because of the prevailing notions that women could and…
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Music docs at Tribeca have a common thread, record producer Hal Willner. In Angelheaded Hipster, about Mark Bolan and T. Rex, and Hallelujah, a Leonard Cohen biopic through the lens of his now classic song, Willner provides vital information on recordings. His presence in these films prior to his untimely death in the earliest wave…
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