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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Is Cinema Eye Honors a prelude to The Academy Award category for Best Documentary? The fifteen features shortlisted for an Oscar affirm the artistry of the nonfiction film. A champion of the art of doc, Netflix has distributed several of this year’s best, including The Great Hack and American Factory. The films have been available…
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On the eve of the Golden Globes, consider The Song of Names, a film of merit in a tough, competitive film season. An epic post-Holocaust drama of two men who grow up as brothers, one a Jewish child prodigy, the other a Christian, the son of a classical music producer, The Song of Names focuses…
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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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When a performer as dynamic as Gloria Estefan claims to be shy, as she told the packed ballroom at the midtown Hilton for New York Women in Film and Television’s Muse Awards this week, you wonder what life experiences had an impact. Her grandmother, an entrepreneur when she came to America from Cuba at the…
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Traditionally, the IFP Gotham Awards kicks off the film awards season. As celebrations go, this decidedly downtown dinner, sponsored by Robert Hall Winery, brings together New York’s movie making elite while honoring lower budget fare in Oscar-like categories. This year, I wanted to coin a category of my own, Best Speech, to be given to…
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Amidst the shit storm of impeachment inquiry of the president Spike Lee calls “Agent Orange,” noting heavy toxins, the documentary The Edge of Democracy tells a political history set in Brazil, juxtaposed with the personal story of the director Petra Costa’s family. This relentless political drama can be seen as a cautionary tale, or just…
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Out of the blue comes Dark Waters, Todd Haynes’ new film based on his star, Mark Ruffalo’s environmental passions. Fear of the water depicted in this legal procedural is not because of sharks, but because of industry, specifically the story of Dupont’s deliberate poisoning of landfill resulting in the death of animals and cancer in…
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Longtime documentarian Frederick Wiseman was on a roll. First celebrated this week as a NYPL Literary Lion, he was then honored with the Critics’ Choice Documentary Lifetime Achievement Award redubbed for the late D. A. Pennebaker. With this renaming, Chris Hegedus, Pennebaker’s film and life partner for 43 years presented the statue to Frederick Wiseman…
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The women in the Roger Ailes story are fierce, ambitious blonds, at least those in the forefront of the movie Bombshell, a truthful account of the demise of the Fox News CEO: Truthful, because, at a recent screening of Bombshell, many close to the story of how Gretchen Carlson refused to compromise in her lawsuit…
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Putting a new spin on Hitchcock, no one does horror with the class of Brian De Palma. At the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend, the man who gave us Dressed to Kill, Scarface, and The Untouchables, among other classics of American cinema, sat for a conversation with Alec Baldwin, an actor who has worked…
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Director Noah Baumbach knows from divorce, and has made films that have illuminated sides of that subject throughout his career. His 2005 Squid and the Whale comes to mind, and the family in The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) is riddled with marital fragility, and resilience. Each hews close to the director’s family background. Baumbach’s new film,…
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Trust Martin Scorsese. If he makes a 3 ½ hour film, he will have you by the throat, riveted and wondering where the time went. Such is The Irishman, his latest masterwork, which opened the New York Film Festival this week. Featuring a trifecta of characters in the personae of Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe…
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The special screening of Nanfu Wang’s One Child Nation, hosted by Oscar winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin at Lincoln Center this week, had some special guests among the attending elite of New York documentary filmmakers: Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi. The subject of this riveting documentary is the effect of China’s one…
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Just as Lord and Lady Grantham are thinking of downsizing,the King and Queen decide to visit, setting off the lavish fairy talethat is Downton Abbey: The Movie. The smartly dressed crowd at AliceTully Hall cheered as John Lunn’s symphonic music swelled, a richreminder of what was left behind when the last PBS season ended inJulian…
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Photo: Nina Salpeter Showtime’s The Affair returns to Montauk for its final season, to a preview decktop screening at Gurney’s. With the drizzle and ocean breezes, fans felt right at home with the first episode: Helen (the remarkable Maura Tierney) ministers to both the death of Vic (Omar Metwally) and the birth of his son,…
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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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A “live documentary” by the filmmaking team Sam Green and Joe Bini, A Thousand Thoughts is a true celebration of collaboration in media ("live documentary") and joyful art-making. At Guild Hall this week, in a production with the Hamptons International Film Festival, Sam Green narrated the Kronos Quartet history in a film, in the presence…
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Sylvia Miles passed away today at 94. She always said she would not leave this earth without her academy award but sad, to report, that she did. A two-time nominee for just minutes of screen time in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Farewell My Lovely (1975), Sylvia was a New York actress who would not relocate…
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Designing Women in its 20th Year: The Look of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Game of Thrones, 60 Minutes
Photo: Regina Weinreich The makeup, hair people and costumers behind the scenes rarely get their due attention, but for 20 years, New York Women in Film and Television, has been celebrating them. While women are under represented in media, and often paid less than men doing the same jobs, makeup artists, hair stylists, and costume…
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