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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: Fim Festivals
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You could say that the Gotham Awards has edge, and heart, marking the official start of the awards season. Cavernous Cipriani’s on Wall Street was the scene of great film industry camaraderie on Monday night. An “Oscars” night for indie films, with categories like “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You,” the evening…
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Sheila Nevins knows how to pick them. At HBO2 where documentaries are her domain, so to speak, she reigns supreme. But “don’t call me lucky,” she cautioned members of New York Women in Film and Television at a special breakfast, lest anyone might envy her this dream job. To get to this place is a…
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It was an unexpected Ezra Miller film festival: two movies premiering back to back this week, co-starring this gifted 19 year-old in roles that might give new parents pause. He's got this character nailed, the disaffected, edgy son with degrees of menace. Naturally the films in question, Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day and Lynne Ramsey's…
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Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has perhaps one of the most rarefied visions of anyone working in film: operatic, on a tilt, jawdropping. This weekend, his talent for bringing together elements, yes, Icelandic music from the Middle Ages to a unique historic moment in Canadian history, comes to the Walter Reade Theater for a program commissioned…
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Werner Herzog is all over DOC NYC. In this, its second year, his film Into the Abyss was screened opening night on Wednesday. The famed German director quipped that all of his films could have this title. Indeed, last year his Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a 3D undersea archeological expedition kicked off the inaugural DOC…
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British children may have been promised oranges and sunshine as they were deported to Australia in the '60's and '70's in a scandalous child trafficking operation affecting some 130,000 kids, but that is hardly what they found there. The children, aged 3 to 13, often left in child care by unwed mothers, were lied to,…
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Jean Dujardin, star of the much acclaimed movie, The Artist, conceived and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, is dubbed the French George Clooney. Silent, and black & white, The Artist is the perfect foreign film, playfully incarnating the era of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, a Gallic homage with no accents. Shot in Hollywood with a…
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Marilyn Monroe may have been the original superstar, from the era when such mega stardom was invented. Her public and private persona remains infinitely fascinating, even when she is portrayed, pouting, petulant, and persuasive by the actress Michelle Williams. On Sunday, the movie, My Week With Marilyn, directed by Simon Curtis premiered at the New…
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Uptown at the Walter Reade Theater on Thursday night, the vibe was decidedly downtown. The occasion: the New York Film Festival screening of director Sara Driver's film of a Paul Bowles short story, “You Are Not I.”
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If the world ends any time soon, as threatened for 2012, what will the last day on earth look like? That is the dominant conceit for two films in this year's New York Film Festival: Lars von Trier in his film Melancholia imagines a planet hurtling toward Earth disrupting the kind of human rituals this director is…
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Fans of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage will wonder what happened when that Tony winning stage play was adapted for the screen by the playwright for her friend, director Roman Polanski, and redubbed simply, Carnage. At Alice Tully Hall last night where the movie opened the New York Film Festival audiences cheered Polanski’s credit, knowing that this…
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Making theater requires a lot of planning. In fact, it takes about five years to produce the average opera. Imagine only having 24 hours to write, compose, cast, direct, rehearse, and perform a show! In the documentary One Night Stand, which premiered last week at Newfest, filmmakers Elisabeth Sperling and Trish Dalton provide a behind-the-scenes…
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Hello, I'm Buck, says the man in the large brimmed hat, brown leather jacket, brown stitch trimmed white shirt, and red silk tie with horses, completely disarming a guest to the private screening of a documentary film about him on Tuesday night. Buck, the movie, has been circulating the festivals, touted as a crowd-pleaser for…
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The actress Geena Davis was awarded the Sarasota Film Festival's first “Impact Award” for her work on promoting the visibility of women in the media. Suddenly shy, the tall movie star, “Thelma” of Thelma and Louise, turned her back to diners feasting on shell fish and short ribs on the Sarasota Opera House stage,…
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If you ever had a doubt that the French are obsessed with love, or at least have a different mindset about all variations: amour fou, fidelity, passion, adultery than we puritanical Americans, check out their movies. On this matter, the French are consistent. Even in an epic length period drama like The Princess of Montpensierwith…
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The idea for Alex Gibney's new film Magic Trip began at Sundance and climaxes with a world premiere at the film festival this weekend. En route to Sundance to show Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), Gibney and editor Alison Ellwood, found a New Yorker article by Robert Stone that piqued their interest:…
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The crowd-pleasing “Made in Dagenham,” about a strike for equal pay for women workers at a Ford plant in mid-'60's England, will remind many viewers of “Norma Rae.” With a winning performance by Sally Hawkins in the lead as Rita, this labor world variation of “the little engine that could” has a charm all its…
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What hits you immediately upon meeting Jacki Weaver, the extraordinary Sydney-based actress who plays Smurf (Janine) Cody in the movie Animal Kingdom is that she is nothing like the sociopath, the manipulative mom with darting eyes and flirtatious menace she plays in Animal Kingdom. This Australian Tarantino-like crime drama won top awards at Sundance, and…
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At the center of Daniele Thompson's delightful comedy of manners, Change of Plans, a hit at the 2009 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, to open theatrically later this summer, is a dinner attended annually on June 21, on World Music Day, by the same –more or less– collection of characters. On Tuesday, after IFC's special screening,…
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The more Jane Rosenthal quipped, they had renamed the Tribeca Film Festival for the Oscar winning documentarian Alex Gibney, the less her words felt like a joke. The prolific Gibney made My Trip to Al Qaeda, the untitled Eliot Spitzer, and a segment of the closing night Freakonomics, all huge hits at Tribeca. As if these…
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Last week at the Tribeca Film Festival's premiere of Alex Gibney's documentary based on the play, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, author Lawrence Wright's explained how he found himself in the midst of controversy after having scripted the 1998 action adventure, The Siege, proclaiming the true threat of terrorism. And then: 9/11 elevated his words to prophesy.…
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