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: Fim Festivals
-
A favorite at film festivals throughout the fall, the movie Time Out of Mind, stars one of the great cinematic heartthrobs, Richard Gere. “Lord have mercy,” exclaims one of the retirees in the recent Best Marigold Hotel sequel when Gere’s silver haired character enters the room. Of course we all fell in love with him…
-
What makes French films, eh, French? The facile answer: a focus on love: married, obsessive, at first sight. In its 20th season the popular Rendez Vous at Lincoln Center, shows a penchant for action adventure—and, serial killers. What happened to the frothy comedies and romantic musicals of the past? Benoit Jacquot’s 3 Hearts opened…
-
The irrepressible Rosie O’Donnell could not help herself. Coaxed to do stand up on the not funny subject of her heart attack by HBO’s Sheila Nevins, the television star created a routine that is more than the heartfelt in its title, “Rosie O’Donnell: A Heartfelt Standup,” it’s a PSA for women, a wake-up call to…
-
What an impressive record of documentaries on the subject of addiction! Then again, what an impressive record of documentaries! Last week, Phoenix House honored President of HBO’s Documentary Films Sheila Nevins at Cipriani 42nd Street. With Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones by her side, Nevins had a ringside seat watching the reel of her green-lit…
-
The New York Film Critics Circle announce their film honors early, so you know just who you are going to see at their annual awards dinner: with Boyhood taking top honors, the team was a distinct presence at Tao Downtown, with Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, the star, Ellar Coltrane, and director Richard Linklater. The NYFCC’s…
-
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:
-
The idea of Important differs from Best: for American Sniper, Selma, and Unbroken, Best is beside the point. Each film is enormously engaging, highly recommended, and grounded in history on a large canvas. While many reviewers are concerned with the qualities that push films into the awards race, and all three deserve the Oscar nod…
-
The annual celebration of indie films kicking off the vibrant awards season every year gets more glamorous, honoring the outstanding and risk-taking films that are going to make it to Oscars—like Boyhood and Birdman, as well as those that are just great, likes’Laura Poitra documentary Citizenfour, Ira Sachs’ Love is Strange, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin,…
-
Every computer-age gadget is deployed to bad effect in Jason Reitman’s satiric new movie, Men, Women, and Children, and that’s the least of the targets of his scrutiny: how about sex, ambition, and most of all, power, particularly of the parental kind. Let me say, there was not one adult I could admire in this…
-
Radiant in black taffeta on Guild Hall’s stage after the movie Still Alice screened, Julianne Moore said the way you play a woman with degenerating early Alzheimer’s is to reach for normality, for what she can remember. Even buffeted by family, a supportive Alec Baldwin, and daughters Kate Bosworth and Kristen Stewart, son Hunter Parrish,…
-
As any Freudian will tell you, father and son relationships are mythically fraught. In Robert Downey, Jr.’s new movie, The Judge, he’s a killer New York lawyer with a small town judge father (Robert Duvall) to topple, but there’s a twist: he has to defend his father in a murder case. The courtroom tension rests…
-
Bill Murray’s got some moves in St. Vincent, a big-hearted movie that had its New York premiere last night, a few days prior to opening the Hamptons International Film Festival this coming weekend. Murray’s shimmying in his seedy Sheepshead Bay kitchen, and singing to Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm,” are some of the film’s many…
-
The war in Vietnam still conjures volatile emotions for those who lived during that heady time in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. That’s why Alec Baldwin insisted that the audience at Guild Hall Saturday night ask only questions related to the documentary, Last Days in Vietnam; host of the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summerdocs series, he…
-
Wisdom has it, summer is for action thrillers, rom-coms, and other popcorn movies, but this season is particularly rich. Last week’s opening night for the BAM CinemaFest set the tone of excellence with Richard Linklater’s epic masterpiece Boyhood. With stellar performances by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as divorced parents, the film, shot in a…
-
As last week’s Oscar ceremony fades from memory, it is useful to consider, as Marlon Brando’s character in Last Tango in Paris says, when it’s over it begins again. The “it” here is the Hollywood cycle from Sundance to the Oscar red carpet, awards, and after parties, the subject of a new book, “The $11…
-
147 docs were eligible for Oscars this year. 15 made a short list, and 5 are now contenders. One, The Act of Killing, a first feature length film for director Josh Oppenheimer, working with an anonymous partner, raises questions of morality, conscience, and accountability related to the 1965-6 genocide in Indonesia. As Oppenheimer explained at…
-
Forest Whitaker takes her calls. Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe so epitomizes the strength of simplicity, the Oscar winning star of Last King of Scotland— he portrays the dictator Idi Amin-– form a likely alliance in helping young people in Africa recover from the horrors of vicious murderous rebels like Joseph Kony who, like Idi Amin, brutalized…
-
What can’t Meryl Streep do? Presenting a Best Actress award to her friend Emma Thompson, she offered the 700 gala guests of the National Board of Review at Cipriani 42ndStreet an option, a short speech of praise, or a longer complaint. I don’t remember a show of hands. Wearing a souvenir trucker hat emblazoned with…
-
In 1935, at age 5, Harry Belafonte saw his first movie, Tarzan, and knew he never wanted to be one of those people from Africa. This bit of personal history was the entry point for the 87-year old performer and activist, putting the achievement of Steve McQueen, the British director of 12 Years a Slave…
-
Lee Daniels, always a provocateur, addressed the huge crowd at Cipriani Wall Street at this week’s Gotham Awards with a confession: he hates white people. No one gasped. It was not clear whether this proclamation was part of his complaint that no one in the cavernous space was listening to his introduction of honoree Forest…
-
After a best actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, there’s no stopping Bruce Dern. As Woody in Alexander Payne’s masterpiece “Nebraska,” featured in Toronto, New York, and the Hamptons Film Festivals, he’s a doddering but endearing old fool who takes seriously one of those announcements that he’s a sweepstakes winner, and convinces his…
-
The lovers in Felix van Groeningen’sThe Broken Circle Breakdown, Belgium’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar, live and love so intensely, you know from the start that something has to give. It was too good to last, says Elise (Veerle Baetens), a tattoo artist as her marriage to Didier (Johan Heldenbergh), a banjo…
gossipcentral.com 