The end of cinema? Hardly. More than ever, boiling this concluding year down to the 10 “best” movies feels both arbitrary and reductive. Ideally, I’d have 25 unnumbered slots. I’d cite another five, formally varied nonfiction films: Tchoupitoulas, Detropia, The Ambassador, Only the Young, and How to Survive a Plague…
Most of the blathering this year about the death of film and film culture has already dissipated. But one gnomic pronouncement endures: Leos Carax describing cinema as “a beautiful island with a cemetery” following the world première of Holy Motors at Cannes. What are the contents of that necropolis? As…
Gay-male weepies have left a long trail of tears, stretching back to the sobbing, self-loathing queens of The Boys in the Band, released one year after the Stonewall insurrection of 1969, and including high-prestige pictures like Philadelphia (1993) and Brokeback Mountain (2005). The genre, most prominent during the first decade…
“Just so you know, it’s going to take a while,” says the CIA officer to his newly arrived colleague at the start of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. The year is 2003, the place a secret prison (or “black site”) somewhere in the deserts of the Middle East or Asia,…
“Like a lot of other stuff in my life, I sort of fell backwards into it,” screenwriter Will Beall says of his unexpected perch atop Hollywood’s A-list. Unexpected, because just five years ago Beall was busy working for Tinseltown’s second most famous employer, the Los Angeles Police Department, where he…
Perhaps in response to bombastic mainstream Hollywood, international auteurs often veer toward minimalism — quieter emotions, slower tempos, a tightly defined era and setting. Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes is clearly a man of the art house — his new film, Tabu, was shot on 16mm black-and-white film stock, for starters…
Ah, here it is again: that special time we experience every two to six years when Quentin Tarantino makes a new movie, and people dig out the old “Tarantino just steals everything from such-and-such” arguments. You’ve heard them. Reservoir Dogs is a scene-for-scene rip-off of Ringo Lam’s City on Fire,…
Rock and roll proves the coming-of-age crucible in Not Fade Away, Sopranos creator David Chase’s semiautobiographical feature debut of shaggy hair, shagadelic beauties, and the joy and sorrow wrought from chasing, and failing to achieve, one’s dreams. Chase’s tale of showbiz striving has, in its basic form, been told before:…
Salesmen are typically depicted in screen drama as the quintessential American phonies. The exceptions — in Barry Levinson’s Avalon or Whit Stillman’s Barcelona — are buried under a mountain of films proving the rule. That one set of phonies are being dramatically indicted by actors is an irony that we…
Quentin Tarantino has been Googling himself, and it’s starting to become a problem. The filmmaker, whose eighth feature is Django Unchained, is famously an analog evangelist: He writes his scripts in longhand; he bans cell phones from his sets and hasn’t had one of his own in years; he’s claimed…
Watching Django Unchained, it’s easy to imagine that Quentin Tarantino had such a blast making his last picture, the ebullient Holocaust fantasia Inglourious Basterds, that he decided to take his whole blood-spattered historical tent show on the road, this time putting down stakes in antebellum Dixieland. Although not technically a…
You can hear the people sing — really hear them — in the long-gestating screen version of that Broadway juggernaut Les Misérables. Countering the standard practice of having the actors in a film musical lip-synch their songs to prerecorded tracks (a.k.a. “playback”), director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) insisted that…
If you have a taste for extreme adventure and think you and a friend/family member/spouse/significant other/ex (really) could survive the wild, Bear Grylls is looking for you. The adventure expert and television personality known best for the Man vs. Wild series is kicking off a new reality series on NBC…
Hmm… television guilty pleasures, eh? The trick is that I’m more adept at talking guilty pleasures with music than with TV. I’ve got a whole host of critic-hated albums at home, but with TV, I’m generally pretty solid. So I had to think a while. Then I sheepishly remembered Ancient…
Many adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby have seen the silver screen, and this summer director Baz Luhrmann will release his own starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Joel Edgerton, Carey Mulligan, Isla Fisher, Jason Clarke, Elizabeth Debicki, and Amitabh Bachchan. The movie follows the literary story of writer…
In his 2005 novel One Shot, writer Lee Child lays out nine rules for surviving a five-against-one alley fight, a challenge his hero, the ex-Army cop Jack Reacher, is about to face. These include “Be on your feet and ready.” “Identify the ringleader.” “Don’t break the furniture.” Rule number nine…
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to watch Jacques Audiard’s outrageous melodrama Rust and Bone without laughing. Loosely adapted from two works in Craig Davidson’s 2005 short story collection of the same name, Rust and Bone finds Audiard returning to the overdetermined characters and swift…
Sadly, country songwriters stand as nearly the only entertainers in our popular culture who craft memorable art on the subject of marriage, the state in which just less than half of Americans spend the majority of their lives. A few years back, Brad Paisley, one of Nashville’s best, wrote and…
There’s traffic from Silver Lake. That’s why Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund, the stars of On the Road, are late to the Benedict Room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. We’re as psychically far from Jack Kerouac’s Beat gospel as you can get: fidgeting under crystal chandeliers in…
Once comic actors reach a particular career stage, they often choose one of two paths: A) They stop being funny and start being all Hallmark heartwarming, i.e., by growing a beard and playing a psychiatrist. B) They accept unambitious, work-for-hire roles in mass-market family comedies about some combination of dogs,…
This January, Ovation Television Network is looking to award a community project in the U.S. a “viewer’s choice” Innovation Grant by popular vote. The InnOVATION Grant Program was born from its short docu-series “Motor City Rising,” which features a group of artists working to revitalize parts of Detroit. Producers realized…
There is no cool way to spin the fact that I am obsessed with a teen soap opera. It’s one that airs on the CW, no less. The network is home to Rachel Bilson-starring Hart of Dixie, which finds yankee doctor Zoe Hart relocating to a small, southern town, and…
