movies
At the Tribeca Film Festival: Will Forte's surprising, successful dramatic debut
It could have been played for melodrama or maudlin sentimentality at every turn, but it isn't. Instead, it is a sensitive and often quite funny look at what Conor's re-entry does to his wife Vanetia (the wonderful red-headed Maxine Peake), and his two young children. Meanwhile, there is an interloper (Forte) in their midst, following Conor around with a cam-corder. Vanetia says, "I was worried about letting a hypothesis into the house." More
At the Tribeca Film Festival: Directors of 'In God We Trust' on Eleanor Squillari, Madoff-scandal heroine
In the film, Squillari’s involvement with the FBI is so thorough that I assumed her generous efforts were rewarded with some kind of paycheck. But Kubicek and Anderson confirmed that, in fact, she wasn’t paid for her work. “That’s part of why we have major respect for her, because it was not easy and it was not beneficial for her to do this. She did this anyway.” More
At the Tribeca Film Festival: A message to you from a West Virginia town ruined by Oxycontin
The people of Oxyana speak for themselves; Dunne is listening, and the community trusts him, so he has gotten under the suffice of things. He is their message in a bottle. But there is work for the audience here, too. More
(16)At the Tribeca Film Festival: A bold, risky film from Quebec produces a revelatory performance from Thomas Haden Church
Whitewash was shot in northern Quebec, and Church is clearly really out there, in a real wilderness, with real snow drifts that swallow him up. He struggles with branches, he builds fires, he tries to carry bags of groceries and cans of gasoline through the deep drifts. More
At the Tribeca Film Festival: From Taiwan, a very serious comedy about love's hopes and sadnesses
Chen leads us through the shoals of these troubled relationships with a light grip, an affection for every character, and an acceptance that romantic possibility can actually make the world look different, magic, funny, unexpected. More
At the Tribeca Film Festival: Filmmaker Mira Nair on our 'world of misunderstanding'
"I always want one question: of who we call the Other, and why is that, and make that Other someone so palpable that you might hopefully see yourself in that person or who we thought of as the Other."
At the Tribeca Film Festival: 'The King of Comedy'
What is it about fame? What do these people want? Rupert Pupkin (or "Pumpkin," "Pipkin," or any of the other incorrect names he is called during the course of the film) is alive and well, more vigorous now than he was in 1983. More
Steven Soderbergh describes his last good shot
Look for the first scene in Side Effects where Rooney Mara visits her psychologist. That's the capstone of a career. What next? “Well, someone is going to take my place,” Soderbergh said. More
Ben Stiller, Jonathan Demme, Soledad O'Brien, and more gather to honor a Haitian film school
Ben Stiller and director Jonathan Demme, benefactors to the institute, along with journalist Michèle Montas—widow of Jean Dominique, a vocal opponent of the Duvalier dictatorships who started an independently funded radio station in support of Haitian rights (chronicled in the film The Agronomist, directed by Demme)—held a discussion after the screenings. “Ciné Institute proves that the ability to make films, to create cinema is something that’s in our DNA,” Demme said, “A big dream of Jean Dominique was a Haitian cinema. His thinking was that a place like Haiti deserves its own culture.” More
For J. Hoberman, the cinema is dead - but its afterlife is fascinating
Hoberman terms our new digitally-affected pictures "cyborg cinema.” He’s defined this previously in a New York Review of Books essay titled “Trapped in the Total Cinema,” with examples like Tron, Jurassic Park, Andy Serkis's portrayal of Gollum in Lord of the Rings. The Matrix, in particular, created a dystopia which was “a kind of model for cyberspace.” “Photography had been superseded, if not the desire to produce images that move,” Hoberman said, and added, a little forebodingly: “In this brave new world, Chaplin is perhaps a footnote to Mickey Mouse." If there’s no camera, is it still a film? More
(1)Jodie Foster, now unquestionably out (except, maybe, to the 'Times')
Jodie Foster came out, again, but will the media listen this time? More
(5)Cliché-ridden 'Gangster Squad' is little more than a garish genre wank
There’s just something about gangsters and Hollywood: they like it; it likes them. Gangster movies have been inbreeding this love for generations, producing one golden child—a Chinatown, Goodfellas, Untouchables, or L.A. Confidential—for every litter of cross-eyed duds. The best that can be said for Gangster Squad is that it secures, for now, the position of alpha dud, the fedora-capped king of clichés. It’s less a gangster movie than a gangster mutation with tommy-gun Tourette’s. More
Nick Flynn talks about the book about the movie about the book of his life
Asked by Farley about the most harrowing day to be on set, Nick had an answer ready. “It was the Julianne Moore scene. We had her for four days. The first two days into the shooting it was a very eerie experience. My mother’s dead, as you all may know, and there was a node in my consciousness where I knew I would see Julianne Moore play this role, but also there was another part of me who thought I’d see my mother again.” More
'56 Up,' the latest in Michael Apted's series, confronts middle age and what it means to make a life
The Up project was conceived to render and compare a small group in broad strokes. Some Victorian residue clings to the idea that a life should be determined by accidents of birth or the marriage one makes. But there is also something of the modern fondness for defining life in terms of milestones nailed and five-year plans in the structure of the series, which mixes pop philosophy (“Give me a child until he is seven,” the voice-of-God narrator intones in the first program, “and I will give you the man”) and social studies with a healthy dose of voyeurism. More
'Django Unchained,' Tarantino's manic, masterful mashup of cinematic and very real brutality
This year American history was beautifully backlit and exquisitely argued in Lincoln; tersely annotated and faithfully reenacted in Zero Dark Thirty; and now, with Django Unchained, it gets hand-cranked through Quentin Tarantino’s imagination, which is to say through a mirrored palace of movie cameras, projectors, eyeballs, and screens, each one aimed askew and operating at full tilt. It may never walk the same way again. More
