'What About Bob,' and other things only Bill Murray can get away with :
Bill Murray might be America's favorite celebrity prima donna.
Bio: Simon Abrams writes about comics, books and movies for The Comics Journal, L magazine, The New York Press and Slant Magazine. You can find a lot of his writing here.
Rather than rest on their laurels, the film curators of Subway Cinema have booked another slate of risky and exciting titles for the New York Asian Film Festival. More
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on June 29th, 2012 8:14amOn Friday and Saturday nights this summer, Film Society at Lincoln Center is doing midnight screenings of a mix of standard cult titles, like Evil Dead II and Lifeforce, and relatively obscure fare, like The House by the Cemetery. This weekend's pick is the series' most eclectic one: a 35mm print of Richard Pryor: Live in Concert. More
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on June 22nd, 2012 4:09pmThe John Ford western was the inspiration for many other genres and subgenres, especially horror and science fiction.
So it's fitting that Quentin Tarantino has named his new homage to the spaghetti western Django Unchained, after Django's titular antihero. Like Tarantino's films and the spaghetti western genre in general, Django is pure pastiche, a hybrid genre film pulled together from various other generic tropes. Django, directed by Sergio Corbucci, is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy; it's a riff on A Fistful of Dollars, which in turn is a revisionist remake of Yojimbo, which is an homage to John Ford's westerns. More
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on June 16th, 2012 3:08pmAt this point in his career, it's really impossible to tell who Tom Cruise thinks he is.
Cruise's decision to follow up Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, his most recent cinematic proof of life, by taking on the role of a has-been hair-metal rocker named Stacee Jaxx is an indication, if nothing else, that he's not overly concerned with extending himself. More
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on June 14th, 2012 12:32pmHickey: “Nobody came. Nobody cares. It’s still not about anything.” More
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on June 9th, 2012 4:22pmIt’s weirdly fitting that my recent phone interview with Todd Solondz began with a disappointing revelation and ended with an uplifting joke at my expense. Solondz, the writer and director of simultaneously provocative and deeply immersive black comedies like Happiness and Storytelling, has a new film out this week called Dark Horse. And for me, watching Solondz’s latest film was a pretty traumatizing experience. More
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on June 9th, 2012 2:54pmBefore Prometheus, the only sequel Ridley Scott had made was Hannibal.
Based on an utterly outre novel by Thomas Harris and (sort of) a script by David Mamet, Hannibal exists within a previously established universe. Anyone watching it already knew who Clarice Starling was. And they certainly already knew Hannibal Lecter.
Hannibal, which screens this Sunday night at the Film Society at Lincoln Center, is built on that foundation of knowledge. He and screenwriter Steven Zaillian thus made an ungainly but weirdly compelling follow-up to Jonathan Demme’s wholly superior Silence of the Lambs adaptation. More
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on June 2nd, 2012 3:14pmSleepless Night, a hard-boiled Gallic action film, is similar to last year's Point Blank and 2006's Tell No One in that all three are French, all lean heavily on convoluted plot twists and reversals, and all favor frenzied action over considered choreography.
Kinetic, wild action is the thing in Sleepless Night, which recently played to a very receptive audience at the Tribeca Film Festival. More
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on May 13th, 2012 6:39amHaynes's stunning adaptation originally aired on HBO in late March and mid-April of last year. It clocks in at a little less than six hours long. The Museum's screening is part of their "Fashion in Film Festival: If Looks Could Kill" series. But this isn't the first time they've screened all of Haynes's adaptation on a big screen. (They previewed the mini-series last year before it aired on HBO.) More
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on May 12th, 2012 7:11amIn The Avengers, a film whose full title is tellingly Marvel's The Avengers, geek-idol Joss Whedon has delivered a fitting climax to Marvel Studios' recent series of superhero adaptations. More
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on May 2nd, 2012 4:55pm
