'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.
It’s striking that BAM Cinematek is kicking off its comprehensive retrospective of the films of Francesco Rosi with The Truce. The Truce is an adaptation of The Reawakening, Primo Levi’s memoirs about his journey back to Italy after his imprisonment in Auschwitz. The Truce is also Rosi’s last film. After BAM screens The Truce, they screen the rest of Rosi’s films in chronological order. More
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on August 5th, 2011 5:26pm"Man is a genius when he is dreaming."—Akira Kurosawa
It’s fitting that Dreams is screening in the middle of the IFC Center’s career-spanning retrospective of Akira Kurosawa’s films and not at the end. Though Kurosawa has said that, “my films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time,” and Dreams was one of his later films, it’s also sort of an ur-text. It speaks to very specific issues about reflecting on one’s past but it also is all about the creative drive. More
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on July 30th, 2011 7:54amIt’s easy to understand why the Landmark Sunshine Cinema regularly screens The Muppets Take Manhattan as part of their midnight-movie initiative.
As an instructional guide, the movie is probably of limited use to actual human beings. But it's a fantasy you can easily relate to if you are, say, a struggling young would-be artist enrolled at New York University’s Tisch School for Performing Arts. More
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on July 22nd, 2011 2:20pmAnyone looking forward to the latest and, if series creator J.K. Rowling is to be believed, last Harry Potter film will not be disappointed. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 ends the movie franchise on just the right note. Director David Yates comes alive here and decisively takes charge in ways that he hasn’t in any of the last three Potter films he helmed, including Deathly Hallows Part 1. More
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on July 15th, 2011 1:43pmAt the end of the first Planet of the Apes movie, there’s a scene in which the only two evolved apes that believe Taylor, Charlton Heston’s character, try to prove that there used to be a human civilization on their planet that pre-dates their contemporary simian culture. Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) shows off his archeological site, pointing out how curious it is that the deeper he dug, the more advanced the human artifacts he found were. More
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on July 8th, 2011 4:35pmIt’s hard not to fall in love with the New York Asian Film Festival.
Subway Cinema, the festival’s programmers, pride themselves on screening the most inspired pop cinema you’ve probably never heard of. The festival hasn’t had a dull year yet, thanks to its mix of blockbuster hits like Hero, acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s big-budget martial-arts epic, and fiercely independent films like Late Bloomer, a black-and-white neo-noir about a handicapped serial killer. More
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on July 1st, 2011 4:15pmWhen Conan O’Brien quit his hosting duties on "The Tonight Show" last year, it kicked off a drama involving Jay Leno and NBC in which O’Brien was the undisputed victim and good guy.
It’s a dynamic the new documentary Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop playfully sets up using a Taiwanese news program’s animated representation of events. The film then takes the sympathetic, pitiable image of O’Brien that the clip sets up and reinforces it, again and again. More
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on June 23rd, 2011 11:42pmThis week New York’s Museum of Modern Art kicks off “In Focus: IFC Films,” a two-week-long retrospective of films distributed by IFC Films. One of the featured titles stands out both as a major work unto itself and one whose release looked to herald big changes in the U.S. market for arthouse films: Y Tu Mamá También. More
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on June 17th, 2011 3:43pmTo dismiss Super 8, J.J. Abrams' homage to Steven Spielberg's simultaneously authentic and nostalgic views of suburban America, simply for being derivative would be deeply unfair. The problem wasn’t with the premise, but with the script. More
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on June 10th, 2011 12:19pmApart from being director Federico Fellini’s most decisive step toward his characteristic surrealist style, La Dolce Vita’s portrayal of the search by a thirty-something journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) for a way out of his bohemian lifestyle has left an indelible impact on the way filmmakers have since depicted male celebrities in crisis. More
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on June 4th, 2011 10:22am
