The Dramatic Competition at Sundance this year featured a pair of films that were largely built on duologues between two strong protagonists. Attention was mostly–and properly–focused on Whiplash, which ended up winning both of the Festival’s top prizes, but Peter Sattler’s CAMP X-RAY is also worthy of some note. Camp X-Ray is set at […]
SAVING MR. BANKS: Buy A Ticket – Positively Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious SAVING MR. BANKS , which screened at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles last night before opening in theaters next month, is a moviegoer’s dream of Hollywood popular art, superbly melding history, personality, humor, sentiment and glitz with little fault or sign of strain. […]
TOP FIVE: No Current US Distributor or Release Date (but that will change very soon) – Worth A Ticket Chris Rock is generally considered among the greatest stand-ups of his generation, and it’s been clear for some time that he wants to move up to the next cultural echelon, the level of regard where […]
There’s a tendency to compare any slow-moving, beautifully-photographed drama with an abundance of natural imagery to the films of Terence Malick, but that’s unfair to the very particular surreal spirituality Malick brings even to his more insufferable projects. In the case of AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS, the more apt comparison is probably to Robert […]
HEROES REBORN: Thursday 8PM on NBC, starting September 24 This year, for the first time, the Toronto Film Festival has included a slate of television productions from around the world in its line-up, formalizing the degree to which the status of TV has changed in the last few years. That’s completely logical. What […]
EMANUEL AND THE TRUTH ABOUT FISHES is deeply, satisfyingly strange. In a way, it’s a validation not just of Sundance, but the whole film festival system that is now our main way of finding out about distinctive new talent. It also tells a story based in large part on a single plot development that, while […]
JOJO RABBIT (Fox Searchlight – October 4): The discourse about Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit has quickly become a debate between those who think its Nazi-era black comedy is authentically daring, and those who feel its purported audacity is a pretense covering a merely middlebrow sensibility. (Note: every person in the history of language who […]
The borders between “movies” and “television” were already beginning to buckle pre-pandemic, thanks to Netflix and the desire of studios to release their product on as many simultaneous platforms as possible. Now, of course, we’ve been 4 months without movie theaters, and the most optimistic view is that wide openings are still weeks if […]