Cannes Journal: ‘Wildlife’
Paul Dano explodes out of the gate with his directorial debut. ‘Wildlife’ immediately establishes him as an independent director to be contended with. Written in collaboration with Zoe Kazan and based on a novel by Ric...
Paul Dano explodes out of the gate with his directorial debut. ‘Wildlife’ immediately establishes him as an independent director to be contended with. Written in collaboration with Zoe Kazan and based on a novel by Ric...
In only her second feature as a director, Dee Rees (‘Pariah’) shoots high and mighty with ‘Mudbound’. The film is both intimate and epic in scale, hoping to tell a very specific story with broad implication...
This year’s running theme at Sundance seemed to be films that start strong but derail before the end credits. Filled with great actors giving stellar performances, ‘Mudbound’ got the memo and nullifies their achi...
‘Suffragette’ is a tricky movie. On the one hand, there’s no denying the importance of its themes (which have oddly not been properly dramatized before), the talent of the actress at the center, or the handsome n...
In a weekend when a movie like ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ is set to premiere, that doesn’t leave much room for competition. The superhero spectacle will slay the popcorn crowd, so any other movie that dares to ope...
I was recently speaking with a friend of mine who criticized the Coen brothers’ films for being too “on the nose.” “So what?” I said. “That’s the whole point!” Their new ‘Insid...
Director Baz Luhrmann has created a grand opus filled with shiny costumes, modern music, magical camera tricks and classical early Hollywood filmmaking to once again bring to life F. Scott Fitzgerald’s beloved and iconic nov...
I cannot think of another time in the past few years that there hasn’t been a single nationwide release over a weekend. The widest opener of the week lands on a whopping 54 screens. Most of us won’t have these titles p...
The advanced hype on ‘Drive’ has almost been too unbelievable, like it had been generated out of thin air in preparation for the impending Oscar season. We all know that hype is what eventually carries films to be nomi...
Ah, Mark Romanek. You’re sort of a genius. You pioneered the art form of music videos and made a brilliant, if somewhat aloof feature debut in the form of the psychological thriller ‘One Hour Photo.’ Then you was...
There’s a reason that everyone has been renting or buying or Netflix-ing the shit out of the original ‘Wall Street‘ in preparation for the sequel. For all its zeitgeist-capturing zest, it’s a remarkably con...
Technically, the Toronto International Film Festival opened last Thursday, the 9th. However, Mrs. Z and I didn’t arrive in the city until late on Sunday. We didn’t get a chance to see any movies that night, so our fest...