Thursday, January 3, 2019 at 9:10PM by Eric Blume
Adam McKay’s film Vice has been out in theaters for two weeks or so now, and as we head into Golden Globe weekend where it leads the nominations, we ought to discuss it a bit more. Here are some thoughts about the film, which do carry SPOILERS, not about story points (as unfortunately these things really happened), but about just how truly odd this film is in so many ways...
Friday, December 21, 2018 at 11:14AM John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.
#51 —Florence Foster Jenkins, a socialite and opera singer of abysmal ability.
MATTHEW: Florence Foster Jenkins was an affluent New York heiress who is only remembered today for her decades-long career as a nonprofessional soprano that spurred many to label her “the world’s worst opera singer.” Meryl Streep is one of the most acclaimed and rewarded actresses in history, a global celebrity whose foremost attribute is talent, pure and simple. The marquee casting of Streep as Jenkins is the amusing and unignorable irony at the center of Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins, a biographical drama that narrativizes the amateur, septuagenarian chanteuse’s notorious attempts to resuscitate her dormant career in the years before her death in 1944. It is nothing if not a testament to Streep’s power as one of the only active, major female movie stars of a certain age that a period piece about an awful opera singer well into her 70s received a prime summer release from a major studio (Paramount) and a full-steam awards campaign that garnered the actress her 20th Oscar nomination...
Thursday, November 22, 2018 at 11:36PM As a special Thanksgiving gift to all of you, we've updated all the Oscar charts.
The Favourite In theaters tomorrow! DO NOT MISS IT.
BEST PICTURE
The box office this weekend and so many openings and/or guild screenings this week (Roma and The Favourite both in limited release, Green Book going wide, Vice and Mary Poppins and Mary Queen of Scots screenings) etcetera will likely disrupt this chart, as will the impending NYFCC and NBR decisions, but here's what we're thinking right now...
Monday, November 19, 2018 at 3:22PM by Eric Blume
Willem Dafoe plays Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate, director Julian Schnabel’s film about the last year in the life of the great Dutch painter. And Dafoe’s delivers a magnificent performance here: his face is the canvas of the film, in all its agony and ecstasy.
Schnabel, a painter himself who made the stunning films Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, gives us a deeply detailed movie of a painter by a painter. The mechanics of landscape and portrait painting, the walks to the viewpoints, the tools, and the intimacy with the subject all become the fabric of this movie. Schnabel’s attention to these subtleties establish his credibility and give the movie real texture...
Wednesday, November 7, 2018 at 5:56PM • Variety Susanne Bier to direct Nicole Kidman in the miniseries The Undoing about a therapist whose husband goes missing
• Paste Kyle Turner on the "literary drag" of Can You Ever Forgive Me?
• Decider Julia Roberts 'queen of comebacks she never had to make'
• Pajiba an ode to Missy on Big Mouth (also my favorite character on the show)
• AV Club Emma Thompson wore sneakers to her damehood ceremony
• IndieWire it's foolish to bet against James Cameron even if you think the idea of four more Avatars is insane
• Remezcla why was the Cuban submission Sergio & Sergei left off the Oscar Foreign Film list?
• THR will Netflix caving on an exclusive theatrical window for Roma mean more films will get that treatment?
• Vulture on the extreme closeups in this season's awards contenders
• i09 interesting piece on why we need more utopian fiction (it's all dystopias out there currently)
• Vulture unexpectedly good article "in defense of the medicore music biopic" on Bohemian Rhapsody, Great Balls of Fire, The Doors, and more...
• People Idris Elba named "sexiest man alive" for 2018
• Gizmodo MoviePass didn't kill the dream of subscription-based moviegoing. A new competitor Sinemia has lots of tiered pricing options and a $24 monthly charge if you want unlimited one non 3D movie a day.
• /Film Nothing ever stays dead onscreen. Breaking Bad will now get a film version with Aaron Paul expected to return (as a sequel to the series)
• Broadway World Angela Bassett and Cicely Tyson named honorary chairs of the 60th anniversary gala of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Post Election Blueishness
• Slate offers a practical optimistic way to look at the election results yesterday
• New Yorker "Putin Loses Control of the House" - funny piece!
