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Entries in film debuts (35)

Monday
Apr172017

Thoughts I Had... Gaga & Cooper's "A Star is Born"

Chris here. Filming has officially begun on the long-developed remake of A Star is Born, which is both the cinematic debut of Lady Gaga and star Bradley Cooper's first time in the director's chair. Gaga may have some big shoes to fill after Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, but this one promises its own unique point of view: a fully country-western soundtrack. Intriguingly, Cooper will be filming live at music festival Coachella over the next few days, so you can bet we'll get a look at some of Gaga's original songs - but the studio has also given us our first look at the duo. Some first thoughts...

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Wednesday
Mar292017

ND/NF: "Menashe" and "The Future Perfect"

MOMa and Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual New Directors / New Films festival wrapped up this past weekend. Their goal each year is to celebrate "a group of filmmakers who represent the present and anticipate the future of cinema: daring artists whose work pushes the envelope and is never what you’d expect"  The big tickets this year were two buzzy Sundance titles: the gay drama Beach Rats (a subway misshap prevented me from making the screening - argh!) and the rap comedy Patti Cake$ which will be out in July. The latter prompted a bidding war with Fox Searchlight offering $10+ million. Beach Rats was picked up by a new distribution company called Neon so who knows when it will arrive. Colossal, that Anne Hathaway as a kaiju oddity, will be Neon's first proper release on April 7th. 

At ND/NF we previously reviewed Sexy Durga, Happiness Academyand Strong Island. Here are the two final films yours truly caught, one being maybe my favorite of 2017 thus far...

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Saturday
Mar112017

New Directors / New Films: Sexy Durga

New Directors / New Films which runs March 15th through the 26th is a festival of emerging international filmmakers here in NYC each year. We'll cover a few titles staring with a nightmare journey in India... 

Sexy Durga
Do you ever feel like you're missing something no matter how closely you pay attention? Not being well versed in Hinduism, it's difficult to make many inferences from the use of the goddess Durga in this film's title though calling her "Sexy" was quite a controversial move. I'm not sure why given that a quick bit of research reveals that she's a supreme goddess which sounds damn sexy to me...

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Saturday
Jan282017

Pfandom: In 1980, Pfeiffer Hit the Big Screen

P F A N D O M  
Michelle Pfeiffer Retrospective. Episode 4 
by Nathaniel R 

obsessed with Pfeiffer's eyeshadow in HOLLYWOOD KNIGHTS (1980) 

She didn't quit the supermarket. That's something we need to understand immediately about Michelle Pfeiffer's methodic rise. After losing the beauty contest and landing an agent in 1978, winning TV gigs and moving to Hollywood, she merely transferred to a different supermarket. She was very practical and very focused, according to those who knew her when, taking acting classes and going to cattle calls but always showing up at work. Many stars bios are littered with colorful anecdotes about brief early jobs but in Pfeiffer's case, supermarket checkout girl, was an actual job that she stuck with until the acting, well, stuck.

One of her teachers, who had described her as a tardy, disinterested but smart student in high school recalls meeting her just before her career took off in the grocery store...

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Wednesday
Aug032016

Frances McDormand: from Blood Simple (1984) to Olive Kitteridge (2014)

1984 is our year of the month for August. Here's Matthew Eng to talk about a treasured actor that made her on camera debut back then...

For the better half of her nearly four-decade film career, Meryl Streep has managed to compel generations of moviegoers to accept a self-styled character actress as not only an acting heroine for the ages but also a bona fide movie star with mass-market appeal and unimpeachable box office credentials. Like no other actress since Bette Davis, Streep has perfected a once-unfeasible practice of playing the sort of idiosyncratic women she has always drifted towards, but within the safe confines of midrange, studio-supported moviemaking that seems to satisfy audience expectations as well as her own.

Sometimes Streep’s projects—and, it must be said, Streep herself—can disappoint. For every quietly graceful gem (like her underrated Hope Springs performance) or skillfully uninhibited turn (as in the best passages of It’s Complicated), there are another two or three within Streep’s latter-day canon that could stand some sharper finesse or at least more dexterous directorial guidance. Whenever I’m let down to by Streep, I can’t help but wonder what one of her less-viable peers might do with the opportunities that are scarce for any actress born before the Kennedy administration and which Streep barely has to put up a fight for.

The Beginning: Blood Simple (1984); The Most Recent Triumph: Olive Kitteridge (2014)

For as long as I can remember, Frances McDormand has served as the purest and most intimidating embodiment of what a character actor should be. “That woman has no vanity,” my mom remarked with clear admiration after watching her in Lisa Cholodenko’s Olive Kitteridge, where McDormand delivers one of the decade’s most masterful star turns, a perfectly prickly meeting of actor and role that might have been a surefire Oscar winner had the project aimed for a bigger screen...

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