Great Movies
Chaz's Journal
My Telluride Film Festival Diary 2008
A look back at my Telluride Film Festival Journal from August 28th to September 1st, 2008
A look back at my Telluride Film Festival Journal from August 28th to September 1st, 2008
In light of Polish director Andrzej Wajda's recent passing, an alphabetical list of his ten best films.
A guide to the work of the legendary Max von Sydow, star of more than "Star Wars, Episode VII: The Force Awakens."
A guide to the latest and greatest on Blu-ray and streaming services, including Ex Machina, It Follows, Clouds of Sils Maria, What We do in the Shadows and more!
When: Through Oct. 25Where: Screenings at AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St. (unless noted).
NEW YORK (AP) - The National Society of Film Critics on Sunday selected "The Hurt Locker," a film about an elite Army bomb squad unit that works in Iraq to defuse improvised explosives while under the threat of insurgents, as the best picture of 2009.
Since Moses brought the tablets down from the mountain, lists have come in tens, not that we couldn't have done with several more commandments. Who says a year has Ten Best Films, anyway? Nobody but readers, editors, and most other movie critics. There was hell to pay last year when I published my list of Twenty Best. You'd have thought I belched at a funeral. So this year I have devoutly limited myself to exactly ten films.
When Sydney Pollack was making "Out of Africa" in 1985, he considered the problem of how to film Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in love scenes that were not explicit, yet were erotic. "When I have Streep and Redford together," he told me, "I don't want to see them strip naked and writhe around in bed together. The challenge was to find love scenes that would have emotion and passion and yet not violate a certain place where we want to see them. There are two really sensual love scenes. One of them is the undressing scene. I always like scenes like that. I think they're sexy. I tried to make a sort of passionate dance out of them undressing each other. The second scene consists of three absolutely terrific lines I took out of a screenplay that was written in 1973 when Nicholas Roeg was going to direct this project. It's only three lines, but what lines: "Don't move. I want to move. Don't move."
Bora Bora, Society Islands -- To get here you take off from Honolulu and fly into tomorrow, crossing the international date line for a refueling stop on Samoa. Then you fly back into yesterday and land on Tahiti, switch to an Air Polynesia flight to a coral landing strip, take a motorboat for another hour's journey, and arrive after dark at the island James Michener called the most beautiful in the world. It's a long way to go to visit a movie location, but then Dino De Laurentiis went a long way to shoot his movie.
Michael Kutza's year began with a January trip to California to look at the American Film Institute's new stuff. Then he was off to Colombia to help judge the Cartagena film festival, new movies from Latin and South America. He was back in Chicago in March for board meetings of his Chicago International Film Festival.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - The premiere of Jan Troell's "The Emigrants" was held in the Roda Kvarn, a cozy little jewelbox of a theater that was built in 1915, when Swedish silent films were finding an international audience. But Troell's film wasn't merely post-silent; it was post-Bergman, post-sex, post- the image of Swedish films in the 1960s.
