Fast & Furious 6
Squarely state-of-the-art, "Fast 6" is not a great action movie. It has all the ingredients, including a cast that flaunts infectious group chemistry, but its…
Squarely state-of-the-art, "Fast 6" is not a great action movie. It has all the ingredients, including a cast that flaunts infectious group chemistry, but its…
The latest from Blue Sky Studio ("Ice Age," "Rio") is different from whatever Pixar/Disney or any other big animation outfit happens to be offering this…
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a…
James Gray's "The Immigrant" maintains a tight focus on the Ellis Island experience, and Mohammad Rasoulof's "Manuscripts Don’t Burn" dramatizes the inside of the cruel…
Will Michael Douglas take home a Best Actor prize from Cannes for his turn as Liberace in "Behind the Candelabra"?
Far Flung Correspondent Seongyong Cho discusses "Kinyarwanda," a powerful look at the genocide in Rwanda.
Roger was a titan in the film community, but he was also a beacon for the seriously disabled.
Far Flung Correspondent Seongyong Cho discusses "Kinyarwanda," a powerful look at the genocide in Rwanda.
Roger was a titan in the film community, but he was also a beacon for the seriously disabled.
The destruction of Vulcan, one of the most crucial planets in the "Star Trek" universe, should be at the core of J.J. Abrams’ "Trek" movies.…
Dear Roger,You emailed me the questions to this interview on March 15, 2013. In your March 16th reply to my email, you said: The piece…

When purchased in 2007 by Trump, the land was a conservation area, with sand dunes 4,000 years old and a mixture of ocean-shore environments. "We've had tremendous support from the environmentalists," Trump says to a TV interviewer, which is a bald-faced lie. We see spokesmen for U.K. environmental organizations who are bitterly opposed, and indeed his building permit was turned down by the local council before being restored by the Scottish Parliament on the grounds that it would bring jobs to the sparsely populated area.
But that isn't what's most fascinating about Anthony Baxter's one-man indie documentary. It's Donald Trump's almost joyous rudeness. The Donald loves playing a bad guy. One of his targets in the project are a few small farm homes that he fears would "spoil the view" of his luxury hotel guests. Having stayed at hotels in the area, I found the sight of farms added to my pleasure.
But listen to Trump describe Michael Forbes, a man who has refused to sell his strategically located land to the robber baron: "The man lives in a pig sty. He lives in garbage. He's a pig." Say what? Has Trump ever visited the Forbes farm or been inside his home? Not bloody likely. What we see is a farm, with machinery, outbuildings, chickens, ponies and no pigs. I imagine Trump's idea of beauty is the antiseptic tackiness of the tinfoil towers he erects around the world.
Trump's operation moves with cruel efficiency. Tons of sand are bulldozed from a virgin beach and piled up to create a small mountain blocking Forbes' view. His water and electricity are cut off, and when he visits the Trump site office, he is dismissed curtly. ("Is that an expensive camera?" Trump's man asks the director Baxter.) The local police later arrest Baxter and hold him in jail for four hours, on general principles. From what we see, they were unprovoked.
We visit and meet Forbes, whose meticulously trimmed mustache alone should raise doubts about his piggish existence — all right, I'll say it — especially in contrast to what David Letterman describes as "the thing that lives on Donald Trump's head." We also visit Susan Munro, who shows old movies of her father, a fisherman who lived on the very same spot, and David Milne, another indignant local. Local outrage inspires a protest march on the area. There's an uproar when a local university grants Trump an honorary degree; the school's former principal returns his own degree in protest. Trump proudly marches in with two hired bagpipers who hilariously accompany him everywhere he goes.
The underlying message is that if you are rich and powerful enough, you can run roughshod over tradition and private property rights and buy your place at the table. One 18-hole course of Trump's new development opened in July, but construction on the 450-room hotel has been halted. Trump's reason for the delay is priceless: He threatened to move the development elsewhere because the windmills of an offshore wind farm will spoil the view of his guests. He announced his decision at about the same time he commenced his bid for the U.S. presidential nomination.
Do the math. To tee up at the Trump course will cost around $310, about the same as the world's first and most famous golf course, the Old Course in nearby St. Andrews. How many rounds of golf do you need to sell to pay for a luxury hotel? Can he make a go of the project without the hotel? Construction remains on hold.
In medieval times, the nobility enjoyed something called droit du seigneur, their right to deflower their serfs' virgin daughters before their marriage. These days the nobility has been replaced by billionaire bullies, who continue to screw us serfs.
Saturday, May 4, was one month to the day that Roger left this earthly plane. In honor of Kentucky Derby weekend I ...
Today the American Pavilion remembered Roger Ebert with a panel and beachfront thumbs-up salute.
When Chaz has gone to Cannes without Roger in the past, she has written about the festival in the form of letters and...
View image A graffito on Norah Jones. It's confession time again here at Scanners: I've never go...