Great Movies
Tributes
Sonny Chiba: 1939-2021
A tribute to the late martial arts legend, Sonny Chiba.
A tribute to the late martial arts legend, Sonny Chiba.
Potentially another "Dog Day Afternoon." Too bad about the execution.
A report from this morning's Golden Globes nominations announcement, and a full list of the nominees.
Matt writes: Last week, we mourned the death of Aretha Franklin, the inimitable Queen of Soul who left behind a towering legacy of immortal music when she passed away at age 76. Odie Henderson penned a wonderful tribute to the legend, while various contributors at RogerEbert.com joined Chaz Ebert in offering their own reflections on her extraordinary life and career.
A deep dive into the acting career of Glenn Close, celebrating a performer who gets more out of stillness than almost any other actor.
Bruno Dumont stages a rock opera about Joan of Arc. An Argentine political thriller has a dash of Hitchcock's "Spellbound."
A review of the season two premiere of USA's "Mr. Robot."
A TV critic's picks for the best TV of 2015-16.
New titles on Blu-ray and DVD including "The Martian," "Mr. Robot" and "Straight Outta Compton."
Tragedy strikes at SXSW; Nebulous platitudes and James Franco; TV actors don't need movies; Connecting The Sopranos and Irreversible; Eviscerating Nymphomaniac: Vol I.
With several new dramas returning or premiering in the next week, Brian Tallerico says The Americans and The Red Road are two to watch.
This piece is about director Neil Jordan's seven most overtly supernatural, fairy tale-like films—The Company of Wolves, High Spirits, Interview with the Vampire, The Butcher Boy, In Dreams, Ondine, and his latest, the mother-daughter vampire shocker Byzantium. An infographic analysis of each—please refer to the key for each symbol's meaning—reveals this pattern and confirms Byzantium is the culmination of 30+ years of Jordan exorcising his personal demons on-screen.
Marie writes: Now this is really neat. It made TIME's top 25 best blogs for 2012 and with good reason. Behold artist and photographer Gustaf Mantel's Tumblr blog "If we don't, remember me" - a collection of animated GIFs based on classic films. Only part of the image moves and in a single loop; they're sometimes called cinemagraphs. The results can be surprisingly moving. They also can't be embedded so you have to watch them on his blog. I already picked my favorite. :-)
Marie writes: It's a long story and it starts with a now famous video of a meteor exploding over Chelyabinsk, Russia. Followed by alien conspiracies fueled by the internet and which led me to investigate further. Where did it come from? Does anyone know..? Yes! According to The NewScientist, the rock came from the Apollo family of near-Earth asteroids, which follow an elongated orbit that occasionally crosses Earth's path.That in turn led me to yet another site and where I learned a team of scientists had discovered two moons around Pluto, and asked the public to vote on potential names. They also accepted write-in votes as long as they were taken from Greek and Roman mythology and related to Hades and the underworld - keeping to the theme used to name Pluto's three other moons. And how I eventually learned "Vulcan" has won Pluto's moon-naming poll! and thanks to actor William Shatner who suggested it. Behold Vulcan: a little dot inside a green circle and formally known as P5.
Marie writes: The late John Alton is widely regarded as being one of greatest film noir cinematographers to have ever worked in Film. He perfected many of the stylized camera and lighting techniques of the genre, including radical camera angles, wide-angle lenses, deep focus compositions, the baroque use of low-level cameras and a sharp depth of field. His groundbreaking work with director Anthony Mann on films such "TMen" and "Raw Deal" and "He Walked by Night" is considered a benchmark in the genre, with "The Big Combo" directed by Joseph H. Lewis, considered his masterpiece. John Alton also gained fame as the author of the seminal work on cinematography: "Painting with Light".
The Big Combo (1955) [click to enlarge]
