Great Movies
TV/Streaming
Home Entertainment Guide: December 2023
The latest on Blu-ray and streaming, including The Creator, Dumb Money, Five Nights at Freddy's, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
The latest on Blu-ray and streaming, including The Creator, Dumb Money, Five Nights at Freddy's, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
A tribute to Oscar winning cinematographer and filmmaker Haskell Wexler on what would've been his 100th birthday.
A look at how The Blue Lagoon both exploited and created the public persona of Brooke Shields, and how it plays 37 years later.
A celebration of actor Warren Oates in anticipation of an upcoming retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in NYC.
An appreciation of the late, great cinematographer, documentarian and activist Haskell Wexler, plus a transcript of his 2013 conversation about his work on Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven."
In the nearly three days since I learned of Eric Rohmer's death, I've been looking over his filmography, which has stimulated a flood of fond recollections. Few directors have left behind so many enjoyable, stimulating, gorgeous movies -- photographed by none other than Nestor Almendros until the mid-'80s, a beau mariage made in cinema heaven. I was trying to think of a Rohmer film I actively dislike... and I can't. (There are a few I haven't seen, a few I like more than others, a few I don't remember very well...) But a surprising number of them still live among my favorite movie-memories: "Perceval," "Summer"/"The Green Ray," "My Night at Maud's," "The Marquise of O...", "Pauline at the Beach," "Le beau mariage"...
At The Crop Duster, Robert Horton, who was discovering these movies at the same time I was, recalls Rohmer by resurrecting his terrific 1984 piece on "Pauline at the Beach," and by lightly tracing his own life through cinematic encounters with the director's movies in an entry he calls "A Rohmer Datebook."
First, a swell mini-overview from the former:
Rohmer has been on a hot streak lately. Keep in mind he was a slow starter compared to some of his friends in the French New Wave. Rohmer made short films during the 1950s, and he was editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinema, the magazine in which Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol et al. vented their auteurist spleens, from 1957 to 1963. Those other fellows had already collected an armful of international awards by the time Rohmer completed his first widely-recognized feature, "La collectioneuse," in 1967 (though he had been directing for some time already). That film was part of his contes moraux--Moral Tales--and the next entry, "Ma nuit chez Maud" ("My Night at Maud's," 1968), brought him shoulder to shoulder with the world's leading filmmakers. After he finished the Moral Tales, Rohmer took time out to pursue projects with settings completely different from the palpably modern landscapes of the six Moral Tales; predictably enough, "The Marquise of O..." (1976) and "Perceval le Gallois" (1978) were two of the best and most intriguing works of the decade.
“Kramer vs. Kramer,” the drama of a child custody fight, won nine Academy Award nominations on Monday – and so, in a surprise, did "All That Jazz," about a Broadway director’s self-destruction.
