A review of the new Starz drama series, "Hightown," premiering Sunday, May 17th.
To understand our current political climate, let's revisit the rich cadre of Cold War films in our collective cultural archives.
Looking back at "Donnie Darko" on the occasion of its 15th anniversary.
Chaz Ebert highlights films with the potential to get us through the confusing political times of the Trump presidency.
Issue doc aesthetics; Amy S. Weber on "A Girl Like Her"; The original underclass; Sheriff of Babylon captivates war vet; Why "Point Break" still delivers.
An interview with New Zealand stuntwoman Zoë Bell, best known for hanging on the hood of Kurt Russell's car in "Death Proof," now the star of her own action vehicle, "Raze"
"The To Do List" may not be a film of great substance, but this comedy about a young girl’s strange, semi-erotic journey from untouched maiden to minx accomplishes something both rare and significant for a teen movie: it places a female character in the central role as unapologetic sexual aggressor.
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I wasn't old enough to experience the French New Wave first hand. My introduction to the New German Cinema (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, et al.) was getting my mind blown by Werner Herzog's 1973 "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" when it was released in the US in 1977. The bossa nova craze was before my time, as was Elvis, but I vividly remember Beatlemania and felt that punk and grunge were mine. It's hard for me to imagine what it must be like to look back on some of the things I experienced first-hand and to approach them retroactively.
I've been thinking about this for a while -- what a pleasure it has been, for example, to see Steven Spielberg develop, having watched his TV movie "Duel" when it was first broadcast and being absolutely riveted; discovering the monstrous phenomenon of "Jaws" when it opened and created the "summer blockbuster" before we had a term for it; witnessing the remarkable suburban double-whammy of "E.T." and "Poltergeist" (in which Spielberg's presence was clearly felt) in the summer of 1982...
But what brought it to the forefront of my consciousness was this (last?) week's Entertainment Weekly cover story touting a big ol' list of 1,000 "New Classics" in film, music, theater, video games, etc. I'm not entirely sure what their definition of "classic" is meant to be, though among the terms they use to describe them are "iconic" ("Pulp Fiction"), "primal work of popular art" ("Titanic"), "quotable" ("Jerry Maguire"), "apotheosis of its genre" ("A Room With a View"), "most amazing" ("Children of Men")... and, um, "classic" ("When Harry Met Sally").
Q. I noticed the letter in the Answer Man from Daniel Stender of Ames, Iowa, who had a project of paintings of scenes from movies featuring people dressed in bear suits but who could only think of two titles, "The Shining" and "The Science of Sleep."
"It was as though this plan had been with him all his life, pondered through the seasons, now in his fifteenth year crystallized with the pain of puberty." -- from Graham Greene's story "The Destructors," as read by Donnie Darko's English teacher, Miss Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore)
PARK CITY, Utah -- One day at Sundance, three wonderful films:
There is a kind of shyness, a modesty, about Francis Ford Coppola that is so surprising. Here is the director of "The Godfather," and the epic "Apocalypse Now," and the paranoid psychodrama "The Conversation," and he talks about whether he has the right to put his name above the title. Kids out of film school put their names on their first films, and here he is explaining why his movies are called "Mario Puzo's The Godfather" and "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and "John Grisham's The Rainmaker."
LOS ANGELES This is a very small anecdote, but maybe it will lead somewhere. I went to interview Albert Brooks out at his office at Warner Bros. We were going to talk about "Defending Your Life," his new comedy about a man who discovers the afterlife is a place named Judgment City, and you go on trial there. We had a good talk.
Great Movies
