Chaz Ebert reveals her list of movies from 2018 to see before awards season 2019.
A body of work at once austere, beautiful, tactile, allusive and deeply generous.
The latest on Blu-ray and DVD, including Annihilation, Gringo, Thoroughbreds, and Unsane.
A closer look at the 13 reviews by Roger Ebert chosen for the front page today to mark the anniversary of Roger's passing and the Day4Empathy.
A recap of the latest New York Film Festival and review of Woody Allen's newest film after its world premiere there.
A look at the latest on Blu-ray, including several Criterion releases, "Their Finest," "The Fate of the Furious," and "The Lost City of Z"!
An interview with filmmaker and critic Bertrand Tavernier about his new film, "My Journey Through French Cinema."
An article announcing the winners of the newly published Roger Ebert Great Movies IV giveaway.
A preview of the 54th New York Film Festival, including "Son of Joseph," "The Rehearsal," "Graduation," "Sieranevada" and much more.
A report from Venice on the festival's Venice Classics program, including restored films by Robert Bresson, John Ford, Andrei Tarkovsky, George Romero and Woody Allen.
For the 30th installment in his series about maligned masterworks, Scout Tafoya examines Hitchcock's dizzying oddities "Torn Curtain" and "Topaz."
A brief history and reappraisal of John Cassavetes in light of the recent Criterion Blu-ray release of "Love Streams."
"A man can be an artist ... in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasey's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece." -- Rayburn (Christopher Walken), "Man on Fire" (2004)
While I've never been a fan of the late Tony Scott or Christopher Nolan, a few thoughtful articles in recent days have helped me see them in new lights, and got me to thinking about their resemblances as well as their dissimilarities. Several appreciations of Scott (especially those by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Bilge Ebiri, David Edelstein and Manohla Dargis), along with David Bordwell's incisive essay on Christopher Nolan ("Nolan vs. Nolan") got me to thinking about the common assumptions about these popular filmmakers, both of whom are known for quick, impressionistic imagery, intercut scenes, slam-bang action and a CGI-averse insistence on photographing the real world.¹ Regardless of what you ultimately make of their work, there's no question they've done it their way.
This is an attempt to look at both filmmakers through the prism of others' points of view, refracted in critical appraisals like the above.
Of course, Scott and Nolan have passionate admirers and detractors. Until Scott's shocking suicide last week (from a bridge, a landmark that figures hauntingly in the climaxes of several of his movies), I wasn't aware of many critics who championed his movies, but with a few exceptions the obits seem to have been more admiring than the reviews over the years -- understandably, under the sad circumstances.
Those who applaud Scott and Nolan's films see them as genre boundary-pushers (thrillers, action pictures, science-fiction, superhero movies); those who denigrate them see them as symptomatic of the debasement of resonant imagery in modern Hollywood movies. Both have been subjected to that worst of all critical insults, comparisons to Michael Bay:
"'Inception' may have been directed by Christopher Nolan, but Nolan's dreams are apparently directed by Michael Bay." -- Andrew O'Hehir, "Inception: A clunky, overblown disappointment"
"If it sounds like I'm describing Michael Bay, that's because I sort of am. What we like to think of today as the Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer aesthetic was, in fact, originally the Tony Scott aesthetic (often deployed in films made for Bruckheimer and his late partner Don Simpson). Only back then there was a lot more art to it." -- Bilge Ebiri, "To Control Something That's Out of Control: On Tony Scott"
One of Scott's notable defenders has been The New York Times' Manohla Dargis. She identifies him as a "maximalist" who used "a lot of everything in his movies: smoke, cuts, camera moves, color. This kind of stylistic, self-conscious excess could be glorious, as in his underappreciated film 'Domino' (2005)," which Roger Ebert also somewhat grudgingly admired, quoting a character to describe the movie itself as having "the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth." Dargis writes:
