A STAR IS BORN (Warners – October 5): Bradley Cooper, making his directing debut, decided to do the equivalent of a first-time weightlifter starting out with a 400-pound barbell. It isn’t just that A Star Is Born is one of the most iconic Hollywood classics (this is the fifth version, counting What Price Hollywood?, […]
THE LAST 5 YEARS (Radius/Weinstein) – release date currently unscheduled – Worth A Ticket Richard LaGravenese’s film version of Jason Robert Brown’s THE LAST 5 YEARS, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and was acquired for release by the Radius division of the Weinstein Company, is a must-see for anyone who loves musicals–and very […]
> Rodrigo Garcia’s film ALBERT NOBBS (he shares auteurship with Glenn Close, who served as screenwriter with John Banville and Gabriella Prekop and as a producer as well as star) caters to what used to be called the James Ivory audience, when he was still churning his films out. In NY, these are the audiences […]
> Tonight’s Grammy Awards were inevitably somewhat haunted by the awful loss of Whitney Houston barely 24 hours earlier, a tragedy that seemed to have been going on for a decade yet was still shocking when it came to its fruition. Nevertheless, the show found time to include innumerable music numbers, some of them saluting […]
Jacques Audiard doesn’t do sentimental. His last film, A Prophet, had the clear-eyed view of crime and the dramatic heft of a French version of “The Wire,” and his new and very different drama RUST & BONE benefits as well from his refusal to take the road of easy emotion. Lord knows, the bare […]
THE HATE U GIVE (20th – October 19): YA radicalization. George Tillman Jr’s film, from a sprawling script by Audrey Wells (based on the novel by Angie Thomas) centers on Starr (Amandla Stenberg), an African-American teen who witnesses her friend shot to death by a white cop. But the story also wants to encompass […]
BROKEN CITY: Watch It At Home – Wahlberg and Crowe In An Intriguing But Too Simplistic Thriller Studios love nothing better than predictability, so since Mark Wahlberg had a tidy January hit last year with Contraband, it was no surprise when Fox slotted his new thriller BROKEN CITY for the same weekend in 2013. […]
JOJO RABBIT (Fox Searchlight – October 4): The discourse about Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit has quickly become a debate between those who think its Nazi-era black comedy is authentically daring, and those who feel its purported audacity is a pretense covering a merely middlebrow sensibility. (Note: every person in the history of language who […]