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 & B...
In recent years, the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film has come to stand for not much more than a fair level of craftsmanship and a comfortable pitch of moral predicament (The Secret In Their Eyes, Departures, and The Counte...
Virtually every screening at Sundance is followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, and while these sessions can be informative and charming (although 3 questions that need never be asked again are How long did you shoot?...
THE MASTER: Worth A Ticket – The Title Describes the Filmmaker Our shorthand for describing movie directors, even great ones, is to compare them to other filmmakers. So Quentin Tarantino is Sergio Leone plus ha...
Not At Any Price: “Art” More Than Art The name Monte Hellman doesn’t mean much to the vast majority of moviegoers, but Hellman is among the cultiest of American cult directors. He came up the Roge...
BEING FLYNN: Watch It At Home – Troubling Story That Doesn’t Go Deep Enough There’s a scene in Paul Weitz’s new film BEING FLYNN where Jonathan Flynn (Robert DeNiro), the alcoholic...
A BETTER LIFE – Watch It At Home: Earnest Isn’t Enough Impending disaster hangs over every early scene of Chris Weitz’s new film A BETTER LIFE. As soon as we’re introduced to Carlos ...
SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED: Worth A Ticket – Time Is Of Its Essence Nothing in SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED happens the way you’d expect. The film was inspired by a real-life classified ad run by someone looking for ...
Stu Zicherman’s A.C.O.D. (written by Zicherman and Ben Karlin) suffers a bit from a familiar indie comedy malady: the conflicting desires to tell meaningful and even dark stories, while at the same time getting ...
ANOTHER EARTH – Worth A Ticket: Tiny Story With Big Ambitions For ANOTHER EARTH, the Sundance Film Festival went exactly the way it’s supposed to. The low-key picture was made on a miniscule bud...