With a robust showing of documentaries and foreign and American-made films in 2015, there are more than enough to choose from for a top 10 list. The options make for a more spirited end-of-the-year discussion than usual and are also why so many of the awards and nominations that have been announced thus far have […]
The whiplash camera work of a faux-documentary. Actors breaking the fourth wall, staring straight into the camera with a what-the-hell bemused expression. All this plus the underlying cynicism with a smirk will immediately remind viewers of top TV fare such as the American version of The Office. As if on cue, that series’ star, […]
It wasn’t really that long ago when many had to rely on dial-up Internet service, when listening to live-streaming audio sounded like an underwater long-distant phone call, and podcasts and streaming video on demand were merely ideas on the horizon. In the breezy Dreams Rewired, perspectives on the rapid-fire technical developments of a century ago […]
Don’t be fooled by the European poster for Paolo Sorrentino’s latest amorphous film. It may be hard to pin down what type of movie this is, but it’s definitely not the spry sex comedy hinted at in the ad campaign, where stars Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel sit in a swimming pool staring gob-smacked at […]
The opening shot of a dead child about to be buried as his parents mourn graveside sets the tone for this efficient and at times absorbing retelling of Shakespeare’s violent tragedy. The few and infrequent bits of the play’s comic relief have been excised for one uniform, despairing depiction of warrior Macbeth’s murderous ascent to […]
Just the facts, ma’am. That catchphrase from the old Dragnet TV series well describes director Tom McCarthy’s efficient, workmanlike approach to his beat-by-beat unmasking of a scandal. In 2002, the Boston Globe published an exhaustively researched exposé of how the city’s Roman Catholic diocese shielded hundreds of sexual abusers among its ranks for decades. This […]
Film Comment deputy editor and New York Film Festival programmer Kent Jones’s cinematic fan letter to the François Truffaut/Alfred Hitchcock’s collaboration, 1966’s Hitchcock: A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock, may be the most effective inducement to pick up a book since Oprah’s Book Club left the air—well, at least for cinephiles.
Film buffs who haven’t touched […]
Only a few films could pack a 2,300-seat theater at a 12:30 Thursday morning screening as did Gaspar Noé’s 3-D orgiastic opus Love when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Sight unseen, it had already gained notoriety for the director’s declared intention to add emotion to explicit sex within a love story. Well, in […]
There are very few actors with the charisma and sex appeal of Idris Elba, as witnessed five years ago at the Tribeca Film Festival. He made an appearance there to support his starring role in a British indie, Legacy. At the box office, filmgoers, most of them women, bought a ticket for a film whose […]
