Stars and stuff on the silver screen.
The film that Robert Bresson made in 1983, L’Argent, would be the last he would ever make. It is, if nothing else, a movie made by a director in full command of his intentions, a work of art created by someone who knew exactly what he wanted to do and would …
“Little things that just don’t matter,” goes a Quasi lyric often quoted by my partner, “still could get me mad as a hatter”. Yes, folks, we’ve been putting it off for a long time, and I’m not any happier about it than you are, but it’s time we finally had …
The genius of Stan Lee — and he was a man possessed of genius, despite the bad press he’s generated in recent years since translating that genius into a fortune that was denied to many of his employees — is that he was able to see the way the wind …
Chantal Akerman died two weeks ago. Her death was a shock to the film world, or at least that part of it that still considers cinema to be an art form and its geniuses worthy of commemoration; she was only 65 years old and in relatively good health, and she …
Peggy Guggenheim’s relationships with men were difficult, to put it mildly. As the new documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict makes clear, the heiress and collector was far ahead of her time, both in recognizing the value of modern paintings and sculpture and in navigating the world of fine art — a world often …
Laurie Anderson has had a lot to deal with over the last few years. Since 2013, she was faced with, in rapid succession, the death of her mother Mary Louise, her husband Lou Reed, and her beloved dog, Lolabelle. Never one to let such matters overwhelm her, though, she dealt …
Just prior to beginning work on his first feature film, 1979’s Real Life, comedian Albert Brooks had been making short subjects for the show that would eventually become known as Saturday Night Live (or, as the bewildered Phoenix city councilman puts it when introducing Brooks in the film, “Good Night Saturday”). …
It happened while my partner was watching Keith Richards: Under the Influence. “This isn’t bad,” she said, “but it seems so much like an advertisement for his book.” I couldn’t help but agree; taken all in all, Under the Influence, Life, and Crosseyed Heart seem less like disparate threads in one man’s artistic …
Ever since the Hays Code took a fatal nosedive in the 1960s, movies have been cursing like there’s no tomorrow. At one point, movies, no matter how much they sublimated their sex and forefronted their violence, were as sanitary as a dentist’s tools. Sometimes this resulted in some finely suggestive …
Fargo was such a singular movie, such a unique and multilayered take on the typical heist-gone-wrong film, that it was almost unthinkable that it could be remade, rebooted, adapted or made sequel in anything like a satisfying manner. That someone actually managed to do so almost twenty years later — …
Straight Outta Compton is in theaters as I write this, and like just about everything the former Andre Romelle Young touches, from subpar headphones to white dingbats from Detroit, it has turned to gold, raking in over $100 million at the box office so far. What exactly this means for …
One of the advantages of making a sports documentary, at least in theory, is that you avoid the pitfall of so many other types of non-fiction film: the lack of footage. If you’re making a movie about a band or a performer, there may be relatively little filmed evidence of …
Great novels — and Philip K. Dick’s unsettling 1962 alternate history The Man in the High Castle is certainly a great novel — tend to have in common the fact that much of their greatness is in their ability to communicate the internal. From their omnipotent viewpoint, they can use …
One never expects an atomic bomb to go off in such a quiet way. It’s also never supposed to be in the form of a long, lovely, exquisitely detailed shaggy dog joke. But Jim Jarmusch’s groundbreaking, entirely wonderful Stranger Than Paradise — which, astonishingly, is 31 years old this month — …
It was recently announced by the minds that run 21st Century FOX that, going forward from season 15, The Simpsons would no longer be released in digital video disc format. Taken as a specific instance, this is no great loss; the critical consensus is that The Simpsons lost its bite a …
