As targets for satire, flamboyant pop stars and celebrity journalists are low-hanging fruit — maybe even slightly mushy, rotten fruit. But in “Opus,” Mark Anthony Green, a former style columnist for GQ making his first feature as writer and director, bids to say something trenchant about fame while cementing his reputation as a sleek new … Read more
One enduring storytelling strategy is to put some characters in a cage and watch them fight it out. There’s a reason so many mysteries, thrillers and horror movies take place in close quarters: Lockdowns have a way of turning people into lab animals. And whatever the cause — nature, nurture or screenwriting contrivance — when … Read more
‘Novocaine’ Review: Sticks and Stones Will Never Hurt Him
“John Garfield should be doing this part, not me.” This declaration of self-doubt was muttered by a scruffy, largely untried 23-year-old actor at the first table read for a new work by a fast-rising young American playwright. The year was 1947; the setting, a rooftop rehearsal space on West 42nd Street; and the play, after … Read more
All moviesOscar winnersBox Office HitsDramaComedyDocumentaryAction Adventure Animation Biography Crime Family Fantasy History Horror Music Musical Mystery Romance Sci-Fi Sports Thriller War Western 2000 – 20242000200120022003200420052006200720082009201020112012201320142015201620172018201920202021202220232024
One bit of footage shows issues of Film Culture magazine, which Mekas started in 1954 with his brother Adolfas, rolling from a printing press. Several of Mekas’s segments show the buzz of activity at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which he co-founded in 1961 to distribute little-known movies. Mekas was also the first full-time film critic for … Read more
A blasphemous black comedy, part noir, part case history, Luis Buñuel’s 1953 Mexican melodrama “Él” amply justifies its inadvertently self-reflexive American release title, “This Strange Passion.” One of the rediscoveries of last year’s Buñuel retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “Él” opens for a week at Film Forum in a fine new 4K restoration. … Read more
“We all want to be like Bugs, but we’re all really Daffy,” said the voice actor Eric Bauza with a hearty laugh during a recent interview in Los Angeles. For the past five years, the Canadian performer, 45, has played both the clever rabbit and the hyperactive duck. He has won two Children’s & Family … Read more
“The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay.” Not bloody likely. Those stage directions from Tennessee Williams’s published script for “A Streetcar Named Desire” may amount to a mission statement … Read more
Stanley R. Jaffe, a former Hollywood wunderkind who became president of Paramount at 29, then left after just a few years to become an Oscar-winning producer of films like “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Fatal Attraction” and “The Accused,” died on Monday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 84. His daughter Betsy Jaffe confirmed … Read more