The Hunger Games (Gary Ross) March 23
Your children have been refreshing Fandango daily to see if tickets are available yet for the movie based on Suzanne Collins’ kiddie novels—think of them as Twilight, except with actual murder instead of benign vampirism. Games promises a chaste love triangle and lots of angst for the tween Read More
With this past weekend’s Grammys, producer Scott Rudin became the latest entertainer to earn the ugly, ineffective title of “EGOT”–having won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. (His new Grammy was for The Book of Mormon.) He’s one of only eleven such winners–and the first in a decade. We demand yet Read More
Roman Polanski’s Carnage, a brisk, 79-minute adaptation of the wildly successful play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, is a case of the right film by the wrong director. This one-set, four-character theater piece that kept audiences in stitches for long runs in London, Paris and on Broadway, is a giddy war of words and modern manners between a quartet of highly sophisticated, unspeakably duplicitous New Yorkers who thrust and parry on the front lines of the domestic battlefield to see who can draw more blood with the sharpest teeth and most insincere smile. It’s a slight but highly entertaining little morsel that leaves you laughing and thinking about how rotten apples never fall far from the tree, and it needs a director who knows how to move four people nimbly through a single living room in Brooklyn without claustrophobia. Mr. Polanski is a gimlet-eyed master craftsman, but comedy is not his forte. Read More
It is often predicted that the world will no longer end with the whimper of a long, boring war, but with the scream of a fatal, incurable and fast-moving plague. Addressing that theme in time to scare the living daylights out of everybody, Contagion is a star-studded, apocalyptic wake-up call to the horrors that await mankind in a test tube. We’ve made so much progress in terms of immunology, technology, scientific research and medical miracles that the planet considers itself immune to everything from small pox to swine flu. But there’s still no cure for cancer or AIDS, and the canvas of new viruses gets broader every year. So the topicality in Contagion is dark and unquestionable, if not creepy and off-putting. Read More
After lavishing Kate Winslet with praise and noting how adorably “edible” his tiniest cast member is, director Todd Haynes got emotional.
“This is a movie… about a mother,” Haynes said while introducing his new miniseries, Mildred Pierce (to debut on HBO March 27) at the Ziegfeld Theatre, “and tonight isn’t quite the same for me Read More
One of the very best films to come out in the last couple of years hits DVD today and you haven’t seen it. Why Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes’ tragically beautiful adaptation of Richard Yates’ novel, failed to connect with moviegoers is a question that has many answers: In an era of hope, it was too Read More
Okay, yeaaah, the Oscars! It’s going to take us at least a few more days to really be able to digest all the absolute batsh*t craziness that went down during Sunday night’s telecast. Can we all just start by agreeing that that show was truly bonkersville? We know there will be plenty of ink shed Read More
BEST PICTURE
The Reader
My choice for Best Picture would be The Reader. I think it’s a magnificent film about little people with big experiences. It’s a movie that, at a time when movies are not about much of anything, is a very important Read More
Like most of the English-speaking world, you probably didn’t catch any of the 15th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards last night on TNT and TBS (it’s an awards show so nice, they air it twice!). That’s too bad though. Not only does every movie star in Hollywood show up to bask in the Read More
For all the problems we have with The Golden Globes–they’re haphazardly produced, completely ridiculous and totally second rate–we cannot stress how much fun it is to watch them each year. Mostly, that has to do with the fact that the stars drink during the ceremony. A lot. Last night, after Slumdog Millionaire won for Best Read More
