It’s once more around the block for Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy’s sweeping, complex saga about an adulterous heroine who loved too much and too well, ruining her reputation and wrecking her marriage while men winked and women wept (yes, they loved soap operas even on the Russian steppes). The story of Anna, the beautiful, unhappily Read More
The Master
Paul Thomas Anderson Read More
Don’t worry about floods, earthquakes or burning to death in an apocalyptic fire. When the end comes, protect yourself with love. This is the message conveyed in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s feature film debut. It’s an intriguing take on the apocalypse as a pragmatic tone poem, with comedian Steve Carell in his first deeply dramatic role (at least, the first one I’ve seen). He is very touching and unexpectedly appealing, and with co-star Keira Knightley he exhibits a romantic chemistry of which I never thought him capable. Read More
Word has it that Sex and the City is getting rebooted on TV–bringing back Carrie Bradshaw for a generation unfamiliar with her exploits! Carrie’s going to be a young writer struggling to make it in New York in a pilot ordered by the CW, as opposed to a youngish writer magically making it in New York. Which actress can portray the young Ms. Bradshaw with just the right mix of panache, narcissism, and ability to wear a Manolo? We have a few suggestions! Read More
An antiseptic departure for shock jock David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method is a psychological tug of war between the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson), and his disciple Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) over the mind and sex of an overwrought mental patient named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a mad Russian with a craving for spanking. Whacking her on her naked bottom must have worked. She ended up, years later, analyzing patients of her own. Too bad she didn’t also analyze this movie. It would have saved so much wasted time.
A grim 1912 period piece set in a mental clinic in Vienna at the dawn of 20th century enlightenment, the movie flirts with the peculiar relationship between novice Jung and mentor Freud while they both flirt with the same patient, but aside from Ms. Knightley’s lurid whupping without her panties on, nothing ever happens. The “dangerous method” in the title refers to the experiment by both analysts to radically treat the same female patient by taking her to bed. Not very scientific, but very, very talky. Read More
Iranian writer-director Massy Tadjedin arrives in films via Tehran and Harvard with Last Night, a tedious but cogent feature debut that explores the boundaries of conventional morality in a seemingly perfect modern marriage that is beginning to show cracks. After four years of togetherness, an attractive, successful and outwardly flawless New York couple (with inexplicable Read More
In what must have been a fit of fanboy indiscretion, Brian Williams signed up to interview the famously cagey Robert De Niro on the actor’s home turf, the Tribeca Film Festival.
Some typical responses from Mr. De Niro: “I’m O.K.” “I am and I’m not.” “No.” “Yeah.” “What?”
Closing the conversation, Mr. Williams Read More
Marc Jacobs, along with Kate Moss and Justin Timberlake, are confirmed to co-chair the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Gala in May with Anna Wintour. [Vogue UK]
The new celebrity trend is not to wear the actual designer handbag, but rather the dust bag in which it is sold, as seen on Keira Read More
Sweaty BALLS! Is it time yet to empty our checking accounts (of course we don’t have any investments, real estate or 401(k), ya big silly) and flee to, eek, Quebec? Or better yet—Pompeii? Or should we just close our eyes, pretend nothing is happening and drop a couple thou on a Read More
The Hollywood Reporter reports that The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes has signed on to direct The Beautiful and The Damned, which would tackle the shiny, bright, and often thorny relationship between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre. Though the glamorous duo were considered the jazzy embodiment of the Roaring Twenties, things did not end Read More
