After his most recent film, Moonrise Kingdom, hit big with a cast divided between big stars and total unknowns, Wes Anderson has doubled down on the big-star element, with Johnny Depp just having been cast in the newly-titled The Grand Budapest Hotel. Mr. Anderson coaxed a career-best performance out of Gwyneth Paltrow at Read More
The new film by Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom, has set the record for the highest per-screen average for an independent film; playing in just four theaters (including the AMC Lincoln Square and Regal Union Square in New York), the film took in an average of $127,500 per screen. (That adds up to $509,000 in Read More
Preceded by bewildering blogs and Tweets (and even a few genuine reviews) from Cannes (“A Tender Triumph!” “Glows in the Darkness!” “Ode to Arrested Development!”), Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is juvenile gibberish about two 12-year-olds who get married in a Boy Scout camp that is too sexually outrageous for the preteen age group it portrays and too tween for grown-ups. Like all Wes Anderson movies, it is naïve, mannered, pretentious and incomprehensible. He co-wrote it with Roman Coppola (yikes! another Coppola!). Together they were responsible for The Darjeeling Limited, one of the worst movies of all time. This one is neither as contrived as The Royal Tenenbaums nor as moronic as The Darjeeling Limited, but its boredom quotient is still stuck in the same unbroken wave of dubious tedium Mr. Anderson is famous for. (It also features another Coppola, the creepy Jason Schwartzman.) What is it with this guy and his awful movies masquerading as “original ideas” that turns otherwise sensible critics into slobbering groupies? Read More
CANNES, FRANCE– Last year’s Cannes Film Festival was a bizarre anomaly by any measure. The art-house powerhouse debuted Oscar’s best picture (The Artist); Woody Allen’s highest-grossing film ever (Midnight in Paris); Terrence Malick’s mystical, masturbatory tone poem (The Tree of Life); and Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic melodrama (Melancholia), which prompted the Danish provocateur to announce himself a Nazi, get officially labeled “persona non grata,” and be told he physically can’t come within 100 yards of the festivities. That’s a hard act to follow, even for the French. Read More
David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin took the relatively wonky tale of coding a great website and made it into a top flight drama.
But what if The Social Network had been directed by a different Hollywood heavyweight? College Humor gave it spin with Wes Anderson, Frank Capra and many others.
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File this under bad planning: it seems like every week Hollywood offers up yet another schlocky horror movie to the court of public opinion, but today—on the always-spooky Friday the 13th—there isn’t a horror movie in sight. Someone cue up the Price is Right horn! As we do every Friday, here’s a handy Read More
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Running time 87 minutes
Written by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach
Directed by Wes Anderson
Starring George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray
Wes Anderson’s take on Fantastic Mr. Fox, the classic 1970 book by Roald Dahl, is full of the whimsy and cleverness one expects from the man Read More
Monday: Vertigo
Halloween might be over, but that doesn’t mean the scares have to stop. We wouldn’t go so far as to call Vertigo a “horror movie,” but Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock ratchets the tension to such unbearable levels that parts of it are more terrifying than anything you’d see in whatever torture porn Read More
“Have you seen the show?” asked Jason Schwartzman, via phone from his home in Los Angeles late last week. “I haven’t yet, not really. I’m just sitting here in a cocoon … not of anticipation … what would you call it? I’m feeling right now that something is in the oven and I’ve been cooking Read More
