Monday, February 3

Tag: films

John Cazale’s Barbaric Squawk | The New Yorker
10Apr By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

John Cazale’s Barbaric Squawk | The New Yorker

The list of offenses is long, but let’s start with his jacket. It is a rich shade of burgundy, the color of a bruise, and not remotely flattering to the pale body it covers. Throughout the pitiful non-heist in “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), while everyone else in the un-air-conditioned bank sheds layers or unbuttons blouses, the jacket stays put, getting soggier and dirtier. The robber is still wearing it when he scolds a hostage for smoking. “If I die of cancer, it’ll be half your fault,” she teases. “No,” he mutters, echoing what some teacher or parent must have told him long ago, “it’s because you’re weak.” Everything about this character, who goes by Sal, is pathetic, unless it’s repugnant. There is no reason for us to sympathize with him, and therefore we do. The hostages do, too: just ...
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“The People’s Joker” Is an Outlaw Vision of the Superhero Movie
6Apr By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

“The People’s Joker” Is an Outlaw Vision of the Superhero Movie

“The People’s Joker,” directed by Vera Drew, is the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen—because, unlike studio-produced films in the genre, it responds to the filmmaker’s deep personal concerns. There’s a noble history of directors transforming commercial assignments into personal statements, but it usually doesn’t extend to superheroes. First, the characters’ canonical identities admit of only slight shifts, and even these are inflated by fans to intergalactic proportions. Second, even slight changes impose a butterfly effect on a franchise: changing a detail in a movie today will force change all the way down the line in any planned sequels. By contrast, “The People’s Joker”—a crowdfunded, D.I.Y. parody of Todd Phillips’s 2019 film “Joker”—gives not a hoot about comic-book canon and car...
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“Coup de Chance,” Reviewed: Woody Allen Reëmerges with a Movie About Getting Away with Murder
3Apr By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

“Coup de Chance,” Reviewed: Woody Allen Reëmerges with a Movie About Getting Away with Murder

The most recent movie directed by Woody Allen, “Coup de Chance,” which opens in theatres this Friday, April 5th, is the most prominent theatrical release that any of Allen’s films have had since “Wonder Wheel,” six and a half years ago. But it’s not for lack of trying. In the meantime, Allen has been busy. In August, 2017, he signed a four-picture deal with Amazon. He started shooting “A Rainy Day in New York” a month later, with a cast that included such prominent actors as Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Rebecca Hall, and Liev Schreiber. But, that October, allegations of sexual abuse and harassment emerged against Harvey Weinstein—many of which were reported by Allen’s son Ronan Farrow, in The New Yorker—and against other powerful Hollywood men, energizing the #MeToo move...
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A Sense of Mystery and Wonder in a New “Color Purple”
27Dec By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

A Sense of Mystery and Wonder in a New “Color Purple”

The prime success of the new movie version of “The Color Purple” is its tone: it plays like legend, filtered through the pleasure and the pain of the telling. It’s a musical, adapted from Alice Walker’s novel and from Marsha Norman’s book for the stage play (which is also a musical and provides the new movie with most of its songs). The interjections and interminglings of the musical sequences in the drama endow the story with narrative distance along with its emotional immediacy; this distance from within seemingly conveys the very notion of adaptation, the feeling of tales retold, reimagined, relived. The movie’s director, Blitz Bazawule—making only his second feature, following his ultra-low-budget dramatic fantasy “The Burial of Kojo,” from 2018—catches the sense of mysteries and wond...
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George Santos and the Art of the Scam
14Dec By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

George Santos and the Art of the Scam

Sign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter.In the weeks since George Santos was expelled from Congress, his story has been funnelled straight into the entertainment pipeline, from a memorable sketch on “Saturday Night Live” and reports of a film in the works at HBO to his own exploits on Cameo, where he’s charging five hundred dollars apiece for personalized video messages. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz assess why Santos’s story resonates with audiences, and the enduring appeal of the scammer narrative, from Herman Melville’s “The Confidence-Man” to Meredith Wilson’s “The Music Man.” Scammers embody—and exploit—a central tenet of the American Dream: the promise of a brighter future awaitin...
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“The Sweet East” Plays Fast and Loose with the Politics of Hatred
5Dec By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

“The Sweet East” Plays Fast and Loose with the Politics of Hatred

The distinctive cinematography of Sean Price Williams has been making its mark on modern American independent filmmaking for two decades, ever since 2002, when he was shooting Ronald Bronstein’s “Frownland” (which was eventually released in 2008). Now, with his first feature as sole director, “The Sweet East,” Williams presents something as drastically different from the recent run of independent films as “Frownland” was from its contemporaries. Written by Nick Pinkerton—who, among other things, is a noted film critic—the movie is a picaresque adventure, a sort of contemporary “Wizard of Oz” in which a teen-age girl named Lillian Wade (Talia Ryder) finds herself propelled out of her ordinary American life into a wild and phantasmagorical—though utterly real—world of eccentric characters a...
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The French Are Not Happy About “Napoleon”
30Nov By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

The French Are Not Happy About “Napoleon”

Joaquin Phoenix in Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon.”Photograph courtesy Apple TV+Americans are so used to seeing history played by Americans that the oddity of it hardly registers anymore. Charlton Heston was the Spanish El Cid and the Hebrew Egyptian Moses and the Judean Ben-Hur—believe it or not, he won an Oscar for that one—and his Midwestern accents were taken for granted whomever he played and wherever the character was supposed to have lived.And why not? No one expects the actors in a production of “Julius Caesar” to speak good Latin. Fiction is the premise of all fictions, and that simple truth, along with the (perhaps declining) companion truth that, for the most part, movie stars are made in America, is enough to explain the phenomenon. Indeed, the whole point and rationale—the raison d...
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“Anatomy of a Fall” Is Prestige Cinema as Airport Novel
13Oct By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

“Anatomy of a Fall” Is Prestige Cinema as Airport Novel

The more I consider “Anatomy of a Fall,” the new French courtroom drama by Justine Triet that opens Friday, the more I love “France.” Not France the country (though it is something of a home away from home) but “France” the movie, Bruno Dumont’s frenetic 2021 satire about a TV journalist whose ambitious and intrepid reports, with their standardized format and their unchallenged attitudes, have become sensations of the mediascape. “Anatomy of a Fall” is something of a counterpart to those reports but in the cinematic realm; it’s both a product and an echo of high-minded consensus. It’s a movie of manifest ambition, suggested by the literary milieu in which it’s set and the themes that come with it, but one that realizes it’s ambition with prefabricated attitudes and a numbingly conventiona...
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