The Not-Oscars 2013

It’s the morning of the Oscar nominations, and I’m not upset. This is weird. All the films I wanted to see nominated for Best Picture are. All the actors I hoped to see receive nominations for this year’s performances were. Compare and contrast to last year’s fatal omission of Kathryn Bigelow as Best Director, or […]

Top Ten Films: 2013

Hollywood is obsessed with money, I say. Duh, you think in response. But hear me out. In 2013, Hollywood was particularly obsessed with money. Not just with making money, but with telling stories about making — and losing — money. In my Top Ten list last year, I named Zero Dark Thirty my favorite film […]

Italian ‘Beauty’: Death, Dancing & Debauchery In Rome

Think of Rome. All sorts of images may flash into your mind. You might first think of religion, or of the glamor captured in cinema by Fellini in the sixties. Maybe you think of the history, the architecture, the art. Whatever it is, you’ll likely find it in La Grande Bellezza, the latest film from […]

A Divorce: Farhadi Repeats Himself In ‘The Past’

A quarreling couple. A troublesome pregnancy. A deceitful employee. A daughter who knows more than she lets on. If this all sounds familiar, you probably saw A Separation, the 2011 Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film (a first for Iran). Or maybe you saw the newly-released The Past, Asghar Farhadi’s follow-up to that […]

Big Good ‘Wolf’: Scorsese’s Latest Is Excessive To The Max

Is Leonardo DiCaprio this generation’s Robert DeNiro? Yes — at least in the sense that he’s Martin Scorsese’s current muse, and yes in the sense that the movies he stars in tend to have some very hefty running times. From Titanic, the blockbuster that made him an international superstar, to The Aviator, his previous three-hour […]

Screen Full Of Sugar: Disney’s Accidentally Meta ‘Mr. Banks’

Why is P.L. Travers such a bitch? That’s the question central to Saving Mr. Banks, and it’s up to Walt Disney, of all people, to solve the mystery. Movies like this one can be challenging, because the whole key to the problem of the movie is, “Just stop being a bitch!” Too often, this journey […]

Away From ‘Her’: The Ultimate Long-Distance Relationship

Her is a rather unusual film, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s seen Spike Jonze’s other movies (or his music videos). He’s collaborated with Charlie Kaufman a couple of times, first on the brilliantly bizarre Being John Malkovich, which put them both on the cinematic map. Jonze’s adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are was […]

Catching Heat: The Warmest Women Of 2013

(Films discussed in this post: Blue Is The Warmest Color, The Heat, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Drinking Buddies, Enough Said, The Invisible Woman.)Women are so hot right now. Again. Or… still. No matter how many female-driven movies make a splash at the box office, Hollywood never seems to learn its lesson. Sure, the top-grossing […]

Russell Does The ‘Hustle’: An All-American Ode To Bullshit

Hey, Academy, are you paying attention? But of course you are! Here’s a movie featuring a whole bunch of last year’s Oscar nominees, including several past Oscar winners, made by a guy who’s made two Oscar favorites in the last three years. (And now one more.) Basically, there was no way in hell American Hustle […]

Broke In New York: ‘Frances Ha’ & ‘Llewyn Davis’

How’s this for irony? A film about an unappreciated artist made by some of the most praised filmmakers in the world.

All By Myself: Another ‘Survivor’ Lives To Tell

If there’s a theme at the movies for 2013, it’s survival. Sure, lots and lots of movies are about survival — like, almost all of them. The biggest movies at the box office tend to be about the survival of the human race, and plenty of comedies have life-or-death stakes. You could stretch the definition […]

Lone Survivors: The Stubborn Old Men Of ‘Nebraska’ & ‘All Is Lost’

Some movies are tougher sells than others. Certain films are almost willfully difficult to sell. How about a nice uplifting movie called All Is Lost, which features exactly three instances of dialogue — some voice over in the beginning, a distress call spoken into a malfunctioning radio, and one expletive shouted to the heavens. (If […]