The latest and greatest on Blu-ray, including The Croods: New Age, Event Horizon, Celine and Julie Go Boating, and Promising Young Woman.
An article about MoMA's To Save and Project Restoration Festival and its January 18th screening of "Cane River."
A deep dive into the acting career of Glenn Close, celebrating a performer who gets more out of stillness than almost any other actor.
An update of the article dedicating Ebertfest 2018 to Roger Ebert and Mary Frances Fagan. And recognizing Ebertfest Volunteers Leonard Doyle, and Sherren (Sherry) Slade.
Premieres at this weekend's Telluride Film Festival include the latest from Alexander Payne, Errol Morris, Greta Gerwig, Angelina Jolie, Guillermo del Toro and more.
Stephen Cone on "Personal Shopper"; Jack C. Newell on "Open Tables"; Not-so-secret life of Terrence Malick; Studio Ghibli's girl power; Éric Rohmer's battle of the sexes.
An appreciation of the life and work of the legendary producer Menahem Golan.
In the biochemistry class during my naive undergraduate years, the professor jokingly said the capability of metabolizing alcohol depends on our genetic makeup. Thanks to the variations in the genes, some people can produce more enzymes or more active enzymes to take care of alcohol in their body. They can be heavy drinkers, or the ones less susceptible to the hazards caused by alcoholism than their fellow drunks.
That may explain the existence of Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), the "laureate of American lowlifes" who lived a relatively long life despite many days and nights of bottles and women at the bars. As Stephen King says in his insightful book "On Writing," writing usually has no business with drinking ("Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do."). Sometime there are exceptions like Bukowski. Drinking and writing always came together to him, and he had no problem with that.
The dissection of a real life legal case from every possible point of view may be the main subject from Barbet Schroeder's "Reversal of Fortune" but the heart of the film unquestionably resides in one of the most amazing acting performances in the history of cinema: Jeremy Iron's portrayal of Claus Von Bulow
The real Von Bulow was indeed convicted to a thirty year term for the murder of his socialite wife Sunny, played by Glenn Close, but the movie, without taking sides, does make it clear that his sentencing was somehow influenced by the court of public opinion in which everybody believed Claus was guilty, he had to be, he certainly seemed like a man guilty of something.
CHAMPAIGN-URBANA -- Michael Tolkin, the writer-director of 1994's "The New Age," which played at Ebertfest on Thursday, surveyed the packed house from the stage of Champaign's historic Virginia Theater and said, "This now doubles the number of people who saw this film on its first release."
The one complaint I heard the most about Ebertfest this year is that it's too much and too short. Is that a contradiction? Very well, Ebertfest contains contradictions. For now, I'm posting photos. Some concluding thoughts coming soon...
"Barfly" director Barbet Schroeder and Sunset Gun blogger Kim Morgan discuss Bukowski and Hollywood.
Charlie Kaufman, the writer and director of "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), my choice for the best film of the decade, will appear after the screening of his masterpiece at Ebertfest 2010. The 12th annual festival will be held April 21-25 at the landmark 1,600-seat Virginia Theater in Champaign-Urbana, and for the first time ever, all festival Q&A sessions and panel discussions will be streamed live on the Internet.
I AM SO PROUD that eight of the Far-Flung Correspondents will be attending Ebertfest 2010, and so sincerely moved that they're providing their own tickets! A shout-out to Ali Arikan, Seoungyong Cho, Weal Khairy, Michael Mirasol, Omar Moore, Omer Mozzafar, Gerardo Valero, and Grace Wang. Only Robert Tan, who has been under the weather, will be missing. They're all bloggers, and will be on a panel Friday morning about the Global Web of Filmlovers.
Q. Why did you refer to the novel The Da Vinci Code as a "preposterous" work of fiction, yet fail to label the Bible as such? Do you honestly believe the Bible is a work of non-fiction? Aren't parts of the Bible "preposterous"? If your devotion to institutionalized religion colors your ability to write logically, perhaps you should recuse yourself from reviewing films that require an unbiased view.
Shhhhhh. Don't tell a soul. Close Oscar-watchers (and Academy insiders) know that what you are about to read is true -- but few like to talk about these things. When it comes to picking Oscar winners, you can study the stats of Oscars past in search of patterns and clues, but there are certain influential paradigms that defy and transcend conventional statistical analysis.
TELLURIDE, Colo. -- In the blazing noon sun of Labor Day, on a panel discussion in Elks Park, the veteran critic Stanley Kauffmann put his finger on the kinds of films that the Telluride Film Festival does not exist to support: movies made of special effects and technology.
TELLURIDE, Colo. -- The moment that best captured this year's Telluride Film Festival came when three musicians from Cambridge, Mass., were creating a percussion thunderstorm during a silent film from Germany, while a real thunderstorm boomed outside.
It is one of the oddest performances of recent years, an exercise in mannered behavior that has the audience snickering with disbelief before they realize it's all right to laugh because, in a way, it's supposed to be funny. The performance is by Jeremy Irons in "Reversal of Fortune," where he plays Claus von Bulow, a man accused of attempting to murder his wife.
Great Movies
