By Armond White In Greil Marcus’ original review of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 “Gimme Shelter,” he wrote about “women who can shout like Mary [sic] Clayton–gutty, strong, and tougher than any of the delightful leering figures that are jumping out of the old Stones’ orgy. She can stand up to …
HollywoodandFine.com “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” Noel Coward wrote in his play, “Private Lives.” It certainly makes a difference in Paul Andrew Williams’ “Unfinished Song,” a so-so old-age dramedy that mostly avoids easy laughs but isn’t afraid to use sentimentality to pound its point home. The film is part …
HollywoodandFine.com No one, it is said, knows what goes on in someone else’s marriage. Even more to the point, no one can know what’s going on in another person’s head. Those notions are among many at the crux of Ziad Doueiri’s haunting, provocative “The Attack,” based on the novel by …
By Armond White The Cinemascope frame stretches just wide enough to contain Alain Resnais’s abundant ideas about memory, imagination, love, art, death and life in You Ain‘t Seen Nothin’ Yet. Taking full measure of that vaudeville phrase (also the title of Andrew Sarris’ essay collection containing his superb monograph on …
HollywoodandFine.com This was originally going to be a piece about how wrong it was for Will Smith to remake “The Wild Bunch.” But that metastasized into an idea about remakes and reboots in general. So I wound up simply writing an open letter to Smith about “The Wild Bunch” – …
Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters Love her or hate her, Sofia Coppola has cornered the market on the world of privilege and its discontents. And so it goes with the writer-director’s latest movie, “The Bling Ring,” based on a Vanity Fair true-crime-in-the-Hollywood-Hills article. The film, in limited release this weekend …
By Armond White When Jean-Luc Godard showcased his great, long lateral-pan supermarket sequence in 1970’s Tout Va Bien, the metaphor provided an undeniable satire of the consumerist habit that typifies modern middle-class life even though no previous filmmaker had perceived the depth of such banality. Who could imagine that Godard’s …
Boris Karloff had appeared in something like 60 movies over 11 years before his first important part in Howard Hawks’ “The Criminal Code,” the first of his 13 film appearances in 1931, the year that ended with his breakthrough in “Frankenstein.” The Hawks film — his first release that year …
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HollywoodandFine.com Zack Snyder widens his view as a director with “Man of Steel,” taking a proclivity for creating startling images in the service of storytelling and using it to enlarge and expand the action. As a result, “Man of Steel” works as a compelling big-screen blockbuster because Snyder doesn’t treat …
