By Armond White One of the major Academy Award bloopers occurred in 1974 when Robert Redford was nominated Best Actor for The Sting and not The Way We Were (both were released in 1973). He seemed miscast and distant in the former but movie-star idolized and emotionally committed in the …
HollywoodandFine.com Pity the poor filmmaker who has to follow Alex Gibney in tackling any subject. Gibney, the Oscar-winning documentarian, has made a string of tough, incisive nonfiction films examining such topics as Enron, the Iraq war and beyond. His 2010 documentary about crooked Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, “Casino Jack and …
By Armond White It was impossible for Kimberly Peirce to direct a remake of Carrie that could live up to Brian DePalma’s 1976 original. Two cultural events got in the way. First, political correctness so dominates our culture that the mythological aspects in Carrie’s reverse-Cinderella story (a repressed, unpopular high …
HollywoodandFine.com Oscar-winner Jonathan Demme has built a whole side business making films that most other filmmakers would be happy to have as a career: documentaries about music and musicians. Boswell to Neil Young through three films, Demme has also made a film about Robyn Hitchcock – and now Italy’s cult …
HollywoodandFine.com Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” is the year’s most powerful film, an arthouse masterpiece which demands to be seen – and which will punch mainstream audiences in the gut. McQueen may be the most distinctive filmmaker to emerge since Quentin Tarantino. But while this film deals with similar …
By Armond White Brutality, violence and misery get confused with history in 12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen’s adaptation of the 1853 American slave narrative by Solomon Northup, who claims that in 1841, away from his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., he was kidnapped and taken South where …
HollywoodandFine.com Like bookends – or perhaps a double-feature for adrenaline junkies – “All Is Lost” comes on the heels of “Gravity” with the distaff and earthbound version of a similar story. But where Sandra Bullock barely stopped talking during “Gravity,” Robert Redford barely says a word in the course of …
] Perhaps it’s unfair to critique a movie based on a Danish film that virtually nobody in America has seen, “A Hijacking,” so let’s just begin with this: I caught up with “Captain Phillips” yesterday at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, with my son. Its conventionality surprised me given that …
By Armond White Paul (shaky-cam) Greengrass makes another mess of recent political history in Captain Phillips. This time Greengrass fakes a docu-drama about the 2009 incident when the Maersk Alabama cargo ship, piloted by Vermont merchant marine captain Richard Phillips, was seized off Africa’s eastern coast by Somali pirates, then …
HollywoodandFine.com Randy Moore’s “Escape from Tomorrow” may be the year’s most subversive film: a horrifying satire of the manufactured fun we’ve come to associate with the Disney assembly line. Make no mistake: I’m a huge fan of the shiny, witty entertainment which, for years, has been the Disney trademark. I …
