HollywoodandFine.com Here’s what I loved about this year’s Emmy Awards: Well, nothing, really – I didn’t watch them. I avoid award shows like they were herpes – and they tend to spread just that easily. But there was one thing I thought of afterward that did make me smile: all …
HollywoodandFine.com The 51st New York Film Festival kicks off tonight, with a lineup that runs the gamut from mainstream action (“Captain Phillips”) to Spike Jonze’s latest, “Her” (his first since critics and the public unjustly crucified his film of “Where the Wild Things Are” for not being a warm and …
HollywoodandFine.com The Republican noise machine has become such an overpowering presence in our world – manipulating the media with its messages, preying on the fear of the uninformed – that the whole idea of facts (the reality-based world, as someone in George W. Bush’s administration so dismissively put it) seems …
By Armond White Maybe if Ron Howard hadn’t been the most adorable child actor in Hollywood history, he wouldn’t have gone on to be a filmmaker who makes everything banal–cutesifying every story, no matter the topic, into movies so dull and unoriginal reviewers reflexively–mistakingly–call them “well crafted.” Howard’s second career …
HollywoodandFine.com Either the title of the documentary “Muscle Shoals” resonates with you – in which case it resonates hard – or you have no idea what it means. But you should – or you should find out by watching the movie, one of the year’s most entertaining and enriching nonfiction …
HollywoodandFine.com As directorial debuts by actors go, “Don Jon” is an auspicious one. Too many of these projects are vanity affairs, the chance for the actor to try get all the focus. Alternatively, it’s a form of therapy, acted out in front of a camera and broadcast to the world. …
HollywoodandFine.com Ron Howard’s “Rush” is winning all sorts of praise as being daring (for taking on subject matter that apparently isn’t an automatic audience magnet), a throwback to the 1970s (when filmmakers took more risks) and just plain sexy and exciting. Yet I found it to be exactly as middlebrow …
By Armond White Two films on faith this week are not a coincidental appearance. They suggest a transition in culture from the prevailing agnosticism to spiritual awareness. One film is masterly, the other fumbling. In Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, Keller Dover is a modern man possessed of Biblical rage when his …
HollywoodandFine.com Denis Villeneuve had two films at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. The better one was called “Enemy.” The one that’s getting the big studio release this week is called “Prisoners.” Being sold with an adrenalized trailer featuring the histrionics of Hugh Jackman, “Prisoners” is meant to be a thriller. …
By Armond White Harvey Weinstein may call 2013 “a great moment” for “great black filmmakers” just because he happens to be releasing three high-profile films with Black subjects, but the year’s first real sign of new life and energy in movies about Black Americans is the low-budget Newlyweeds, written and …
