Isabelle Adjani lionized in Techine’s lost masterpiece By Armond White Isabelle Adjani’s screen work is ethereal yet passionate. Once compared to James Dean at the time of her breakthrough role in Francois Truffaut’s 1975 The Story of Adele H., her artistry most resembles Lillian Gish’s but less maidenly and always …
MacFarlane backlash proves the “booboisie’s” desperation By Armond White We survived awards season and the damage done tells us that movie history has lost any sense of dignity. Satirist Seth MacFarlane couldn’t expose how gutless contemporary film culture is without sacrificing himself in the process. As host of the 78th …
By Armond White In the 1957 The Incredible Shrinking Man, a scientific experiment caused a man to experience the world in reverse scale–objects grew threateningly larger as his human potential (and possible death) decreased. That trauma is repeated in Jack the Giant Slayer, a reenactment of the “Jack the Beanstalk” …
By Armond White It can’t be easy for children of famous filmmakers to escape their parents’ shadows. That’s the problem facing Francis Ford Coppola’s offspring, daughter Sofia and son Roman, the most talented of the two. Neither can seem to get out from under their father’s eminence but at least …
Italy 2, Hollywood 0 By Armond White Why are Italian filmmakers so good at political movies and Americans so bad? This week, Marco Bellocchio’s newest film Dormant Beauty has its US. Premiere at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Elio Petri’s 1965 The Tenth Victim shows in a special …
An exclusive CityArts critics discussion of Walter Hill’s comeback By Armond White Bullet to the Head is an event. It is director Walter Hill’s first theatrical film since 2002’s Undisputed and the most meaningful Sylvester Stallone acting vehicle since Rocky. On this occasion I discuss the significance of Bullet to …
YouTube satire tops Gangster Squad By Armond White Gangster Squad is not the first important cinema work of 2013–that would be the YouTube clip “Demand Celebrities Go Fuck Themselves”–but the two are related. Both deal with violence, the top-ranking political issue this news cycle, as an undeniable part of our …
Critic Armond White assesses the past movie year By Armond White In 2012 politics became personal fantasy. Movies weren’t just entertainment but were used to justify prejudiced (even escapist) points of view. Critics misread films to suit political partisanship but they could do so only because filmmakers were similarly biased. …
Django is Junk By Armond White Brazenly inauthentic, Django Unchained is unmistakably QT’s vision–trivializing slavery’s true deep treachery–and it’s an impersonal, privileged vision. Tarantino, who commands more leverage than any Hollywood director besides Spielberg, is beyond needing to look cool about his race obsession. He’s got Jackson to satisfy his …
David O. Russell brings up a romantic Playbook By Armond White Pat and Tiffany, a recently paroled psychiatric patient and young widow in David O, Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, argue on the street of their Pennsylvania neighborhood, pouring out their anxieties and defenses–all the time emanating undeniable sexual attraction. This …
The Pageantry of Rhetoric How Spielberg’s Lincoln parlays the “Great Man” notion of history By Armond White “You begin your second term with semi-divine status,” the 16th President of the United States is told in Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln. The evidence of that status is in the film’s mythifying visual …
By Armond White “Sex sells” says Mark O’Brien, the 38-year-old writer and poet played by John Hawkes in The Sessions. So he decides to write about his quest to lose his virginity, an effort made unusual due to contracting polio as a child and living in an iron lung except …
Cloud Atlas disgraces Griffith’s legacy By Armond White The Lana and Andy Wachowski siblings have teamed up with German director Tom Tykwer to film Cloud Atlas, a nearly three-hour adaptation of the novel by David Mitchell. This filmmaking super group’s one movie feels like six bad movies. Six stupid–as in …
Alex Cross and Detropia zombify a city By Armond White Detroit’s old magnificent Michigan Theater was one of the country’s finest cinema edifices. A palace of dreams, its vaulted ceiling rose up nine stories–as high as one’s imagination could rise. It had a grand staircase that one ascended on the …
