By Armond White The difference between Antonio Fargas playing a pathetic Black queen based on Jason Holliday in Next Stop Greenwich Village and Jason Holliday playing himself in Portrait of Jason is crucial. Fargas, a real actor, conveyed the multiple and paradoxical meanings in a dramatized character; Holliday, as an …
HollywoodandFine.com Painfully derivative, “Oblivion” is Strike Two against director Joseph Kosinski, who made the vacantly gorgeous “Tron: Legacy.” Unfortunately reminiscent of many other, better movies, “Oblivion” is a comic-book – excuse me, graphic novel – adaptation that has one thing in its favor: It’s not in 3D. Otherwise, this Tom …
By Armond White Comedian Chris Rock embarrassed himself at this year’s New York Film Critic Circle dinner when presenting a prize to the Ken Burns film The Central Park Five. The black, Brooklyn-born Rock declared “It makes you think I was wrong. Burns shows we were all wrong!” about the …
HollywoodandFine.com Jacob Hatley’s documentary about the late Levon Helm (who died in 2012) is a flinty valedictory to a rough-hewn but cagey and soulful musician. “Ain’t In It For My Health” is a title that comes with two meanings. One is the issue of Helm’s mortality, on painful display in …
By Armond White The affecting if imperfect Les Miserables was cruelly mocked because its essentially Christian story of forgiveness and redemption was out of sync with modern movie nihilism. It takes a cult figure like Terrence Malick to challenge this intolerance in his boldly Christian new film To the Wonder. …
HollywoodandFine.com I recall a while back that a fellow critic took offense when I referred to Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg” as “not an audience-friendly film.” He felt that I was using the term pejoratively – as though I was saying there was something wrong with any film that didn’t make a …
HollywoodandFine.com Brian Helgeland’s “42” is an old-fashioned film in the most modern sense of the term. Even as it embraces big-screen storytelling that takes us back to a golden era of history, it gives uplift without ignoring the pain and sacrifice that went into the achievements being depicted. This story …
By Armond White We are fortunate to be spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful: emphatic about race grievance and loaded with numerous Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has fashioned 42, a superbly watchable tale, from Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of professional baseball …
HollywoodandFine.com If Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” was too much the dialogue-driven, story-heavy film for your liking, you’ll probably be more in the mood for his latest, “To the Wonder,” which features Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams and Olga Kurylenko in its cast. I hesitate to say that it stars …
HollywoodandFine.com “Disconnect” is in the “Crash”/ “Nashville”/ “Short Cuts” school of story-telling, bringing together three disparate storylines that ultimately provide echoes and resonance between themselves, while involving people of tangential connection. But in Henry-Alex Rubin’s film, from Andrew Stern’s script, the connections – or the way they’re made – is …
