By Armond White The Weinstein Company (formerly Miramax) really knows how to sell its product. They even sell a movie while you’re watching it which is the first problem with Shane Salerno’s Salinger. This bio-doc of the fiction writer J.D. Salinger, who became something of a recluse in the years …
By Armond White Westerns used to be called “shoot ‘em ups”–affectionately by moviegoers and industry insiders who enjoyed the genre’s familiar characters and routines, content that its visceral exercise would satisfy their common anxieties. Those anxieties are denied by today’s CGI, comic book-based spectacles based in juvenile naivete–and juvenile cynicism–that …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ll say this about “Adore”: It never goes where you expect it to. This Australian film, from director Anne Fontaine, was titled “Two Mothers” when it screened at Sundance in January, “The Grandmothers” when it was a short novel by Doris Lessing. “Adore” seems more descriptive, if more vague …
What’s missing, what’s visionary and what’s wrong at LGBT film festival By Armond White Why isn’t Julian Hernandez’s new movie I Am Happiness on Earth part of NewFest? The 25th annual showcase of LGBT films (at Lincoln Center, Sept 6 to 11) should be centered on work by world-class filmmakers …
HollywoodandFine.com Lynn Shelton obviously isn’t a filmmaker whose work suits everyone’s taste. With her lightly scripted, improvisational approach to movies, there’s a certain shaggy quality to her work – or at least to the films of hers I’ve seen (and liked): “Humpday” and “Your Sister’s Sister.” Add “Touchy Feely” to …
HollywoodandFine.com After all the hype about its supposedly mind-blowing revelations about the late J.D. Salinger, Shane Salerno’s “Salinger” turns out to be a hype – an overblown, overlong documentary about a famous writer, with little that is either truly revelatory or earth-shaking, at least if you’ve been paying attention at …
HollywoodandFine.com Hannah Fidell’s “A Teacher,” opening in limited release this week, is exactly the kind of movie I love to discover at film festivals: small, low-budget, without famous faces – but with a strong dramatic vision and the intelligence to carry it out with minimal resources. It seems like a …
By Armond White After decades of inspired, always modern, genre-revising work, Brian DePalma finally goes derivative in Passion. His remake of Alain Corneau’s 2010 Crime d’amore isn’t up to the level of that well-cast but trashy film. DePalma merely rehashes its plot–moving the story from Paris to Berlin where a …
HollywoodandFine.com “Getaway” is like the ultimate reductionist car-centric action film. It feels less like a movie made from an actual script and more like director Courtney Solomon composed a list of things he wanted to put in, then assembled those items into something that vaguely resembled a movie. If there …
By Armond White Like molasses in January, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a slow-moving, dull cliché, an art cliché. Director David Lowery tediously imitates the style of 1970s American Renaissance movies in this agonizing tale of an outlaw couple Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara) in 1930s Texas. But …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ll admit it. I have a critic’s crush on Kathryn Hahn. Jill Soloway’s witty, surprising “Afternoon Delight” only confirms it. I’ve been a Hahn fan for a number of years; I celebrated when she landed the lead (opposite Hank Azaria) of a sit-com called “Free Agents” (and mourned when …
By Armond White Rappers were always welcomed by the art world–a fact of the downtown avant-garde as captured in Blondie’s 1981 Rapture music video–even before Kanye West and Jay-Z deliberately sought art world approval. Jay-Z’s new music video Picasso Baby not only crosses the Black Curtain of limited, ghettoized knowledge, …
HollywoodandFine.com A fascinating patchwork of news footage and home movies, “Our Nixon” is at once intriguing and compelling, an inside peek at people who seemed to make secrecy a watchword. Indeed, Richard Nixon’s presidential administration was as secretive as they came – at least until the Reagan years (and then …
HollywoodandFine.com “Passion” isn’t Brian De Palma’s first remake, but it may be his worst: an over-inflated, melodramatically hot-blooded version of what was a cool French thriller. The French film, 2010’s “Love Crimes” from Alain Corneau, starred Ludivine Sagnier as the ambitious but mild-mannered No. 2 to a snaky executive played …
