By Armond White The question of whether computer animation has killed or enhanced the “magic” of cinema demands other questions, like: How many more times can we tolerate digitally enhanced characters leaping into the air with their spear or knife drawn to descend superhero-like on an opponent? How many zooming …
HollywoodandFine.com Philip Roth may be our greatest living writer. So why would he give himself over to filmmakers who would make a movie as dull, superficial and pedantic as “Philip Roth: Unmasked”? The film, which receives a special theatrical run starting this week at Film Forum in New York, will …
By Armond White As we witness the death of cinephilia, movies like Stoker pop up to remind us how deeply we’ve buried originality, inspiration and sincerity. In Stoker’s story of a teenage girl’s erotic and murderous awakening, India (Mia Wasikowska) endures her father’s funeral by rejecting her grieving mother (Nicole …
HollywoodandFine.com The history books won’t tell you the story of U.S. Marine Gen. Bonner Fellers that you see in “Emperor.” Which is just as well because Fellers’ real story is more chaotic and less overtly heroic than the character portrayed by Matthew Fox in Peter Webber’s new film. Fox is …
HollywoodandFine.com The first time a major feature film came out with this title, it was a 1963 entry by the late Ingmar Bergman – not exactly the Judd Apatow of the Swedes. Now here comes Swiss filmmaker Baran bo Odar with “The Silence,” a film about a serial killer in …
Hollywoodandfine.com You absolutely don’t have to be a fan of the rock group Journey to enjoy Ramona Diaz’s “Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey.” Because I’m not. Really. Not to put too fine a point on it, but as someone who was working as a rock critic for the first decade …
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 …
HollywoodandFine.com Though Ray Winstone has been a TV star in Great Britain since the mid-1970s, a lot of Americans got their first sighting of the beefy British actor with Gary Oldman’s 1997’s “Nil By Mouth” or 2000’s “Sexy Beast.” Since then, he’s created a small niche for himself in American …
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 …
HollywoodandFine.com By its nature, movies set aboard submarines should come with built-in suspense. If the story is set during a war, well, there’s always the threat of attack. Even during peacetime, submarines are tense settings: the claustrophobia factor, the ever-present possibility of mechanical failure, that whole trapped-at-the-bottom of the ocean …
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” …
HollywoodandFine.com A roiling visual extrusion rendered from computer-generated imagery, “Jack the Giant Slayer” makes you long for the days of Ray Harryhausen. With his sometimes jerky stop-motion animation that was state-of-the-art movie magic for decades, Harryhausen somehow convinced you more thoroughly that his characters were alive and had feelings and …
HollywoodandFine.com Chan-wook Park’s “Stoker” is audaciously, in-your-face creepy and exhilarating in a way few films have been since David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” Because it’s not just the creepiness – but the way Park gets you involved in his world so that you can’t look away. Written by Wentworth Miller (yeah, …
HollywoodandFine.com You watch a documentary like “A Place At the Table” and it makes you wonder about all the people who still regard large swaths of the population as takers. The thinking is that these people aren’t able to support themselves and their families because they don’t want to. They’d …
