HollywoodandFine.com The visual trickery will catch your attention – but it’s the performance behind it that will hold you and move you in Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone,” opening Wednesday (11/21/12) in limited release. The director of the harrowing “Un Prophete” – with its gritty violence and interracial tensions in …
HollywoodandFine.com Pity poor Toby Jones. A few years ago, he got what he probably thought was the role of a lifetime, playing Truman Capote in “Infamous,” a movie about the writing of “In Cold Blood.” Then Philip Seymour Hoffman swooped in playing the title role in Bennett Miller’s “Capote,” winning …
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 …
HollywoodandFine.com The heart wants what the heart wants, as Woody Allen so famously said. That’s not news to the writers of tragic fiction. Misplaced affection – or the death of one love at the birth of another – is the bedrock of classic tales as diverse as “An American Tragedy” …
HollywoodandFine.com Feel-good movies about people with mental disorders – from “As Good As It Gets” to “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” and beyond – face the same challenge. They have to take the psychological issues they deal with – depression, OCD, bipolar disorder – seriously enough to avoid trivializing …
HollywoodandFine.com It has been years – at least since Zoe Cassavetes’ underseen “Broken English” and perhaps since she burst on to the scene in the early 1990s – since Parker Posey has had a role as meaty and perfect for her as Susan Felders in Michael Walker’s “Price Check.” Walker’s …
HollywoodandFine.com Enlightenment, as we learned this week, is a two-way street. Or, as Dorothy Parker once said, you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think. Lest you think that we are living in a unique period in history – with half the country believing in angels but …
HollywoodandFine.com “Starlet,” opening Friday (11/9/12) in limited release, may be one of the year’s most surprising little movies, a tough-minded, low-budget tale that never quite leads you where it seems to be going. Not that where it’s going is somewhere you’d choose for yourself. But writer-director Sean Baker hooks you …
HollywoodandFine.com Don’t know much about history – but you don’t have to in order to be captivated by Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” Instead of making a conventional biopic, Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner chose to use a single month of Lincoln’s presidency – January, 1865 – to examine the character, power …
No, Nancy Olson doesn’t think think Betty Schaeffer, her level-headed character in “Sunset Blvd,” goes back to Artie — the financee (Jack Webb) she dumped — after her new lover Joe Gillis (William Holden) gets plugged by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). “She injured that relationship, and Artie’s not going to …
HollywoodandFine.com You’re as old as you feel – unless you’re James Bond. Then you’re both ageless and timeless. But as “Skyfall,” the newest adventure of 007, shows, even the world’s most dangerous secret agent needs to keep up with the times. And so director Sam Mendes and a trio of …
By LOU LUMENICK It’s a question that’s fascinated audiences since “Casablanca’’ premiered in New York City 70 years ago this month: What ever happened to Rick and Ilsa? Was saloonkeeper Richard Blaine, played so iconically by Humphrey Bogart, ever reunited with his beautiful ex-lover Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), whom he …
HollywoodandFine.com There are pleasures to be had from Yaron Zilberman’s “A Late Quartet,” opening in limited release today (11/2/12), principally having to do with its treatment of group dynamics battling artistic temperaments. The question is whether those are sufficient to warrant sitting through the rest of it. Set in the …
