If I were to make a top 10 list of my favorite movie top 10 lists, the alt-weekly snobs at the Village Voice and the LA Weekly would be on there somewhere. Like Film Comment and IndieWire (with whom this list bears striking resemblances), they try a little too hard to convince us they’re smarter [...]
Filed under: Lists | 15 Comments »
Daniel Craig in Defiance
Because of the holiday, the new release calendar is kind of in limbo, but two movies are being released today in New York and Los Angeles with misguided hopes for some kind of Oscar action. Suffice it to say that one is called Good and the other is just bad.
Defiance. As directed [...]
Filed under: Weekend Forecast | 12 Comments »
Glimmer, our man in Houston, dropped a dime on the Film Comment Top 20 in a thread way back on December 26, but we were still feeling woozy from too much Christmas nog and it eluded our notice.
Well, the empty bottles have been set out by the curb; the tinsel, wrapping and decorations have been [...]
Filed under: Lists | 40 Comments »
The bride wore…yellow
The big news at LiC over the extended holiday weekend was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Christmas morning. I’m a little talked out about that one at the moment, but feel free to join in the conversation over on the review thread anyway or simply add your two cents here - [...]
Filed under: Watercooler | 49 Comments »
Grrrrrr…
In Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood steps out from behind the camera and onto the big screen for the first time since 2004’s Million Dollar Baby. Taking a page from the character continuum he began with Dirty Harry, here he plays Walt Kowalski, a racist Korean War veteran, retired Detroit autoworker and recent widower. Alienated from [...]
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This one made LiC’s Watch List for 2009 based on the cast and because I liked Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland. I have to admit though, the trailer doesn’t do anything for me. It looks like a routine Hollywood thriller in every way.
Of course, as I’m fond of pointing out, trailers are usually [...]
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“I’m not sad. The corset just cut off the blood supply to
my head and I can’t move the muscles of my face.”
Last weekend I sat down to tap out the Movies You May Have Missed column and I swear there was absolutely nothing worth mentioning. I figured a day or two before Christmas was a [...]
Filed under: DVD | 15 Comments »
I just finished watching the day-after rerun of this episode of Charlie Rose which originally aired Christmas night. Charlie has an unfortunate habit of dropping plot spoilers willy nilly and, though he’s not as bad here as he was on two episodes about The Reader (author Bernhard Schlink one night and Kate Winslet, David Kross, [...]
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Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
It is said that youth is wasted on the young, but in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the title character is blessed - and cursed - to live life the other way around. Born a frail, infant-sized old man with cataracts and arthritis, [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 54 Comments »
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Christmas day brings out a flock of new wide releases and expansions so the usual Weekend Forecast turns up a day early.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It feels like I’ve been waiting for this film forever and here it is finally some 360 [...]
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Here are the top 20 films on IndieWire’s 2009 Critics’ Poll.
The Flight of the Red Balloon
A Christmas Tale
WALL-E
Wendy and Lucy
Happy-Go-Lucky
Paranoid Park
Still Life
Silent Light
Synecdoche, New York
Waltz with Bashir
Rachel Getting Married
In the City of Sylvia
My Winnipeg
Let the Right One In
Milk
The Edge of Heaven
Hunger
The Wrestler
Ballast
Man on Wire
I’m thrilled to see A Christmas Tale coming in at #2 and [...]
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Opening credits of To Kill A Mockingbird directed by Robert Mulligan (1925 - 2008)
A number of Hollywood notables have passed away in the last few weeks. LiC has been taking a break from regular news items but I didn’t want the year to with these losses going unmentioned.
Forrest J. Ackerman, Sci-Fi Legend: 1916 - 2008. [...]
Filed under: Obituaries | 8 Comments »
Here’s another trailer from a film that made a splash at Cannes this year. Presented by Martin Scorsese, Gomorrah (spelled Gomorra outside of the US) prods the underbelly of the rampant organized crime in Naples, Italy. Roberto Saviano, the man who researched and wrote the book on which the film is based currently lives in [...]
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James Gray’s Two Lovers got decent notices when it premiered at Cannes last May. Writing for Cinematical at the time, Kim Voynar called it darker, more intellectual and more thoughtful than a typical American romantic drama. Here’s the first trailer for it I’ve seen:
The film starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw and Isabella Rossellini [...]
Filed under: Trailers | 4 Comments »
