14 articles

1 hour ago

Anne Marie is tracking Judy Garland's career through musical numbers...

1941 was a year of beginnings and endings for Judy Garland. It was the year of Judy's last Andy Hardy film (Life Begins for Andy Hardy, wherein nobody sang). And she wasn't just growing up on film - 1941 was also the year of Judy's first marriage: to David Rose, the musical director of the Tony Martin Radio Show. At only 19, Judy Garland was transitioning from child sensation to full fledged star.

The Movie: Babes on Broadway (1941)

The Songwriters: E.Y. Harburg (lyrics) and Burton Lane (music)

The Players: Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Virginia Weidler, Fay Bainter, Margaret O'Sullivan, directed by Busby Berkeley.

The Story: As the country entered World War II, the Freed Unit was lining up a series of nostalgia-inflected new hits starring Judy Garland for MGM. While Babes on Broadway looks at first glance like the typical »

- Anne Marie

11 hours ago

This week's Hit Me With Your Best Shot subject is Don Siegel's fascinating whatsit called The Beguiled (1971). It's little like Siegel's other collaborations with his muse Clint Eastwood and assigning it to a genre is also difficult both of which might explain its fairly quiet reputation. With the news coming that Sofia Coppola will soon be remaking it, our eyes drank every frame up. And wow is this story of a wounded Yankee grifter in A Confederate girl's school ripe for a revisit. You might say that imagining how Coppola's halflidded female gaze might view this is nearly as exciting as the movie itself but in some ways it already feels like a Sofia Coppola film. Profound interest in sensual and anthropological gazing at the desires of women who can't articulate their desires? Check!

Some of the English language posters are hilariously false, suggesting it's a shoot-em-up manly western. »

- NATHANIEL R

13 hours ago

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Equals.

I'd be curious to know if Lil Nicky Hoult got into his parents Blockbuster stash around the tender age of eight and saw some things he wasn't supposed to see... like perhaps the 1996 film Trainspotting and the 1997 film Gattaca? Because he's totally spent the past year trying to remake the two of them. Kill Your Friends, the Trainspotting wannabe, has already come and gone without much love lost or gained, and now we have Equals, a shiny "doomed by science fiction" romance for the Swipe Right Age.

Equals - the tale of a gleaming future where emotion's verboten - makes a much more successful case for itself. Yes it echoes Andrew Niccol in every perfume-ad pretty shot, all futuristic silvers and golds shimmering beneath the camera's upturned palm. You've never seen skin as devastatingly luminescent as Hoult's here »

- JA

18 hours ago

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on Strike a Pose.

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Strike a Pose with Madonna: Truth or Dare. After all, that now iconic documentary is really on a league of its own. Then again, this newer doc, which focuses on the male dancers from that 1991 film (and from the Material Girl’s Blond Ambition Tour) cannot help but drum up the comparisons. As a pseudo-sequel to Truth or Dare, Strike a Pose is perhaps less enthralling—no Warren Beatty or Antonio Banderas here—but just as entertaining. And while the first twenty or so minutes of the film do indeed feel like a sequel in spirit if not in name (we get to revisit the tour and the doc in ways that show us how much these dancers kept to themselves even as they seemingly opened up their lives for »

- Manuel Betancourt

21 hours ago

Terrible news to report today. The great Israeli actress Ronit Elkabetz has passed away at only 51 years of age. 

Her last film proved to be her biggest hit (Gett: The Trial of Viviane Absalem) -- we interviewed her right here -- but that courtroom drama was far from her only gem. We first fell (and fell hard) for the intense raven haired beauty in the astounding Late Marriage (2001) where she played the older woman in a sexually intense love affair with a slightly younger man (Lior Ashkenazi) whose parents were eager to marry him off to a "proper" bride and end his long-standing bachelordom. She won the Ophir (Israel's Academy Award) for that film, one of three wins for her as Best Actress.

If you've never seen "Late Marriage," you really must.She also starred in Or (My Treasure) (2004), the international hit The Band's Visit (2007), and other films in both France and Israel. »

- NATHANIEL R

23 hours ago

Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we're highlighting Nostalgia for the Light.

Nostalgia seeps through Peter Flynn’s sophomore film, The Dying of the Light. For good reason one might say. Like many of a certain generation who were too young to appreciate the glory of the mechanics of film projection when it was as common as day and night, I sometimes sound like a fetishist when it comes to talking about the flicker of celluloid as it whirs through its paces on its way to being projected onto the big screen.

Flynn, it would appear, is the same. His first film, Blazing the Trail: The O’Kalems in Ireland, was about people behind the camera in the 1910s, but his newest film is about the people behind the projector – the men and (infrequently) women who »

- Glenn Dunks

19 April 2016 5:30 AM, PDT

Here's what's new recently for your eyeballs.

Newish to DVD/BluRay

• Fifty Shades of Black. Marlon Wayans sends up the Grey S&M movie.

• The Force Awakens. Not available for rental yet but when it is we shall rewatch

• The Forest. In which Natalie Dormer enters Japan's Suicide Forest to confront true terror: the reviews of Gus Van Sant's 'Sea of Trees' which is also set there.

• Ip Man 3. For your completists. I haven't seen any of these since I figured The Grandmaster covered it for me. You?

• The Lady in the Van. In which Maggie Smith gets grittier and descends the economic ladder for once. Maintain high society snobbier via her delusions of

• Norm of the North. Animated. Though probably nothing we need worry about over here.

• The Revenant. That which did rob George Miller of his rightful Best Director Oscar in February.

new to streaming

• Ajin (S1) on Netflix. »

- NATHANIEL R

18 April 2016 8:00 PM, PDT

In April Showers, Team Tfe looks at our favorite waterlogged moments in the movies. Here's Chris on Gone Girl (2014).

Gone Girl is a variation on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, its Nick and Amy being the new George and Martha.  But instead of a pair of unwitting guests, this George and Martha use the media to attack one another - and the verbal barbs are traded in for actual bloodshed. David Fincher loads the film with the darkest rapid fire comedy, much like Edward Albee's acidic play, and the final beats of both can spark immediate audience conversation.

The final act of Gone Girl is where the film reveals its darkest side. If you haven't yet seen the film or read the source novel, then you don't know that the first two acts are pretty twisted themselves. The film's structure and narrative conceits keep us from seeing the true »

- Chris Feil

18 April 2016 3:45 PM, PDT

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on All We Had.

To say Rita Carmichael is Katie Holmes’s best role and best performance to date seems almost like a backhanded compliment. After all, Joey Potter aside, what else comes close to that description? Nevertheless, there’s no denying that Holmes has thrown herself into the role of this drunk single mother whose solution to her problems is putting “all we had” into their car and driving away, hoping the signs (on the road and, you know, of the universe) lead her to where she needs to be.

Holmes is a prickly presence on screen as Rita, finding ways of making her sunken eyes and oft-mimicked mouth quirks work to her advantage to sketch out this clearly broken woman who’s trying her darndest to offer her teenage daughter (a solid Stefania Owen in white trash Rory »

- Manuel Betancourt

18 April 2016 12:00 PM, PDT

Jason from Mnpp here, reporting for "Beauty vs Beast" duty from the middle of the Tribeca Film Festival -- I mean that literally; I am in between screenings right this very minute. (Sidenote: and since I'm not on my usual computer and don't have access to Photoshop, this week's edition is more lo-fi than usual, but we'll make due.) Anyway you know who else is here with me at the festival? James Franco. James Franco is everywhere, in every movie.

Okay okay maybe he's just in two movies - The Fixer and King Cobra - but on top of those I just finished watching 11.22.63 the other day plus it's his birthday on Tuesday, so he certainly feels omnipresent in my life at the moment. So for this week's competition let's look back at one of his finest moments -- David Gordon Green's 4-20-Perfect-10 Pineapple Express, opposite the Bacall to his Don't-Bogart-That-j Mr. »

- JA

18 April 2016 10:00 AM, PDT

With Tale of Tales and The Huntsman: Winter’s War both opening this weekend, we have a sudden double feature of fairy tale movies on our hands. That makes it an excellent time to revisit the only fairy tale film nominated for the Oscar Best Production Design, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. (That seems impossible, I know, but it's true.)

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was the first narrative feature to be shot in the original 3-panel Cinerama process. The second, and last, was How the West Was Won, which I showcased two weeks ago. While the epic Western, or at least some its directors, tried to smooth over the unwieldy 3-camera process with landscapes and the occasional single-camera 70-mm shot, directors Henry Levin and George Pal really ran with Cinerama for their fairy tale epic. The results were a bit bonkers »

- Daniel Walber

18 April 2016 8:46 AM, PDT

Murtada here. Graham Norton always manages to coax stories out of his visiting guests that somehow they never divulge on this side of the Atlantic.This week his guests included Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, selling Florence Foster Jenkins. Norton brings up a recent interview in which Grant claimed all his co-stars hated him. Julianne Moore, Rachel Weisz, Emma Thompson, Sandra Bullock and Drew Barrymore are name checked. Clearly the Music and Lyrics (2007) set was not a happy one as this is what Grant said about Barrymore:

She made the mistake of giving me notes. How would you take that?

Meryl's response is perfect and gets the biggest laugh. Deservedly. She knows how to land a line!

Meryl divulges the one movie in her oeuvre she isn’t happy with. I thought it would be Still of the Night (1982) which she has spoken about before. But it’s actually The French Lieutenant's Woman »

- Murtada Elfadl

18 April 2016 6:00 AM, PDT

Manuel here. I'm gonna keep it short and sweet and let wonderful being all around Emma Thompson do all the talking since her outfits for the upcoming Noah Baumbach film Yen Din Ka Kissa are loud! 

The film, as you may know already, stars Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler, and Ben Stiller (three actors whose gifts for dry humor and acerbic comedy one hopes Baumbach will mine to great effect; he's done it before with Stiller, at least). But really—and I know I'm breaching Actor Month rules here at Tfe—it's Thompson who I'm most looking forward to since her pairing with Baumbach (and with those outfits) is pretty promising. That she's described her character as a "dreadful, passive-aggressive alcoholic" is just icing on the cake, and has me thinking we may be seeing the bawdy side of Thompson we so often get on red carpets but so rarely on screen. »

- Manuel Betancourt

17 April 2016 8:20 PM, PDT

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Holidays.

In the immortal words of Bela Lugosi what music the children of the night make, turning the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival into my favorite playground at the fest. Happy times with horror friends! So it was with some consternation when I saw this year the fest has given us a smaller swing-set upon which to swing - there are only six films showing under the "Midnight" banner (and it's a stretchto label at least two of them as Horror).

But wait! This year's opening film of the Midnight program is Holidays, an anthology consisting of eight short films (each one about a different celebratory day of the calendar) by eight different directing and writing teams, so I suppose that doubles their numbers, in a way. We'll take what we can get.

And with Holidays what we get, »

- JA

14 articles

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