Sebastian Maniscalco, currently America’s most popular comedian, amiably approximates himself in the new comedy About My Father opposite a game Robert DeNiro as a movie version of his real-life dad, Salvo Maniscalco. Co-written by the comedian-actor and directed by Laura Terruso, the picture is…
Read More
At 76, Paul Schrader remains the most consistently intriguing American screenwriter working today and perhaps of the last half-century. A standard bearer of the galvanic 70s Hollywood renaissance, his contributions to American film history are lionized and legendary. In the past decade, the filmmaker’s…
Read More
I caught up with Holderman and Simms—a delightful pair of simpatico collaborators tasked with crafting an audience-pleasing commercial entertainment befitting a cast of movie royalty—for a chat about their ambitious new picture.…
Read More
Book Club: The Next Chapter, the follow-up to the popular 2018 romantic comedy that defied ageist Hollywood marketing logic to become a $100 million moneymaker, is a fizzy, funny and frequently wistful comedy featuring a movie royalty quartet looking great and having fun in…
Read More
Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu specializes in hard hitting cultural excoriations that have made him a foremost international voice in both social realism and social critique. His masterful, 2007 Cannes-winning breakout suspenser 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days examined the perils faced by a…
Read More
The first thing to know about Benjamin Millipied’s blazing new Carmen is that it’s a liberal derivation of Bizet’s 1875 masterwork of jealousy, obsession and death. Once Bizet traditionalists depart from expectation, Millipied’s update, which reimagines Bizet’s titular Spanish opera icon though a modern…
Read More
There have been five Evil Dead films in the forty-two years since Sam Raimi’s deliriously unhinged 1983 cabin-in-the-woods demonic possession flick became an instant classic of gore and triumph of tone and craft, a shoestring horror outing made by friends that went on to…
Read More
In their new picture Hilma, Lena Olin and Tora Hallström play cross-generational versions of pioneering Swedish abstract artist and mystic Hilma af Klint, a quintessential woman out of time whose groundbreaking works were dismissed by the early 20th century patriarchal artistic establishment. A modern,…
Read More
Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt—whose three-decade career as an independent filmmaker specializing in spare, minimalist excursions—is an artist freed from American commercial sensibilities; a nonconformist favoring nuance over plot and ambiguity over resolution. In pictures like Wendy and Lucy, about a young homeless woman searching for…
Read More
Kelly Reichardt’s quietly appealing consideration of the life—and life’s work—of an independent artist forms the basis of her new picture, Showing Up, featuring a lovely performance from Michelle Williams as a sculptress navigating the day-to-day while preparing for a gallery opening of her latest…
Read More