The Business of Film and Entertainment
Written by: Victoria Alexander
Really? Not one moment of insight into what happened on Cielo Drive? Tarantino drank the Hollywood Kool-Aid. DiCaprio and Pitt get to hang out and do a lot of driving around. Does writer-director Quentin Tarantino know that the Tate-La Bianca … Continue reading
Written by: Victoria Alexander
Emotionally exhilarating. MAIDEN is a documentary about Tracy Edwards, the first woman to skipper a yacht with an all -female crew in the Whitbread Around the World Ocean Race during the 1989 sailing season. MAIDEN is so fascinating that I … Continue reading
Written by: Victoria Alexander
A stunning, unexpected nightmare for a group of grad students without a clue. Doesn’t leave much room for sympathy for the victims. It’s a clever film worth seeing twice. Director-screenwriter Ari Aster’s HEREDITARY (2018) was certified a hit with critics … Continue reading
Written by: Christopher Llewellyn Reed, Associate Editor
Aquarela (Viktor Kossakovsky, 2018) 2½ out of 4 stars. A frequently beautiful meditation on water in all its forms (ice, snow and pure liquid), the new documentary Aquarela achieves its most spectacular narrative effects when placing people at its center. Unfortunately, … Continue reading
Written by: Christopher Llewellyn Reed, Associate Editor
What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (Roberto Minervini, 2018) 3 out of 4 stars. Italian director Roberto Minervini has, since moving to Texas in 2007, been on a mission to tell elliptical, nuanced stories about both the … Continue reading
Written by: Christopher Llewellyn Reed, Associate Editor
Hillbilly (Sally Rubin/Ashley York, 2018) 3½ out of 4 stars. What is a hillbilly? Who better to ask than the folks in question, and who better to ask the question than a hillbilly, herself? Filmmaker Ashley York (Tig), born and raised … Continue reading
Written by: Rob Goald, Senior Editor
The Cheerful Subversive’s Guide to INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING By Dan Mirvish Routledge/Taylor & Francis A Focal Press Book New York 2017 Learning how to produce ultra-low-budget feature films is a demanding and complicated task. Even earning a bachelor’s degree in Film, … Continue reading
Written by: Christopher Llewellyn Reed
In Lower Manhattan, bordered on the west by the Hudson River, the east by Broadway, the north by Canal Street, and on the south by the World Trade Center site, lies the neighborhood known as Tribeca (formerly spelled “TriBeCa,” each … Continue reading
Written by: Stan Popovich
Many celebrities deal with the pressures of Hollywood on a regular basis. Here are some suggestions on how to manage the stresses and anxieties of dealing with peer pressure when working in Hollywood. 1. Know Where You Stand. Ask yourself … Continue reading
Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Richard Linklater, 2019) 1½ out of 4 stars. I am such a diehard fan of actress Cate Blanchett (Carol) that I would watch her in just about anything, including a film about paint drying. I also … Continue reading
Blinded by the Light (Gurinder Chadha) 2 out of 4 stars. Most can look back at their lives and pinpoint a time in which they had a sort of spiritual awakening through the discovery of some band or song. I … Continue reading
Dora and the Lost City of Gold (James Bobin, 2019) 3½ out of 4 stars. I came to this movie cold, without any experience with its source material, the popular animated Nickelodeon series Dora the Explorer. That show, which began airing … Continue reading
The Kitchen (Andrea Berloff, 2019) 1 out of 4 stars. Last fall saw the release of Widows, director Steve McQueen’s collaboration with bestselling author Gillian Flynn, in which a group of mobster’s wives find themselves denuded of husbands and forced to … Continue reading
Hobbs & Shaw (David Leitch) 1 out of 4 stars. I mainly remember the way it felt. I remember looking up as the camera glanced down at a little set of red buttons that so simply read “NOS 1” and … Continue reading
Cold Case Hammarskjöld (Mads Brügger, 2019) 4 out of 4 stars. Dag Hammarskjöld (1905-1961) was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, serving from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in Africa. An idealistic and militant soul, the … Continue reading
Luce (Julius Onah, 2019) 3½ out of 4 stars. In Luce, director Julius Onah makes up for having afflicted The Cloverfield Paradox on us by delivering a gripping, thought-provoking cinematic essay on race, gender, colonialism, class, power and privilege (white … Continue reading
Gwen (William McGregor, 2018) 2½ out of 4 stars. On Halloween night in 2016 my friends and I sat around, crowded in my college dorm room, to watch a horror movie … what else would one do on Halloween night? … Continue reading
Driven (Nick Hamm, 2019) 2 out of 4 stars. Sometimes when a film does the all too common, unspeakable act of not living up to its exciting and intricate premise, the only thing you can do is offer it a slight … Continue reading
