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Stephen Frears’ Philomena hardly marks the first time Steve Coogan has played an ordinary fellow, but it feels like a definitive forward step in a peculiar and interesting career. To some, he’ll never stop being the British TV character Alan Partridge; to me, he’s always the guy from the under-seen Tristram Shandy, who pops up in brilliant cameos in all sorts of places (including Hot Fuzz). Continue reading
Tom Blank is on a mission. A Navy veteran and retired director who served his career in television, Blank and his wife moved in 2005 from Hollywood to Eugene, where he immediately took up the cause of advocating for movies as cultural and spiritual artifacts. Continue reading
For a film based on a graphic novel, it’s fitting that Blue Is the Warmest Color opens with the discussion of another novel, La Vie de Marianne by Pierre de Marivaux. The 18th-century author cleared a path for romanticists like Jane Austen to delve into an examined life that balances reason with emotion, a theme director Abdellatif Kechiche also examines in his fervid, coming-of-age love story. Continue reading
Director Steve McQueen’s new film is leaps and bounds above his last. The artfully tiresome, cramped and cold Shame gave little clue that McQueen would follow it with a film as grand and intimate as 12 Years a Slave, which tells the ugly, astonishing true story of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man who was kidnapped and sold as a slave in 1841. Continue reading
If Gary Ross’s Hunger Games was a solid piece of entertainment with a sort of finger-wagging moral streak (Look how bad this is! This society is sooooo corrupt!), Francis Lawrence’s Catching Fire is its older sibling, an honest-to-goodness movie (as opposed to just an adaptation) with a nasty dark side and a sullen but fierce heart. Continue reading
Genre breeds familiarity, and then formula, and then contempt. This is especially true when it comes to romantic comedies, which seemed to suffocate on their own fey cuteness with the disappearance of such seminal directors as Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks. Continue reading
In Kill Your Darlings, Daniel Radcliffe, with a mop of tousled hair half swallowing his face, plays the young Allen Ginsberg, when the now-renowned poet was but an innocent Columbia freshman. You can stop thinking of Radcliffe as Harry Potter now; since that series ended, he’s made a career of heading off in the opposite direction, and his role in John Krokidas’ directorial debut might be the final step on the road to being taken seriously. Continue reading
Three forces drive How I Live Now: Meg Rosoff, on whose award-winning young adult novel the film is based; Saoirse Ronan, who has managed to make watchable everything she’s been in, even Hanna; and Kevin Macdonald, whose track record as a director is spotty at best. Continue reading
If it all ended with a zombie apocalypse, I’d spend the last days shacked up in Costco. There are enough supplies to last me a while, a gazebo to camp in and every Friday I’d have first-in-line access to the free samples. Until that fateful day when the dead walk the Earth, the closest we have for preparation is a genre of movies that has inspired both cult and mainstream followings. The Majestic Theatre taps into this zeitgeist with its short, and anything-but-sweet, Hallow’s Eve Zombie Film Festival, featuring three classics from the genre. Continue reading