Justin Lin may strike some as out of place in the pantheon of contemporary auteurs. The Taiwanese-born American filmmaker, best known for having directed Fast Five and its sequel, Fast & Furious 6 makes unabashedly populist blockbusters for mainstream audiences — hardly the purview of a “serious” artist. His films,…
I. First, Something About the Badges (Then We’ll Get to the Coens) Someday I’m going to write a song and call it “Ballad of the Blue Badge.” I haven’t figured out a rhyme scheme yet, let alone a melody, so please allow this outline to suffice: At Cannes, the color…
In Arnaud Desplechin’s English-language Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Benicio Del Toro — freed at last from the tyranny of playing bit-part heavies in American thrillers and action movies — is James Picard, a Blackfoot Indian who has lost his way in post-World War II America. He’s a…
Nerd alert. J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness opens today, and, at risk of revealing just how deep our love of the Enterprise and its crew goes, suffice it to say we’ve been re-watching Star Trek: The Animated Series (which, by the way, is great and on Netflix Instant Watch)…
It’s that thing where we are really, really bummed about Bill Hader leaving Saturday Night Live. This Saturday, May 18, the final SNL episode featuring Hader as a cast member will air on NBC. Hader has plans to move to Los Angeles with his family and continue making movies. (His…
“Who are you?” pleads a doomed man as Benedict Cumberbatch looms into his first close-up in Star Trek Into Darkness. The answer is Khan. And that’s not a spoiler — it’s a selling point. A less secretive director (i.e., all save the ghost of Stanley Kubrick) would trumpet that his…
Young people are lovely in ways they can’t comprehend until years later. Yesterday’s haircut straight out of Scooby-Doo becomes tomorrow’s despondent comb-over. With the advent of varicose veins, the pale, dimpled legs you once hated now seem in memory not so far off from the lily stems of Botticelli’s Venus…
Daniel Mindel, A.S.C., is part of an ever-shrinking population: cinematographers who have yet to shoot a feature digitally. He acknowledges that he “will be forced” to do it eventually by “the corporate entities that drive our industry,” but he believes “there is no need to use an inferior technology at…
One of the most exciting things about attending the Cannes Film Festival is being among the first people to see the films the world will be talking about. That’s one of the terrible things, too: There’s no one to warn you when you’re about to see a puppy murder, a…
The biggest puzzlement of these early days of the festival comes from Sofia Coppola, one of my favorite working directors. Until now, I have loved every one of Coppola’s movies: I love her sure and delicate touch, and she’s better than any other contemporary filmmaker at capturing the greatness of…
François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful, a portrait of a 17-year-old French call girl, is something else again. This is another story about a family in crisis: Isabelle (played by Marine Vacth, a stunning-looking if ultimately inert actress) is a student who still lives at home with her mother, stepfather, and…
Nearly everyone I know who has seen the official poster for the 66th Cannes Film Festival — a bird’s-eye view of a kiss between a young Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward — has been crazy about it. The couple’s lips meet in the center of a perfect sunburst. She’s two…
Chambers of Fear owner Paul Boyd tends to get a little excited when describing everything that his company will be featuring at Phoenix Comicon this year. It’s only natural, considering that the local haunted house’s booth at the event will be twice as big as last year’s and will sport…
Those eager for clues as to what goes down in the long-awaited fourth season of Arrested Development got a few when Netflix released a trailer for the upcoming Bluth family installment, which drops in its entirety Sunday, May 26, on Instant Watch. One scene in particular caught our eye: Michael…
Grab a sweater and stock up on your snacks of choice — here are five movies worth heading to the theater to see this month. The Great Gatsby Though it’s garnered mixed early reviews, Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby will be one thing for sure: visually stunning. The…
There’s a scene in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s hyper-rich, super-awkward Jay Gatsby takes it upon himself to redecorate the bachelor pad of his less-prosperous friend, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Gatsby’s old flame, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), is coming to Nick’s house for tea. Eager to…
Farm films blow up human drama to mythic, big-sky terms in which the world itself is represented by a character’s land, hard-earned and easily lost. Vast landscapes, both psychic and literal, are threatened by unstoppable outside forces. Kind of like zombie movies, farm films are vast canvases for directors to…
For At Any Price Director Ramin Bahrani, Bigger Films Demand Bigger Targets
Responding to the uproar in April over the passage — and President Obama’s signage — of the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act,” the gene-bending agri-giant Monsanto issued a press release dismissing any attendant conspiracy theories as “worthy of a B-grade movie script.” They got it half right. Immediate in its politics…
The supreme testament to Hitchcock is that no matter how many years pass, his work exerts an ever-stronger influence. Just last month came Park Chan-Wook’s reimagining of Shadow of a Doubt, Stoker, and last year Anthony Hopkins did Hitchcock as a Hitchcock character in Hitchcock — and let’s not forget…
One of the most beguiling of the many stories all knotted up in Salman Rushdie’s brilliant, baggy, exhausting 1981 novel Midnight’s Children concerns a lovelorn doctor, his beautiful patient, and that timeless exemplar of old-world prudishness: a sheet with a hole in it. The patient, Naseem, not yet of marriageable…
In the course of reviewing movies in the early 2000s, just as computer-generated special effects were becoming radically sophisticated and also were, increasingly, becoming the chief selling point of big-ticket movies, I more and more often found myself invoking the name “Ray Harryhausen.” He died on Tuesday, May 7, at…
In his new film, the social drama At Any Price, director and co-writer Ramin Bahrani examines how the transformation of food into intellectual property through seed patents has corrupted, impoverished, or dissolved the American family farm. As with the Iranian-American director’s previous films (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo),…
