After a year when the Motion Picture Academy scrubbed its bad idea to create an Oscar category for Most Popular Picture, some of the highest-grossing films were nominated for the top statuette of 2019. Black Panther became the first superhero movie to earn a Best Picture nomination, poised to compete against two other mainstream popular high box office films – Bohemian … [Read more...]
‘The Wife’: Close brings novelistic depth to story of frustrated ambition
Swedish director Bjorn Runge’s The Wife is set in 1992, a time when people still used corded landlines and smoked cigarettes. When Glenn Close, as the title character, accepts a cigarette from an infatuated younger man, she smokes it romantically, like a classic movie star, which of course she is. Close’s character, Joan Castleman, is not a smoker, but she’s sitting in a hip … [Read more...]