It was just Sunday that Julianne Moore won a much-deserved Oscar for beautifully, elegantly portraying a woman navigating the slippery, debilitating reality of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Now, she’s back in theaters again in David Cronenberg’s blunt-force satire Maps to the Stars, where the tone is a wee bit different: We witness her making a putrid bowel movement, engaging in a … [Read more...]
The winter season in film: Cooler months offer likely Oscar candidates
Sorry, fans of superheroes and special effects, the summer is over and Hollywood is ready to bring out its A-list (for “Adult”) fare. This is the season for films of substance, even if Tom Cruise is back with his fourth Mission: Impossible flick, director David Fincher is trying to remake a Swedish film noir into a domestic blockbuster and Martin Scorsese tries his hand at … [Read more...]
The View From Home 21: New releases on DVD
Sweet Smell of Success (Criterion) Release date: Feb. 22 Standard list price: $21.99 Ahead of its time in 1957, Sweet Smell of Success is, like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, one of Hollywood’s most sordid exposes of the entertainment/media complex. It dismantles the promotion industry as an intractably corrupt system, while tapping into deeper, more sinister subtext in … [Read more...]
The View From Home 16: New releases on DVD
Everyone Else (Cinema Guild) Release date: Oct. 26 SLP: $20.49 If “mainstream cinema” is shorthand for grounded, explicable, coherent story arcs told with logic and closure, then art cinema – the yin to Hollywood’s yang – is the terrain of the unknown, the inexplicable, the frustratingly open-ended. Its filmmakers are fully aware that, as in life, they don’t have all the … [Read more...]
‘Completely Hollywood’ gives its actors plenty of room for laughs
Twenty-three years ago, three irreverent wags devised a breakneck evening of comedy, The Compleat Wrks of Wlm Shkspr (Abridged), which mercilessly spoofed the timeless works of the Bard yet -- here’s the inspired part -- required almost no knowledge of his plays and characters. No wonder it became an international hit, spawning subsequent giggle fests about the Bible, American … [Read more...]