This year’s 12th edition of the Scary Movies festival at Film at Lincoln Center premiered Ari Aster’s extended version of “Midsommar” this past Saturday.
The Louis C.K. comedy tour keeps rolling on.
The comedian's latest set is, again, making headlines. According to a report given by The Daily Beast's Stacey Solie, C.K. was greeted by a standing ovation and performed a sold out stand-up show on January 16th in San Jose, California. During the 90-minute set, C.K. tackled the topics of masturbating in front people, the Parkland shooting, 9/11 and the mentally challenged.
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"Roma" has escaped unscathed of backlash thus far this awards season. With the lack of any sort of controversy surrounding Alfonso Cuaron's Mexico-based tone poem, its momentum is now firmly in high gear, it looks like it will be the film to beat this Oscar season.
Read moreI love Steven Soderbergh's work. Yeah, he's the kind of the director that takes so many risks that he's become the epitome of hit and miss, but what risks! Let us forget the initial phase of his career between 1989 and 2001 ("Sex, Lies and Videotape," "The Limey," "Out of Sight," "Traffic," "Erin Brockovich," "Oceans Eleven").
Read moreThis year’s SXSW is tempting me to cover it again. Jordan Peele's highly-anticipated follow-up to “Get Out,” titled “Us,” is already a bigger "get" than any film premiering at Sundance this year, and the rest of the lineup, announced just now, looks mighty impressive.
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Macaulay Culkin defended his friendship with Michael Jackon during an appearance on the “Inside Of You” podcast.
He was asked by host Michael Rosenbaum about MJ, but Culkin admitted feeling a little “ambushed," adding, “He reached out to me because a lot of things were happening big and fast with me, and I think he identified with that,” Culkin said about Jackson. “I mean at the end of the day, it’s almost easy to say it was weird or whatever, but it wasn’t because it made sense. Here’s the thing at the end of the day: We were friends. It’s one of my friendships that people question only because of the fact that he was the most famous person in the world.”
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The "ever-so-lovely" Kathy Griffin has lashed out at Don Cheadle on social media for his lack of support after backlash occurred in May of 2017 when Griffin posted a photo of her holding up asevered Donald Trump head.
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Claire Denis‘ "High Life" had an underwhelming world premiere at the Roy Thomson Hall during the Toronto Film Festival, for which I attended. Around half the audience had already left the theater by the time the film ended, you could just tell nobody was into it. And this is coming from a fest that prides itself in having the best audience in the world. Even Toronto audiences couldn't deal with the metaphorical artsy ambitions that were unfurling on-screen. And I don't mean that as a detraction of Denis' mad ambitions in "High Life," which, by all accounts, warrants a repeat viewing on my part. For now, I'll refrain from reviewing "High Life," until I watch it a second time, but Denis will have her widest audience ever for this sci-fi film, which has her working with the biggest budget of her career and stars Robert Pattinson. And by sci-fi I don't mean something akin to Christopher Nolan, this is Claire Denis after all, she makes personal films that are all but impenetrable for mainstream moviegoers.
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Over the weekend, left-bashing street artists turned a billboard of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher into an NPC meme. The billboard was promoting the return of his show with a billboard depicting him as a seeker of the truth, however, conservative street artist group “The Faction” decided to remodel the ad, located at the corner of La Cienega Boulevard & West Holloway in West Hollywood, by spray painting a gray, expressionless face over Maher’s and changing the image’s tagline from “The Whole Truth and Nothing But” to “The Whole Narrative and Nothing But.” They also changed “HBO” to “NPC.”
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Director Jason Reitman will direct and co-write a new Ghostbusters movie set in the original universe. The production is targeted to start this year with a planned Summer 2020 release date. Reitman told Entertainment Weekly that the new movie will ignore the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig, and will be a direct continuation of the 1984 original.
Read moreSofia Coppola will reunite with Bill Murray once again. Their memorable collaboration in the Oscar-winning 2003 film "Lost in Translation" has stood the test of time and still is the best film Coppola's ever made. In fact, despite making worthy films afterwards, such as "Marie Antoinette," "The Bling Ring," the 47-year-old filmmaker has lived under the shadow of that film's critical success since then.
Read morePeter Parker will be back on the big-screen this summer in “Spider-Man: Far From Home.”
This is, of course, the sequel to "Spider-Man: Homecoming," a successful reboot of the webslinger franchise. Director Jon Watts ("Cop Car") is back at the helm, but, more intriguingly, the film will be set in Europe as Peter and company go on summer vacation. Added to the cast is villain Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), who will be joined by "Homecoming" antagonist Vulture (Michael Keaton).
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When it comes the time to assemble my list of the best movies this decade, which I have already started to do, David Fincher's “The Social Network” will surely be on the shortlist of films deemed worthy of that honor.
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I am not sure if I will be able to catch Dan Reed‘s Michael Jackson-Pedophilia doc "Leaving Neverland" in a few weeks at Sundance, mostly because it's a four-hour doc and it's a risk cramming that lengthy a film into a day's schedule, but also because I was never completely on-board with the mob that claimed Michael Jackson was a sexual predator. There was just something about the guy that felt asexual rather than sexual. The doc will relive the experiences of two men —James Safechuck and Wade Robson — who are claiming to have been molested by Jackson when they were minors.
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Some have compared "Mission: Impossible - Fallout" to "Mad Max: Fury Road." Both were a relentless barrage of practical effects that barely had any exposition and backstory. Their goals were to grab your attention and not let go of it. Whereas the previous installment of the Mission Impossible franchise, "M:I - Rogue Nation," was a more elegant, and refined spy movie that had the best action sequences of the series, "Fallout" went for broke with some of the most astonishing action sequences of the decade.
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Steven Spielberg is 71 but has a stacked few years ahead. Before he enters the world of DC comic books with "Blackhawk", Spielberg is set to go into production and direct the fifthIndiana Jones movie, with a 75-year-old Harrison Ford, and his long-delayed, but now in pre-production, adaptation of David I. Kertzer's "The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara" but up next is a Tony Kushner-penned remake of the classic musical “West Side Story.”
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Back to the Oscar race, with "Roma" having won big at the critics choice awards last night and with its lack of any sort of controversy this year, its momentum is now firmly confirmed. Is there any reason why this film can't the Best Picture prize at the Oscars? Despite my theory that it's just too artsy for a large and vast voting body whose tastes, quite frankly, tend to not veer towards the high-brow, there is a sense that a lot of people will be voting for "Roma" on a purely partisan basis. Accepting the award last night, its director Alfonso Cuaron said in his speech, "this bunch of Mexicans are not as bad as sometimes they are portrayed," clearly taking aim at the Trump administration and its militant stance at getting that border wall funding to prevent Mexicans from entering the country illegally.
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Alfonso Cuaron's “Roma” is the undisputed champ of 2018 when it comes to critics awards. It won the Critics' Choice Awards best picture prize last night, adding to its tally which included theNew York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the Chicago Film Critics Association. Cuaron's fellow Mexican filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro, has called "Roma" one of his top five favorite movies of all time and took to Twitter last night to further expand on his love for the film by launching his 10 personal observations about “Roma.”
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A sequel is currently in the works for David Cronenberg's “Eastern Promises," that's what the 2007 film's screenwriter Steven Knight has told Collider as he was promoting his upcoming film “Serenity,” with the sequel will probably begin production sometime in 2019.
“It is like fishing, where you leave it out there,” says Knight. “And it’s been out there for a while. It went through permutations in the sense of, how do you follow Viggo? We’ve been through that and we’ve moved on and now we’re in a position where I will say ‘watch this space,’ we’re close to getting into production.”
It would appear that the Cronenberg will not return. In addition, the sequel include Mortensen, but he won't be the lead, a "major actor" is being sought to take the lead.
Also, because Russia has been so much in the news, Knight reveals there will be political undertones:
“[The script] changed a bit,” the writer said. “It changed quite recently as a result of events in the world. The topicality of the Russia thing. I’ve adapted it to reflect recent events.”
Here's a nice surprise. STX/Lantern Entertainment’s “The Upside,” starring Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart, surprised pundits this weekend and is projected to finish atop the North American box-office with an impressive. $19.5 million opening, dethroning "Aquaman" to take the top spot on the charts.
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Gaspar Noe spoke to Variety about “Climax,” being released in March, but he also shared a hilarious anecdote about walking out of a screening of "Black Panther" after just 20 minutes.
“I tried ‘Black Panther.’ I escaped from the cinema after 20 minutes,” Noé said. “I thought it was as bad as ‘Star Wars.’ I hated ‘Star Wars.’ I hated the R&B music [in “Black Panther”]. The music was so bad that I had to escape. But you know which one I like? What’s the name of the Denis Villeneuve movie? ‘Arrival.’ That one was good.”
