Alejandro González Iñárritu

The towering technical achievements and bravura sequences of ‘The Revenant’ are enough to warrant a visit to this grim wilderness

  87 years into the ceremony, the Oscars are still unabashedly about the movies. Host Neil Patrick Harris along with Anna Kendrick performed a whizzbang ode to “moving pictures” in perfect Broadway musical style. And despite the fresh songwriting that seemed to give a nod to last year’s winners for Frozen and “Let it Go”, …

On the face of it, 2014 has been a rather strange year for film, a step down from an annum of classics and simultaneously a slalom dodge into the realms of adventure and discord. Here I take a look at five movies and the four lessons they taught us in 2014, for better or for worse.

Whiplash Justin Hurwitz Varese Sarabande Birdman Antonio Sanchez Milan Records “I’d rather die drunk, broke at 34 and have people at a dinner table talk about me than live to be rich and sober at 90 and nobody remembered who I was.” That’s how jazz drumming prodigy Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) sums up art and, …

Acting is tough. Performers are constantly asked to inhabit the consciousness of people other than themselves for a limited amount of time, and then they are expected to abandon them and move on with their lives and careers. For any committed actor, each new role has to take a tremendous toll on their psyche, and …

NYFF 2014: Chris’ Top 5 – A year dominated by its main slate Not much more can be said about the sheer grandeur and highbrow allure of the New York Film Festival. Gala debuts and celebrity red carpet events have become quite the norm for the festival, making its 52nd installment no exception. No, this …

The cast and crew, fly high in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), directed by visionary Alejandro González Iñárritu. Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomson, a washed-up actor who never bounced back from his peak stardom days as part of a 1990s superhero franchise, and who is desperate to gain back some spark for his faded career. Riggan attempts to jolt himself back into the limelight through the triple threat of writing, directing and starring in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

His use of natural lighting, the gorgeous compositions he creates often on the fly, those long takes. This is what we talk about when we talk about Emmanuel Lubezki, the Mexican cinematographer responsible for such arresting imagery in the films of Terrence Malick (The New World, The Tree of Life, To the Wonder), Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, Y tu mamá también, Gravity), the Brothers Coen (Burn After Reading), and Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Anna”, a short in the anthology To Each His Own Cinema). He is the only cinematographer in recent memory, possibly next to Roger Deakins, that pushes the form to its limits and has name recognition for such. The naturalistic beauty of The Tree of Life was nothing compared to the – wait for it – physics-defying work in Gravity. And here he is again, using a simulated long take for Iñárritu’s Birdman. “But isn’t it just a gimmick?”, you might ask. Well, yes. And that’s probably the point.

Though I did get to attend the TCM Classic Film Festival earlier this year (which was an amazing experience, and well worth your time), the New York Film Festival, in its 52nd year this time around, will be the first time I will have attended a festival as press. So, I’m very giddy about it. …

Birdman is highly reminiscent of Noises Off, a play by Michael Frayn, about the insanity of actors as they weave in and out of doing scenes live in front of an audience on-stage. The unpredictable actor Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) throws Riggan Thomson’s life even more into chaos by his refusal to bend to his wishes. Emma Stone plays Sam, Riggan’s recovering addict daughter who has long been put on the back-burner by her dad. Stone and Norton’s challenging forces irritate but eventually bring Riggan face to face with some hard truths about himself.

Mexican maestro Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has proved just how apt he his at capturing the vast scope of a story, whether in the sensational and emotionally hardboiled (Amores Perros) or the ambitious but ultimately underwhelming (Babel), but with his Catalan set epic Biutiful he takes a boat across the Atlantic to delve into a novel-like character study stuffed with an infusion of European sensibility and uniquely personal vision that tops the lot.

“For enduring Iñárritu’s ceaseless, pointless torments, Prieto, Bardem and Álvarez don’t just deserve praise, they deserve reparations.” Biutiful Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu Written by Alejandro González Iñárritu and Armando Bo 2010, Spain / Mexico Ornately, elaborately disastrous, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first venture following the schism that separated him from longtime screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, Biutiful, …

——– Biutiful Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu Ornately, elaborately disastrous, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first venture following the schism that separated him from longtime screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, Biutiful, can’t be faulted for its lack of ambition. While the film scales back somewhat from Arriaga’s tendency to tie together a half-dozen or so disparate characters, Biutiful somehow …

It looks like Biutiful, the latest film from one of my favorite auteur’s Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel), might get stateside distribution from Roadside Attractions, the specialty division of Lionsgate.  According to Deadline, the deal could be completed as soon as the end of the week and they plan on getting it out before the end …