This is an inherently foolish question to ask. As I’m sure we’ve all learned by now, it’s foolish to try to predict the Best Picture winner for the Oscars, especially months in advance. It’s even more foolish to try to predict just based on the box office numbers of a film, just one of several …
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”, …
If there’s one show on television that displays regular technical wizardry that could be on par with Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography in Birdman, maybe it’s Sesame Street, which orchestrates so many monsters and puppets flawlessly and has done so for decades. In a strange way other than just one of its most famous characters’ names, Big …
While we’ve spent a lot of time compiling our predictions for this Sunday’s Oscar winners, the reality is that the actual voting process is a lot more predictable and cut and dry, and many Oscar voters don’t really put that much thought into it at all. One company, Exponential, a digital advertising company, has for …
In an Oscar column in the New York Times several weeks back, A.O. Scott noticed that the Academy loves to champion three different types of narrative: those that affirm the industry’s political values and virtues, those that represent popular success, and those that feel like “auto-cinephilia”. “Three of the last five Best Picture winners were …
So as Birdman heads into Oscar season, the screenwriter reveals that the movie almost ended with a massive cameo that would’ve made us forget (at least a little bit) about Mortdecai. While on The Q & A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast, Birdman screenwriter Alex Dinelaris talked about how the ending of the film almost didn’t …
15. The Immigrant – If one were to rank the films of 2014 based solely on innovation, The Immigrant would probably end up near the bottom. Writer-director James Gray’s languid melodrama tells the tumultuous story of a resilient Polish woman looking to find a slice of the American Dream, without much in the way of …
40. Night Moves Since 2006, Kelly Reichardt has found a way to reach inside of the hearts of her audiences, plucking out strings one by one with desolate re-imaginations of the American Pacific Northwest, seen through the eyes of people not so different than ourselves. With Meek’s Cutoff, she departed from her typical genre and moved …
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, …
The 21st Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards Nominations were revealed Wednesday morning, serving as yet another precursor on the long road to the Oscars. In the film categories, Birdman was the big winner, scoring four nominations, including for Michael Keaton, Edward Norton and Emma Stone, as well as the collective ensemble cast. Boyhood followed right …
I’m not sure what exact moment in Birdman it occurred to me that we were in the midst of a great Edward Norton Renaissance. Maybe it was when the walls of self-professed artistic integrity that his character Mike Shiner wears came crashing down in the face of Sam (Emma Stone), revealing the tragedy and isolation …
This column is a few days late this week, but then this was a particularly busy few days. The first three of the actual awards precursors finally arrived this week, including the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review and the Gotham Independent Film Awards. What’s the verdict? This is still anyone’s …
The 2015 Film Independent Spirit Award nominations came out this morning and unsurprisingly there are a lot of names here that won’t be on an Oscar handicappers list. Birdman is arguably the biggest film on this list – and it leads the field with nominations for Best Feature, Best Director, Best Male, Best Supporting Male 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 …
THE DIGITAL ERA: REAL-TIME FILMS FROM 2000 TO TODAY 40 years before, in 1960, lighter cameras enabled a cinéma vérité-flavored revolution in street realism. By 2000, new digital cameras suggested a whole new set of promises, including telling stories that would have been unimaginable within minimum budgets for features even ten years before. In 2000, …
What do film directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Robert Wise, Fred Zinnemann, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Roman Polanski, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Richard Linklater, Tom Tykwer, Alexander Sokurov, Paul Greengrass, Song Il-Gon, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro Iñárritu have in common? More specifically, what type of film have they directed, setting them …
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.
The Hype Cycle is News Editor Brian Welk’s roundup of industry news, reviews and predictions of everything Oscar, boiled down into weekly power rankings of the buzziest and most likely contenders in this year’s awards season. The Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award has been one of the most reliable barometers for both Best …
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. …
