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The Brat Pack Movies, Ranked
In honor of the new documentary Brats, we look back at the 1980s actors’ finest onscreen moments—and the films that found them way out of their depth.
In honor of the new documentary Brats, we look back at the 1980s actors’ finest onscreen moments—and the films that found them way out of their depth.
A tribute to the director Joel Schumacher.
Rosanna Arquette’s 2002 documentary “Searching for Debra Winger” is so much more salient now in light of the recent reckoning, if a little more difficult to watch.
A packed column on the latest on streaming, DVD, and Blu-ray, including American Made, Brad's Status, Brawl in Cell Block 99, Stronger, The Mountain Between Us, and more!
A report on three very different films from Montreal's Fantasia International Film Festival.
A preview of the 2015 South by Southwest Film Festival.
Sandra Bullock's character in "Gravity" defies the norms of female characters in Hollywood films.
Jana Monji, reporting from Comic-Con 2013 in San Diego, recounts the wonders of waiting (and waiting, and waiting) in line for "Psych: The Musical."
Every year good films show at the Toronto Film festival that never open anywhere near you. This year some good films played that may never open anywhere, even if you live in Toronto--or New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin or upstairs over a Landmark Theater multiplex. Toronto is traditionally a lively marketplace for the purchase of film rights for new non-studio product: Indies, docs, foreign films. This year Harvey Weinstein paid $1 million for "A Single Man," and that was that. One sale, one movie, one million -- probably as little as Harvey has paid for a movie in some time.
Stands at yellow, rising toward orange
The makers of independent films don't have to send to learn for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for them. The bottom fell out of the market. That doesn't mean there were no other offers, but it means there were none that the sellers felt able to accept. It shows a collapse of confidence in the prospects of independent film distribution.
Don't take my word for it. Listen to Anne Thompson, who always knows what she's talking about. In her blog Thompson on Hollywood, she leads: "The old independent market is over." She quotes the producer Jonathan Dana: "It's a massacre. It's the end of funny money."
Thompson names a few of the films going home without deals, and it's depressing:
Few directors have left a more distinctive or influential body of work than John Hughes. The creator of the modern American teenager film, who died Thursday in New York, made a group of films that are still watched and quoted today.
TELLURIDE, Colo. -- It's a combination of a film festival and a ski weekend, greatly improved by the absence of snow. Moviegoers at this year's 26th Telluride Film Festival can take the ski lift to the top of the mountain, but what they find there is a little unexpected: the Chuck Jones Cinema, named for the animator who brought Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote to life.
PARK CITY, Utah How long has it been since I saw a film that was really scary, instead of just going through the motions of scary? Most horror films are merely exercises in ritualized surprise, but a low-budget film titled "The Blair Witch Project" shook up Sundance Film Festival audiences with its gathering sense of menace.
PARK CITY, Utah The future of the American film industry begins its annual convention here today, at the Sundance Film Festival. For the next 10 days, new independent films and documentaries will unspool all over town, in every possible performance space: Wherever two or three gather together, they're probably looking at a movie.
All of a sudden, there are movies about teenagers who are ordinary kids. They come as such a relief after all the movies about teenagers who are killers, victims, lust-crazed sex fiends, hookers, punks, sluts and goons. There for a while it looked like half the new teenage movies were going to be ripoffs of two of the sleaziest recent trendsetters at the box office, "Porky's" and "Friday the 13th." Teenagers in those movies had fairly limited options: They could look through peepholes into the girls’ shower room, or they could get disemboweled by a faceless monster.
