Great Movies
Features
Kevin Costner: The Last of the Cornball American Directors
The three previous movies the Oscar-winner directed suggest a filmmaker whose unabashed earnestness is his greatest weakness and secret superpower.
The three previous movies the Oscar-winner directed suggest a filmmaker whose unabashed earnestness is his greatest weakness and secret superpower.
A guide to the latest and greatest on Blu-ray, including 4K editions of Speed, Donnie Darko, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
A review of the new ABC drama loosely based on the life of Erin Brockovich, which has a great ensemble but has no idea what to do with it.
The latest on Blu-ray and streaming, including The Lion King, Stuber, The Art of Self-Defense, and special editions of Ringu, An American Werewolf in London, and When We Were Kings.
The latest on Blu-ray and DVD, including Lady Bird, The Disaster Artist, The Shape of Water, Justice League, I Tonya, and Thor: Ragnarok.
Looking back at "Donnie Darko" on the occasion of its 15th anniversary.
TNT & USA are premiering or returning eight series in the next two weeks and yet they get half the press of other networks. What are they doing right and are any of the new shows worth a look?
Streaming on Netflix Instant
When I watched "The Intouchables" (2011) at the local movie theater several months ago, I got a nagging dissatisfaction with that crowd-pleaser, which was about the warm friendship between a disabled man and a caregiver hired by him. The movie was surely a pleasant drama with two amiable lead performances, but I found it too mild and superficial; it merely loitered around thin stereotypes and worn-out clichés and it went no further than that.
Lawrence Kasdan's "Grand Canyon" didn't make a splash when it opened here in Mexico, and it's not the kind of feature that's ever shown on our TV, so hardly anybody I know has even heard about it. It's not an easy movie to describe. When people ask me about its subject, I say something like "It's about a group of people from Los Angeles living in despair who end up feeling better when they all get together and visit the Grand Canyon." Most of them seem to loose interest but the response of those who do see it is mostly overwhelming.
Watching "The Tree of Life" brought "Grand Canyon" to mind. The films couldn't be more different, but both deal with a search for a deeper meaning in our existence-- a sense of helplessness in trying to place ourselves in the grand scheme of things. They also lack defined plots or conventional structures.
"It was as though this plan had been with him all his life, pondered through the seasons, now in his fifteenth year crystallized with the pain of puberty." -- from Graham Greene's story "The Destructors," as read by Donnie Darko's English teacher, Miss Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore)
PARK CITY, Utah -- I've seen nine movies so far at this year's Sundance Festival, and can report with absolute certainty that there is no trend, unless it is that South American filmmakers are more relaxed around the subject of sex than North Americans. But then we already knew that.
Hollywood has been waiting a long time to give Clint Eastwood an Oscar, and my hunch is, the wait is over. Eastwood's "Unforgiven," an elegiac Western about a retired gunfighter who pulls himself together for one final campaign, will win the best picture award when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gathers on the night of Monday, March 29.
The ballots have all been returned and counted, and at 7:30 a.m. tomorrow this year's Academy Awards nominations will be announced at a press conference to be telecast, so they say, around the world. It will no doubt be an Oscar year like all years, filled with surprises and injustices, nominations deserved and undeserved.
"Unforgiven" and "Howards End," both about dying castes, one in the old West, one in England, led the 1993 Academy Award nominations Wednesday morning with nine mentions apiece.
Things might be easier, John Sayles sometimes thinks, if he were just starting out--if he had no track record. Then investors might be quicker to roll the dice by putting money into one of his movies. But he's made eight films, establishing himself as a leading (but not often profitable) independent director, and that makes it harder. That's why the success of his newest film, "Passion Fish," comes as such a relief.
LOS ANGELES -- It happened several years ago. Larry Kasdan was standing on a street corner, and he stepped off the curb and then a woman grabbed him by the collar and yanked him back toward her, and just then a big city bus thundered past, going fast.
"Dances with Wolves," a story about a friendship between a Sioux tribe and a lone U.S. cavalryman in the 1860s, swept the list of nominations Wednesday for the 63rd annual Academy Awards.
