8 years ago
Features (10 posts found)
Spotlight on Fandor: “Dark Days”
“I’m in the food business now,” Dark Days director Marc Singer told an interviewer in 2011. “I have a company that sells very nice garnishes—garlic, cherries, onions, anything that you’d find in an alcoholic drink.” Aside from the rather hair-raising suggestio...
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The Art House Next Door: 6 Picks from Fandor
Every streaming service is a journey, and personally, I have been experiencing a heavy fatigue. Most digital streaming platforms favor content over quality, leaving viewers hanging in the void of indecisiveness, meandering endlessly from title to title in a ci...
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Spice World: David Lynch’s “Dune” at 30
Last summer, a major studio allowed James Gunn, an untested indie darling, to helm a big-budget adaptation of an obscure science-fiction property. That the result, Guardians of the Galaxy, was a global hit, struck many as a surprisingly lucrative gamble. In hi...
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2014 Movies: The Miscellaneous Data
Anyone can tell you which movie made the most money this year (Guardians of the Galaxy), or which wide release had the highest Rotten Tomatoes score (Boyhood), or whether Sinbad was in anything (no). But who cares about that? We've compiled the details that tr...
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Once More, With Feeling: The Best Film Restorations of 2014
It's time to kiss 2014 goodbye (or kick its ass out the door, depending on how well your year went) and furiously compile our Best-Of lists, as film people are wont to do. Obviously most people focus on ranking the best new releases of the year ("release" bein...
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Video Essay: Asghar Farhadi – Life & Cinema
Tina Hassannia's new book, Asghar Farhadi: Life and Cinema, is the first major study of this important Iranian filmmaker, director of such films as the Academy-Award winning A Separation. In this video essay, Hassannia explores the moral questions Farhadi rais...
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Come Fail with Us: “The Life Aquatic” at 10
I first saw The Life Aquatic in late 2004, when it premiered at the Winifred Moore Auditorium as part of the Webster University Film series. The exhibitors had supplied the university with boxes of souvenir caps baring the film’s title and a distinctive traffi...
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Bye Bye Life: “All That Jazz” as Film Criticism
“Sometimes I don’t know where the bullshit ends and the truth begins.” Neither do any of us, really, but so few eviscerate our own lives with the kind of crackling critical energy that Bob Fosse did. As Angelique (Jessica Lange), his own personal angel of deat...
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With A Little Help From Our Friends
Every week, With a Little Help from Our Friends highlights the best pieces of writing on film, television, and literature published around the Internet. Please share if you like what you see.
For your reading enjoyment …
"Why Can’t Movies Capture Genius?" b...
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Losing My Religion: “The Decalogue”
Twenty-five years ago, before the “golden age of television” was ever christened, Krzysztof Kieslowski blessed Polish TV sets with his majestic work The Decalogue, a series of 10 short films loosely based on the Ten Commandments. It was a distinctive cinematic...
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