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Deep Focus: The Hobbit: The Battle of the 5 Armies
Peter Jackson’s final movie in his Hobbit trilogy has the wiry elegance of elves, the robust craftsmanship of dwarves, the whimsical bonhomie of hobbits, and the spellbinding poetry of wizards. It’s...
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Festivals: Savannah
The Notebook On a sunny autumn day in Savannah, Georgia, in the year of our lord 2014, a resplendent theater built in 1921 projected a disreputable film made in 2004, and the audience wept. Not many...
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Rep Diary: Chandler, Hammett, Woolrich & Cain
The Blue Dahlia Noir Central through Christmas Eve is New York’s Film Forum, transformed into a cornucopia of delicious nastiness and psychological and sociological disturbance by movies based on the...
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Film of the Week: Into the Woods
The subtlety, complexity, even difficulty of some Stephen Sondheim musicals means that the composer’s shows have rarely had “surefire hit” written all over them (what, you mean you can’t hum any tunes...
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Interview: J.C. Chandor
With Margin Call (11) and All Is Lost (13), writer-director J.C. Chandor established himself as a master of confined spaces and constrained budgets. A crime thriller set in 1981 in and around New York...
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Interview: Roger Deakins
Anyone who’s followed American film over the last quarter century has probably marveled at some point at the cinematography of Roger Deakins. Best known for his collaborations with the Coen Brothers...
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Romney’s 2014 Roundup
In this spot this time last year, I found myself concluding with some relief that, despite doom-laden mutterings to the contrary, the art of film was generally in a state of robust health. Perhaps I...
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Bombast: The Black List
The Judge What do (500) Days of Summer, The Men Who Stare at Goats, In Bruges, Safe House, Snow White and the Huntsman, Draft Day, The Judge, Bad Teacher, and 47 Ronin all have in common? If you...
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Interview: J.K. Simmons
Picture a boss barking comically profane orders from behind a desk and it’s likely that J.K. Simmons springs to mind. An actor whose presence looms large even when his screen time runs short, Simmons...
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Deep Focus: Selma
Selma begins with the camera squarely framing Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo), as if for a formal portrait. The immediate effect is ironic. He’s rehearsing a solemn line for an award speech,...
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Deep Focus: The Interview
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s 2013 smash This Is the End, which also starred Rogen and James Franco and gave them the clout to do The Interview, put several kinds of “joint” in the idea of “joint...
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Film of the Week: Leviathan
You don’t call a film Leviathan if you want it to be perceived as a gentle, intimate little art-house offering. You choose that name either to decorate an opulent SFX blockbuster—which Andrey...
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Interview: Morten Tyldum
Norwegian director Morten Tyldum might seem like an odd choice to tell the story of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who led a team of cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, England, tasked with...
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The New Issue: January/February 2015
What We Do in the Shadows The January/February 2015 issue of FILM COMMENT leads off with our cover story: Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s hilarious documentary-style What We Do in the Shadows, an...
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Festivals: Venice
To begin with the end: your correspondent’s maiden voyage to the Venice film festival concluded with a stroll through the 14th International Architecture Exhibition, also organized by the Biennale....
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Film of the Week: When Evening Falls on Bucharest
We’re often told that filmmaking is a visceral pursuit; When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism gives us a case of a filmmaker literally putting his guts on screen. Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2013...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Taking Tiger Mountain
“Carry the tiger, pull the horse” might be the “Leave the gun, take the cannoli” of modern Chinese cinema. Coming right in the middle of Tsui Hark’s Taking Tiger Mountain—a blockbuster war flick that...
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Deep Focus: Predestination
Brothers who team up as moviemakers are often organic virtuosos—think the Tavianis in The Night of the Shooting Stars and Kaos, the Coens in No Country for Old Men and Inside Llewyn Davis, or, in a...
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Bombast: Holiday Tour
A few months ago, in August of last year, I wrote a roundup of summer movie miscellany which doubled as a tour of the (mostly) independent movie theaters still struggling to make an ever-less-viable...
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Festivals: Toronto
The big-tent (or big-marketplace) approach of the Toronto film festival can make comparing notes with fellow attendees a rewarding experience, especially as the days run on and people check the...
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