One of the biggest box office draws in the world from the 1970s through the early 1990s, actor, writer, director and producer Sylvester Stallone combined sheer physical brawn with a touch of vulnerability in two major movie franchises – the Academy Award-winning Rocky and its five sequels, as well as the ultra-violent Rambo quartet. Frequently [...]
Not too many of us accomplished much by the tender age of 19, but by then, local writer-directer Xavier Dolan had completed his first full-length feature film, J’ai Tué Ma Mère (aka I Killed My Mother), and saw it premiere at the Direcotrs’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. Not one to sit still for [...]
Wes Anderson colleague/collaborator and American indie darling Noah Baumbach returns to arthouse (and a few mainstream) cinemas this week with his fourth feature, the Ben Stiller-toplined squirm comedy Greenberg. Long-absent special guest Eric Mendoza joins Rick and Simon to assess its worth in the face of Baumbach’s generally agreed-upon apex, 2005′s The Squid and the [...]
Our extended look into the filmography of troubled auteur Roman Polanski continues with a big double-header this week; in one corner, Polanski’s hallowed 1968 horror flick, Rosemary’s Baby, which played a significant role in the media narative of Polanski as Euro-creep – up until, you know, other things happened that superseded it. In the other, [...]
The past decade has seen the dramatic emergence of a South Korean national cinema, one bursting forth with inventive genre films and intriguing directors. Perhaps none are as consistently adored as Joon-Ho Bong, whose newest flick, Mother, finally arrives stateside this week after making its debut at Cannes last year. We’ll be taking a look [...]
Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum turned out to be 2009′s biggest movie – in film snob circles, that is. Since we’ve already discussed that film, Rick, Simon and special guest Olivier Creurer tackle three of Denis’ other acclaimed features – Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day, and L’Intrus – with varying degrees of success. And [...]
Director Tim Burton never grew up. Normally, this would mean that he should be making Rob Schneider movies. But since he seems to have spent his never-ending childhood making pets out of things he dug up in the graveyard, his dark, simplistic, highly stylized films have taken on the form of gothic fairy tales, to [...]
It’s hard to believe that after nearly 200 hours of programming, we’ve never had an episode tailored around the singular talents of one of America’s most revered filmmakers: Martin Scorsese. Shutter Island, the Dennie Lehane adaptation that was unceremoniously delayed for five months, found its way to theaters this past weekend and brought in Scorsese’s [...]
Last Tuesday morning, the Academy of Arts and Sciences released its list of nominations for the 82nd annual edition of its awards – better known as the Oscars. It’s the first time in about seven decades that its coveted Best Picture field has expanded to ten slots, thereby leaving room both for more mainstream fare [...]
Albert and Allen Hughes, better known simply as the Hughes Brothers, have been kicking around since the early nineties, but you’d be forgiven for a bit of confusion thanks to their schizophrenic filmography. After helming some music videos, the twins made an envious feature debut at Cannes in 1993 at only 21 years of age [...]
If I were to make a movie using only my own funds and a home computer, I probably wouldn’t be original enough to do anything other than wire a webcam into my Playskool murder shack. Thankfully, Australia’s Spierig brothers are considerably more inventive then I am. With 2003’s The Undead, they fused home made CGI [...]
There was a time when New Zealand’s Peter Jackson had to cook up his own special effects in his family’s oven in order to execute his low-budget terrors. Those days are long gone now, thanks to his acclaimed adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. His latest, an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely [...]
As the only American member of the Monty Python comedy troupe, Terry Gilliam has long been pegged as the odd one out. That reputation has extended to his career as a director, which has been peppered with roughly equal amounts of crossover success, cult adoration and general puzzlement. Today, we’ll be focusing on two of [...]
With this release of 1991’s Slacker, director Richard Linklater helped usher in the modern day independent film movement, which essentially involves making films out of a neat conversation you had at Burning Man. Since that film, Linklater’s output has run the gamut from studio pictures like the remake of The Bad News Bears to the [...]
Jim Sheridan has made a career out of making the sweeping seem intimate. His trilogy of films starring Daniel Day-Lewis – My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father and The Boxer, helped to sculpt the actor into the award machine he is today. The latter two of that bunch of them took on [...]
