We have seen Abraham Lincoln's youth in Young Mr. Lincoln and we have seen his Presidency in Lincoln. Now, we finally get to see his boyhood in The Better Angels, a film which I think could really have used the name "Lincoln" in the title.
Are there two more charming actors than Christopher Plummer and Shirley MacLaine? Maybe Helen Mirren or Bill Nighy, but even so, it's hard to think of any actors who are such a pleasure to watch in whatever they choose to appear in. Their latest film is a romantic comedy directed by Michael Radford: Elsa & Fred, a story about finding love, whatever your age.
You know how to hype a film and create controversy? Publicly predict that it will create controversy. Ben Affleck has apparently learned this lesson, as he informs Details (via The Playlist) that David Fincher's upcoming thriller Gone Girl is going to cause some controversy among viewers when it finally hits theaters on October 3.
The name Tim Burton is not exactly synonymous with modest budgets and introspective dramas. Especially in recent years, we tend to think of Burton as the director of big, stylized films with little substance underlying their other undeniable merits as pop art. But we should also remember that Burton is the man behind films like Ed Wood, which took a loving and complicated look at the Orson Welles of bad movies. In a much-needed return to films like that, Burton has reteamed with his Ed Wood writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski for Big Eyes, starring Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams as the real-life artistic couple Walter and Margaret Keane who became famous in the 1960s for "pop-eyed paintings." The first trailer for Big Eyes has landed, purporting to tell what went on behind the scenes as the couple rose to stardom.
There's nothing like a natural disaster to bring a family together...or to drive them further apart. In Force Majeure the darkly comedic film from Ruben Östlund, a Swedish family faces an avalanche during a skiing holiday in the French Alps. While mother Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) attempts to protect her children, father Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnk) runs for his life. When disaster is averted, the family's dynamic is nonetheless changed forever as Tomas attempts to re-establish his position as the patriarch in the face of his apparent cowardice.
You know, there are some times when I begin to wonder what the media world is coming to and how any of us will survive it. When I write headlines like "Aubrey Plaza Is Grumpy Cat," I am struck by a sense of ineffable existential terror at the current state of the media. But it is true: the Parks and Recreation actress has signed on to play the voice of Grumpy Cat in Lifetime's Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever.
I think most critics are agreed that Kevin Smith's Tusk is one of the weirder things to come out of the Toronto International Film Festival this year. The film features Justin Long as an American podcast host who goes to Canada in pursuit of one story and ends up pursuing another when he meets a reclusive Canadian seafarer with dreams of turning a man into a walrus. Early reviews have been largely positive, treating this film as a funnier version of Human Centipede, and more in line with Smith's last darkly comedic horror story Red State than his earlier slacker films. Whether it's ultimately loved or hated by the world at large, Tusk is bound to be a different cinematic experience.
For some reason that has never been fully clear to me, filmmakers love to make movies about writers. I'm not certain why this is: writing as an activity is not particularly cinematic, usually involving a single person sitting in isolation for hours on end. But self-involved writers with complex relationships and a tendency to destroy the people around them? Now THAT'S cinematic. Such appears to be the argument of Listen Up Philip, a new indie film starring Jason Schwartzman as the titular angry author.
In the interests of full disclosure, I will admit that I am a big fan of vampires. By vampires, I mean proper vampires: blood-sucking Nosferatus with pallid skin and bloody fangs whose ultimate goal is to create an army of the undead, or something like that. As a result, I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to almost any new attempt to tell a vampire story. But with the upcoming Dracula Untold looking more and more like Underworld Redux, it's a bit of a struggle even for me.
Whenever the words "delayed release" are appended to any film, critics usually respond with an arched eyebrow and an intimation that the film is not as good as it should be. While this is often true, in the case of Effie Gray we need to use some restraint. Despite being completed eleven months ago, the film has been delayed as the result of a legal dispute concerning authors Eve Pomerance and Gregory Murphy. The authors both wrote plays and screenplays on the subject and have claimed that the film relies too heavily on their work. Those disputes have been resolved, so it's only now that Effie Gray shall see the light of day.
