It has been a while - too long, by all measures - since we have heard from director Wes Anderson. Although his new stop-motion film was announced last year, there's been very little said about it since then. In a recent interview with GQ (via Collider), however, Anderson confirmed that he's working on the still-untitled film, with production already in process.
Netflix continues to make inroads into the feature film world by producing some excellent documentaries. They distributed Ave Duvernay's The 13th, produced the Oscar nominated doc Virunga, and have now partnered with executive producer Leonardo DiCaprio for The Ivory Game. The first trailer for the film hit the web earlier today, and it's a passionate, scary, and very moving preview.
With the release of Doctor Strange only a few weeks away, questions and rumors have been swirling about where Marvel will take the character once he's made his debut. At a recent press conference for the film today, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige confirmed that Strange will return for Avengers: Infinity War.
I have now determined that Robert De Niro will only do films with "grandpa" in the title. First we had Bad Grandpa, probably the worst film De Niro has ever made; now, we have The War with Grandpa, a new comedy featuring De Niro and-we hope-the comedic chops of Marisa Tomei.
When the hit TV show Supergirl moved from CBS to The CW, the possibilities of crossovers with other DC characters involved in the network's DC TV Universe became more prominent. Probably most exciting for those of us with little to no knowledge of Supergirl was the introduction of Superman himself, played in the series by Tyler Hoechlin. Now, as Supergirl interacts with the wider DC TV Universe and options open up, there are some indications that the series might be preparing for the death of Superman.
The Lost City of Z falls into the trap of being just as romantic as its rather deluded central character, failing to create a cohesive or interesting narrative that exceeds the heroic posturing of real men being real manly.
Director Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (L’Avenir) is one of two dramas starring Isabelle Huppert to come to the New York Film Festival this year (the second is the very different Elle). It is Huppert’s undeniably riveting persona upon which Things to Come rests, as the film teases out her character’s complex strength and vulnerability into a fascinating character portrait of a woman on the edge of a changing life.
Moonlight has been a breakout hit on the festival circuit this year, doing a number on the critics at Telluride, Toronto, and New York. It's hardly a surprise then that writer/director Barry Jenkins should be so in demand now. And he's already lining up his next projects, which include penning the screenplay for a film about real-life boxing sensation Claressa "T-Rex" Shields.
It's always nice to get a bit of interesting casting news on a Friday afternoon. John Legend's Get Lifted Film Co. is producing the upcoming crime drama Monster (not to be confused with the Charlize Theron serial killer movie, or the upcoming The Monster from director Bryan Bertino). This is a film based on the novel of the same name by Walter Dean Myers, about a young man accused of a crime he claims he did not commit. With filming about to begin in New York, the cast has been rounded out to include Jennifer Hudson, and hip-hop artists A$AP Rocky and Nas.
A centerpiece film premiering at the New York Film Festival this year is Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women, featuring performances by Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, and Elle Fanning as three different generations of women existing in close proximity in a ramshackle bohemian house. It’s a shame, then, that the film gathers such powerful actresses and builds compelling female characters only to relegate them to supporting a standard male coming-of-age narrative.
