By Armond White Funny that the Film Society of Lincoln Center paid tribute to Barbra Streisand on April 22 with its 40-year-old Chaplin Award even though Streisand’s movies are not the kind typically shown in Film Society programming. As a fundraiser, it was unparalleled. Co-chair of the event, Ann Tenenbaum …
By Armond White Sloppy storytelling has become so standard for American filmmakers (Side Effects, The Place Behind the Pines) that Francois Ozon’s new trifle In the House feels especially pleasurable. Storytelling is its subject in the same sense as Todd Solondz’s 2001 Storytelling. Ozon plays with his increasing filmmaking skill …
By Armond White The difference between Antonio Fargas playing a pathetic Black queen based on Jason Holliday in Next Stop Greenwich Village and Jason Holliday playing himself in Portrait of Jason is crucial. Fargas, a real actor, conveyed the multiple and paradoxical meanings in a dramatized character; Holliday, as an …
By Armond White Comedian Chris Rock embarrassed himself at this year’s New York Film Critic Circle dinner when presenting a prize to the Ken Burns film The Central Park Five. The black, Brooklyn-born Rock declared “It makes you think I was wrong. Burns shows we were all wrong!” about the …
By Armond White The affecting if imperfect Les Miserables was cruelly mocked because its essentially Christian story of forgiveness and redemption was out of sync with modern movie nihilism. It takes a cult figure like Terrence Malick to challenge this intolerance in his boldly Christian new film To the Wonder. …
By Armond White We are fortunate to be spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful: emphatic about race grievance and loaded with numerous Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has fashioned 42, a superbly watchable tale, from Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of professional baseball …
By Armond White Guys all wanted to sex Rosario Dawson after The 25th Hour where she dressed in schoolgirl drag as the ultimate stroke book fantasy. Dawson is always cast for sultry provocation–sometimes movingly as Channing Tatum’s girl who got away in Ten Years and now outrageously in Trance, Danny …
By Armond White Blancanieves is the most hilariously misunderstood movie since people took Haneke’s Amour to be a sweet love story. Is this peculiarity as simple as illiteracy or is it another case of cinematically illiterate critics who don’t know how to read what they see on screen? Spanish director …
By Armond White Derek Cianfrance must be a pimp to get a project like The Place Beyond Pines green-lighted. Its less than compelling story about a criminal (Ryan Gosling) and a police offer (Bradley Cooper) whose lives cross (a newspaper headline identifies them as “Moto-Bandit and Hero Cop”) is dragged …
By Armond White P.J. Hogan, Australia’s most appealing yet least heralded filmmaker, returns to prominence with Mental, a kind of musical screwball comedy about social misfits that at first seems perfectly designed for the era of “It Gets Better” nostrums. But Hogan is bolder than the politically correct pandering of …
