By Armond White Paul (shaky-cam) Greengrass makes another mess of recent political history in Captain Phillips. This time Greengrass fakes a docu-drama about the 2009 incident when the Maersk Alabama cargo ship, piloted by Vermont merchant marine captain Richard Phillips, was seized off Africa’s eastern coast by Somali pirates, then …
HollywoodandFine.com Randy Moore’s “Escape from Tomorrow” may be the year’s most subversive film: a horrifying satire of the manufactured fun we’ve come to associate with the Disney assembly line. Make no mistake: I’m a huge fan of the shiny, witty entertainment which, for years, has been the Disney trademark. I …
By Armond White A legend of the French New Wave gets a complete retrospective at Film Forum One of my fondest experiences in the New York Film Critics Circle concerned the late Jacques Demy, subject of a complete career retrospective at Film Forum (Oct. 4 –17): When Demy’s first two …
HollywoodandFine.com Cult hits are exactly that for a reason. They’re movies that appeal to a small, feverishly loyal audience who, in most cases, love them either in spite of the fact that they’re terrible (“Rocky Horror Picture Show”) or because they’re terrible (“The Room”) – or perhaps a mixture of …
HollywoodandFine.com Apparently we’re going to have a bumper crop of outstanding thrillers this season – “Gravity,” the upcoming “All Is Lost” (well, not technically a thriller but still intense) – and now “Captain Phillips.” Where the first two are fiction, Pal Greengrass’ latest film finds him returning to a story …
HollywoodandFine.com When it happened in the spring of 2012, the Jeremy Lin phenomenon – commonly referred to as “Linsanity,” from which the new documentary takes its name – was startling for its prevalence. As Evan Leong’s new film shows, the excitement in New York was infectious. It spread worldwide – …
By Armond White Dominique Sanda, the androgynous siren of Bertolucci’s The Conformist and 1990, appears in Jacques Demy’s Une Chambre en Ville wearing a luxurious fur coat and nothing underneath. She trolls the streets of Paris to escape her confining marriage, looking for a way out–a room with a view …
HollywoodandFine.com Fifty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, “Parkland” still has the power to hit you like a fast-moving bus. A recreation of Nov. 22, 1963, as seen through the eyes of people who were directly involved, Peter Landesman’s film has the immediacy of a documentary, though it …
By Armond White The opalescent Planet Earth, the object that opens Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, belongs to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a shorthand image–evoking intellectual contemplation and wonder that Cuaron doesn’t earn. Cuaron borrows it without (pardon the expression) gravitas. The phenomenon of creation dresses up a tale of …
HollywoodandFine.com Paul Giamatti is one of our great screen actors, an absolute poet of frustration and regret with the range to play a wide variety of roles. Watch him in Tom McCarthy’s delightful “Win Win” and then in “Cold Souls” and then in “American Splendor.” He can play everything from …
