By Armond White From the actors’ perspective, Behind the Candelabra looks like a compassionate portrayal of the pianist and singer Liberace‘s relationship with Scott Thorson. The older established celebrity’s involvement with a younger man, masked for the public from 1977 to Liberace’s death in 1987, gets exposed here as an …
By Armond White Filmed under the working title “The Controversy,” Margarethe von Trotta’s bio-pic Hannah Arendt (now at Film Forum), about the renown German Jewish critic and philosopher, combines gossipy insight into the New York literary society of the 1960s with a more serious story of political morality. Those seemingly …
HollywoodandFine.com A movie that’s bound to set your paranoia sensors flashing, “The East” is a cerebral thriller in which it’s hard to tell who’s the hero and who’s the villain. That’s especially true for the film’s central character, a former FBI agent named Sarah, played by the film’s producer and …
HollywoodandFine.com “Fill the Void” is as interesting for the things it doesn’t do as for what it does. Written and directed by Rama Burshtein and set in the Hasidic community of Tel Aviv, it’s a story about family and a sense of duty, informed by a devout faith. The faith …
Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters “Before Midnight,” the third and richest collaboration between Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and director Richard Linklater, finds the French and American couple Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) still talking, talking, talking – and making love. Having met on a train nearly two decades …
Why won’t Linklater, Hawkes and Delpy shut up? By Armond White Following Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight’s ongoing chronicle of an aging, talkative, narcissistic couple Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (he’s author of two books This Time and That Time; she’s artistic) threatens to become the …
By Armond White In light of Michael bay’s Pain & Gain, it’s time to take another look one of its influences: Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 Zabriskie Point finally passes the test of time. Antonioni’s aestheticized vision of ‘60s political and spiritual turmoil was originally scoffed at as disingenuous and “unrealistic”–accusing the …
HollywoodandFine.com This apparently is the week for multiple unnecessary sequels, with “The Hangover Part III” going up against “Fast & Furious 6” (twice as uncalled-for) for that all-important teen-age dollar. So I’ll give the same “meh” response to “H3” as I did to “Iron Man 3”: better than the second …
By Armond White You might laugh at The Hangover Part III but you won’t laugh as hard as Todd Phillips, the film’s pecuniary director and co-screenwriter, who laffs all the way to his offshore Cayman Island account. The Hangover Part III continues what’s advertised as “The Wolfpack Trilogy”–kinda reminiscent of …
By Armond White What’s derisive in the American title A Pig Across Paris (now playing at Film Forum) drives home the bitterness hidden in the original French title La Traversee de Paris (Crossing Paris). This 1956 release hasn’t been shown in the U.S. in more than 50 years probably because …
