Until his sad, untimely death last month, Bill Paxton was one of the true under-celebrated actors of his generation. As a genre star, he had legions of dedicated fans (and apparently an army of co-stars eager to sing his praises as a decent, hard-working, charming guy to boot), but he always seemed more likely to register with casual movie-goers as That Guy.
At a pivotal moment in Jordan Peele’s unbelievably assured horror debut Get Out, something snaps in one of the characters, and he delivers the title’s imperative with wide-eyed urgency to our protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya). “GET. OUT.”
It’s an appropriately self-referential moment for a film that knows exactly what it is doing.
Oscar season is almost over! Soon, we will finally put the year to bed and get to work on the important things, like determining which films seem to be early contenders for Academy Award attention next year.
The other day, we provided some guidance to this year’s prestige awards, drawn from our viewing, reading, and arbitrary hunches.
Dog Eat Dog has all the trademarks and tics you’d expect from Paul Schrader — twitchy griminess, awkward dialog, stray mentions of faith, ultra-violence, losers who just can’t win, cocaine, samurai references. But it’s overwhelming, mean-spirited mood connotes revenge more than anything else.
With the Academy Awards being handed out this Sunday, it’s a popular and appropriate time for Oscar predictions. Any number of determining factors can help narrow down the field to an expected choice, and odds-makers all over the world are weighing in.
Nearly every review of Oscar Assayas‘ weird, lovely Clouds of Sils Maria eventually brings up the Swedish master Ingmar Bergman, and I don’t see why this one should be any different.
The Juliette Binoche/Kristen Stewart two-hander often plays like Assayas received some sort of Five Obstructions-like challenge to conjure up something “Bergmanesque” without the benefit of Sven Nyquist or Liv Ullmann.
I don’t want to startle any of my readers, but it turns out I’m a white guy. Watching I Am Not Your Negro, this couldn’t have been clearer.
Perhaps you may have gleaned this fact about me somehow — say, my weird focus on Nicolas Cage or the fact that I genuinely, almost angrily enjoy La La Land.
In its opening title card, Kirsten Johnson describes her acclaimed documentary Cameraperson as a memoir of her 25 years of filmmaking. Of course, any individual film is itself a memoir of sorts, preserving moments in time when subjects collided and collaborated and performed; it’s the nature of the medium.
Now that Betsy DeVos has been confirmed as our Secretary of Education of Bizarro World, she’s going to have a steep learning curve. This would be true for any newly-confirmed Cabinet member, but it seems particularly urgent in Betsy DeVos’ case, who shows no indication of even baseline competency for the position.
Just last week, I bemoaned the state of Netflix’s streaming options and reoriented this column specifically to account for it. In what I can only assume is a startling indication of this column’s influence and reach, Netflix responded a week later by making the near-entirety of the Pioneers of African-American Cinema collection available.