Tag: film

Were early horror films, with their long, angry processions of the undead, repeating the mass trauma of the First World War, or foreshadowing the coming of the Second?

We voluntarily watch horror movies, despite the very real fight-or-flight physical reactions they provoke. Why?

“I think when I found film,” he said, “I found a way — I still hide a bit — but a way to not hide as much. I felt like I could put these things into the work because it’s the movie. It’s not me.”

Adam Skolnick visits director Chris Weitz on the set of his new film, Operation Finale.

The invisible language of film permeates Christian Kracht’s “The Dead,” prose that is neutral and shot through with so much darkness, you occasionally can’t find the light.

Sometimes, the review is better than the film it reviews.

Scorned by stage actors and mocked by the theater-going upper classes, filmmakers nevertheless developed a bold new art form — but they needed better weather.

My friend Sam went back to Brooklyn and his gang of peculiar white buddies watching their endless Stanley Kubrick film festival. I shall not see him again.

Journalists who get screen time are most often men—even when the original story was told by a woman.

The failures of Kathryn Bigelow’s film undercut the fullness, complexity, and beauty of Detroit.

Five stories about movies, for your reading pleasure.

Alamo Drafthouse creator Tim League wants to make moviegoing fun again.

“We have to get rid of the romantic part.”

If it was up to the media, probably forever.

Christopher Orr, film critic for The Atlantic, watched Fifty Shades Darker — the second film in the series based on the super popular Fifty Shades of Gray books — so that you don’t have to.

How Inception changed the way we listen to movies.

Why can’t we let go of Mermaids-era Winona Ryder? Soraya Roberts at Hazlitt explores the last great pre-internet icon.

What can the endurance of the messy, campy canon of James Bond theme songs tell us about contemporary popular music?

Jamie Tarabay explored Hollywood’s relationship with the Pentagon in a recent piece for Al Jazeera America. The Pentagon has a devoted “entertainment-liaison officer” who acts as a Hollywood point person and helps decide which projects get Pentagon support (in the form of expertise, equipment, and locations). According to scholar Lawrence Suid, the Hollywood military relationship relationship dates back to […]

John Crutchfield’s “Toward an Aesthetics of Failure” explains why he still loves the out-of-fashion western despite repetitive plots, one-dimension characters, and shoddy filmmaking — and why you should, too.

[Harmony] Korine, nineteen at the time, and [Larry] Clark, then over fifty, wrangled the troops from the skate clique, supplementing them with more non-actors from Washington Square Park and the club scene, and across downtown—including Chloë Sevigny, from tony Darien, Connecticut, who had been hanging out with the crew in Washington Square Park for years. They […]

[Allison] Jones began her career with the two-beats-and-a-punch-line sitcoms of the nineteen-eighties, but, in working with Feig and the director Judd Apatow, she was required to try something revolutionary: find comedic actors who, more than just delivering jokes, could improvise and riff on their lines, creating something altogether different from what was on the page. […]

“I have consciously tried to refocus my attention away from being a film critic and toward being a film historian.”

It doesn’t really seem to make much difference how the voting is done. The quality of the work is still only recognized in the context of success. A superb job in a flop picture would get you nothing, a routine job in a winner will be voted in. It is against this background of success-worship that the voting is done, with the incidental music supplied by a stream of advertising in the trade papers (which even intelligent people read in Hollywood) designed to put all other pictures than those advertised out of your head at balloting time.

It wasn’t the compendium of facts in the chapter “Water! Water! Water!” or indeed in the entire book. It was that Carey McWilliams wrote about Southern California with sensibilities my eye, ear, and nose recognized. Along with Chandler he made me feel that he’d not only walked down the same streets and into the same arroyo-he smelled the eucalyptus, heard the humming of high tension wires, saw the same bleeding Madras landscapes-and so a sense of deja vu was underlined by a sense of jamais vu: No writers had ever spoken as strongly to me about my home.

Mike Nichols, the beloved director of stage and screen—from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, to Barefoot in the Park and Working Girl— died Nov. 19, 2014 at the age of 83. Here are four pieces on the life of the artist.

Fast Company has an excerpt from Creativity, Inc., the book by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull (with Amy Wallace), which goes inside the creative process at the studio. Catmull attributes much of their creative success to their internal process for continually refining stories. It includes meetings with the Braintrust, a group of executives, directors and other […]

Of all of his collaborations with Bill Murray, Groundhog Day was his masterpiece.

After Michael Mann set out to direct Collateral, the story’s setting moved from New York to Los Angeles. This decision was in part motivated by the unique visual presence of the city — especially the way it looked at night. Mann shot a majority of the film in HD (this was 2004), feeling the format […]

“In my mid–20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start […]