The 94th Academy Awards, which concluded last Sunday night, confounded just about everyone who watched it—whether they were in the elite crowd inside the Academy’s return to the Dolby Theatre or like the rest of us, flopped out on the couch. Whatever else it was, Oscar night this year will be known forevermore as Not the...

Festival is misleading or even a misnomer. The important A-list fests are really conventions, a cross between sales conventions to introduce the new line — in the garment industry parlance of my salesman father — and marketing launchpads for the coming season of film debuts. We’re in the festival year’s far turn with Venice and...

Lisa Hurwitz’ The AUTOMAT, which came out of the Telluride Film Festival and opens this week at the Film Forum in Manhattan, is a seductive dive back through time into the art deco origins of the Horn & Hardart Automats. You may remember those magnificent walls of little glass door cubbies full of mac and...

Top Gun: Maverick brings Tom Cruise back to the screen, flying faster than a speeding bullet, doing his own stunts in jet planes, blowing stuff up, reclaiming the pretty girl he left behind and burning a hole through the screen with his white, hot teeth as usual.  This cruise missile will land at the 75th Cannes Film...

Festivals are organized fantasy markets, every so often featuring great fantasies and great actors who “play” and sometimes move or even inspire us. The rather humdrum opening of the 75th Cannes Film Festival, Tuesday night 17 May, with some 3500 people packed into the two main halls, The Lumiere and the satellite Debussy (for the...

The strongest among the films I caught up with were mostly those about the great disconnect, as if there’s just some information missing in what’s going down between characters onscreen. There’s no great theme at work here, or maybe not consciously, since what’s on display is as much a function of what got made during...

Unmoored from a robust theatrical release schedule, the professional voyeurs we call film critics spent this third year emerging from Covid looking at character driven films more from the festival circuit, both real time and virtual, and virtually writing off studio “product.” Our film critic, HJ, spent 2022 either going to Sundance, SXSW, Cannes, Telluride,...

The life span of a film is comparatively short—6 months if it’s a star performer, six weeks if it’s got some backing, down to 6 days or 6 minutes if it’s star-crossed. Writer- director Todd Field’s Tár, for which Cate Blanchett might win her third Oscar as a fiery symphony conductor, got a standing ovation in...

In a year that promised to be chock full of eagerly anticipated film titles held over from 2020 – In the Heights, West Side Story, The French Dispatch — the air went out of 2021, the way it seemed to leave the country. There was very little fresh air to go round anywhere, even off to the side in...