As my friend and Indiewire columnist Tom Brueggemann noted this week: This summer Disney had five films cross the $1 billion mark worldwide — with fewer tickets sold domestically than any year since 1992–when the population was 90 million fewer. “Summer totals for 2019 will be about $4.5 billion domestic, which is almost identical for the same period...

Pain and Glory is writer-director Pedro Almodóvar’s 21st film in a career spanning nearly 40 years.  I caught it at this year’s resplendent Toronto film Festival, but it touched down briefly at the ongoing 57th NY Film Festival, which ends this weekend after 17 days with a reprise of some of the festival’s 40 films. There’s...

Plenty to see in this 44th rolling out of films in Toronto, the unlikely glitz capital of the world for these past 10 days. The major film companies, plus the itty-bitty guys and the death star streaming services like Netflix and Amazon all trotted out their sexiest fall entries in the various Oscar categories. Both the...

Rolling Thunder Revue’s subtitle is A Bob Dylan Story, told by Scorsese with a little help from his friends at Netflix, which helped Scorsese and collaborators find restore to vibrancy footage of Dylan’s 1975 tour of small venues in mostly small towns across America beginning at Plymouth Rock. They’ve added new testimonials, a number of which are...

Ever since The Blair Witch Project in 1999, the indie art-house horror film has been making a steady comeback. Get Out in 2017, by actor turned director Jordan Peele, was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, Director, leading actor, and won Best Original Screenplay. Peele’s back. Our Harlan Jacobson went to the SXSW Fest in Austin to see his new...

Tribeca continues to be this blast of energy radiating from the downtown media hub on Varick Street,  including the Regal multiplex in Battery Park through the SVA Theatre on W. 23rd up through some events at the Beacon on the UWS. The festival opened with The Apollo, an HBO doc by Roger Ross Williams, about the life of...

It was an extraordinarily diverse year in films. There were multiple films at all different levels of taste and interests. And great performances dropped out of the sky—or should I say inhabitances, since there were so many instances of good people bringing back the dead from history. Insert the obligatory No Such Thing as a...

Just as Hollywood drags 2018 way past the finish line with the Oscars set for Feb. 24 of this year, the Sundance Film Festival which closes this weekend kicks off the new year with 112 independent films, 56 of which compete in the US Dramatic and documentary categories, and World Dramatic and documentary competitions.  Sundance...

It’s the last hurrah for the mid-century WASP, those men born before WWII, come of age after it, and built or dodged the System, the Death Star of the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address in 1960. Time to consider the corporate white male who pre-dated the rise of the...

As we head into the holidays, there’s a sleigh full of new films that either have opened or are opening before the end of the month. Some are in the Oscar hunt and need a week in theatres to qualify, all are hoping they’re good enough to attract your attention after you’ve cleaned up the...