The 37th SXSW Music, Film, Interactive Media festival and trade show Conferences wrapped up this past week in Austin, Tx. That’s after plowing through 110 feature films, including some 75 world premieres, a dozen or more new TV pilots and series episodes, XR—extended reality—experiences, and real film makers come to Texas. SXSW, or South By, which...
There’s an old maxim that you don’t go to the movies to learn history. British director Ridley Scott, who turns 86 this Nov. 30, has had a glorious career making spectacle films, the heir to the big canvas films of David Lean, who made Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai that mined British history to examine...
The New York Film Festival has in recent years expanded since the years I worked there awhile back from 20 or so films to 32 in its Main Slate and nearly 60 films overall. That somewhat corrects a paucity of programming that was reframed at the time as a jewel box selection, a formulation that...
The Polish veteran director Agnieszka Holland’s The Green Border plants itself in a forest where Belarus meets her native Poland, and follows a small cast of disparate people from Afghanistan, Muslim North Africa and Syria used as political footballs in a torturous ground game run back and forth, over, under and through coils of razor wire that...
During the pre-internet days of peace and love of my hippie youth, it seemed like we had reached the end of days: social upheaval, anti-war rebellion, race riots, Richard Nixon’s stealth attacks on the election of 1972 and the constitution, on values, on race, and his perversion of law that collectively manifested in Watergate. There...
After a decades long run at being the dominant fall film launchpad in North America, Toronto or TIFF as it’s known, has been increasingly challenged by a reinvigorated Venice, the world’s oldest film festival – it was started by Benito Mussolini in 1936 – to launch new work around the world and most especially into...
I have checked out not just one Mission Impossible, but two, the latest Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One with Tom Cruise returning as agent Ethan Hunt in the 7th installment in the series, and Oppenheimer, with Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan’s large-screen epic about the race to beat Germany to the atomic bomb in WWII. Tune in here to...
We’re in the final hours of Oscar chatter which began about a year ago and ends with the 95th Academy Awards this Sunday night. Oscar handicapping usually starts just after the last one ends, but last year, we were consumed for weeks afterwards by The Slap. I see a cosmic battle for control of the culture...
The most anticipated film this year at the 76th Cannes Film Festival was Killers of the Flower Moon directed by one of just about every cinema lover’s modern heroes, Martin Scorsese, adapted from New Yorker writer David Grann’s 2017 historical account. I don’t begrudge Marty another Mob movie, it’s what he does and what often needs being...
AIR had its premiere at SXSW, where I recently reported on the beefed-up selection of films. The new Ben Affleck directed film, in which he stars with his Boston buddy Matt Damon, was a three pointer from center court in Austin. To listen to the broadcast of this review, link to The WBGO JOURNAL on WBGO Public...
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