Go the Capote site and click through to the review section (which has a blurb from yours truly), and while you’re doing that listen to the excerpts from the score by Mychael Danna, brother of Jeff Danna, who also composes for films. The last score by Mycahel that I really liked was for Shattered Glass, but the one for Capote is even better. Listen to it for five minutes or so and it starts sinking in deep. Now I want to buy the CD.
Sometimes people have trouble with simple declarative sentences and laying things bare. If I’d done some calling around on this thing, I would have uncovered the thing of it. In the meantime, we have Rush and Molloy reporting this morning that Warner Independent is dumping Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert’s Strangers with Candy, a feature prequel to the widely-praised TV series featuring Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris), a 46 year-old ex-junkie and ex-con who returns to high school in a bid to start her life over. But George and Joanna didn’t say (or even speculate all that energetically) why. Rush-Molloy wrote that “it was was snubbed by indie filmmakers for being ‘too entertaining,'” but that kind of observation obviously has no bearing on anything relating to their item.
Wes Anderson has been living in Paris for the past several months, “just off the Champs Elysee” and somewhere in the vicinity of Roman Polanki’s place on Avenue Montaigne, according to Squid and the Whale director-writer Noah Baumbach. Baumbach visited Anderson there last winter-spring to work on their script for Anderson’s next film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, an animated film based on the Roald Dahl book of the same name. (Pissed-off farmers wage war upon a sly fox and his family because he’s been eating their chickens.) Henry Selick, The guy who did the animated fish in The Life Aquatic, will do the foxes and the chickens this time. And that idea for a movie “taking place a train in India” may be Wes’s next human-being movie.

“The joy of this unassuming, generous film is that it never sells out its characters’ desires or ours,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dragis says of In Her Shoes. Of the two leads, “Toni Collette is so very good and goes so very deep inside her character — bringing us right alongside her — that she becomes the de facto center of the film as well as the beneficiary of our greatest emotional investment. You want Rose to lay down that ice cream container and poor-pitiful-me expression, to shuck her social conditioning and family dysfunction so she too can sashay in dangerous heels and kiss the boy (or two) in her life as a woman, not a contrivance.” Director Curtis Hanson “gives Ms. Collette the space to do just that.”

“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way… 7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business,...

The Kamala surge is, I believe, mainly about two things — (a) people feeling lit up or joyful about being...
Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner's Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg's tastiest and wickedest film -- intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...