Search Results for: Tom Wolfe

I saw Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro yesterday afternoon at Dolby 88, starting around 4 pm. 130-something minutes later I came out positively elated and humming…floating on a cloud. It’s one of the two or three best films of the year (right up there with Poor Things and The Holdovers, and may even possibly be the El … Read more

The Gotham Award nominations were announced at noon today, and hoo boy…talk about an organization and a community that lives in a deep mine shaft within its own secular planet…nominations that represent an elitist bubble of urban progressive sensitivity that could choke a plowhorse…a mindset that frequently spits upon Joe Popcorn cinema and enforces a … Read more

I’m just going to cough this up and let the chips fall… The four finest films of the 2023 Telluride Film Festival — the ones that boasted the highest levels of craftsmanship, and which will really get through to Average Joes and Janes and cause their hearts and minds to snap to attention — are … Read more

HE picks are in boldface. The high-profile films that are giving me bad or iffy vibes…okay, I won’t highlight these. Let’s just take it as it comes. It’s still fairly devastating that there’s no Pot au Feu, no Coup de Chance, no The Killer, no The Palace, no Maestro, no Killers of the Flower Moon, … Read more

The Telluride ’23 films (as posted by Jordan Ruimy) that HE is the most revved about are underlined and boldfaced. What titles am I underestimating, or lacking sufficient enthusiasm for? Update: Nobody’s really up on these titles, no familiarity, wait-and-see mode. The Holdovers (d: Alexander Payne) Saltburn (d: Emerald Fennell) Poor Things (d: Yorgos Lanthimos) … Read more

The classy, movingly scored new teaser for Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix, 11.22 theatrical) tells us quite plainly that the film is less about the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and more about the 27-year marriage between Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (Carey Mulligan). The emphasis, in fact, seems to be 60/40 in favor … Read more

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has calculated…okay, authoritatively speculated that the following films will have their world premieres at Telluride ’23: The Holdovers (d: Alexander Payne), Wildcat (d: Ethan Hawke), Saltburn (d: Emerald Fennell), The Pigeon Tunnel (d: Errol Morris), The Royal Hotel (d: Kitty Green), Fingernails (d: Christos Nikou), Rustin (d: George C. Wolfe), … Read more

The great Milan Kundera (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting“, “Immortality”) died yesterday at age 94. As a highly influential, world-renowned, Czech-born writer who moved to Paris in ’75, Kundera’s peak influence years were in the ’70s and especially the ’80s, which is when Philip Kaufman‘s The Unbearable Lightness of … Read more

There’s a passage in Tom Wolfe’s “The Me Decade and Third Great Awakening“, which I happened to re-read a couple of days ago, that put the hook in. It says that Ingmar Bergman‘s Scenes From A Marriage (’73 — recently remade for HBO with Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain) “is one of those rare works … Read more

The fanciful bond between Robert Blake and Scott Wilson has been pretty much carved in stone for decades, hence today’s reposting of a time-worn Wilson anecdote. I last mentioned it after Wilson passed on 10.6.18 at age 76. Initially posted on 12.22.11: In the summer of ’81 I had a special Scott Wilson moment. It … Read more

[Initially posted on 9.24.20] A couple of days ago screenwriter Daniel Waters asked followers to post four or five films that they deeply admire or feel guilty-pleasure pangs for, but which are generally regarded as insufficiently loved. Five films, in short, that the hoi polloi never seemed to care very much for (or never knew … Read more