Category: Articles
Loving Jake Gyllenhaal: From City Slickers to Nightcrawler
I’ll admit it. I was not always the biggest Jake Gyllenhaal fan. But, as Richard Cohen quoted Nora Ephron at the latter’s funeral, “This is going to be like the movies. We start as enemies and end as friends.” Who better to apply a “like the movies” quote to? The son of a director/screenwriter marriage,…
Have film critics ever had an impact on the box office?
You gotta love Variety. The journalistic bellwether of all things entertainment has studied the massive box office opening for Batman v Superman and considered the Blart-like reviews it has received (currently a 29% on Rotten Tomatoes). Their conclusion? Critics don’t really matter when it comes to a movie’s financial success. Methinks they are late to…
Michael Caine: An appreciation
Ask anyone to name some great British actors, and they might say Lawrence Olivier, Alec Guinness, John Mills, Richard Attenborough, or Anthony Hopkins. Pose the same question to younger respondents, and they could well come up with Jude Law, Clive Owen, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Eddie Redmayne. It is unlikely that any of them would think…
Philippe Mora: Five films about the fabric of truth
It’s possible that there are not a huge number of people amongst the general public who will immediately recognise the name of film director Philippe Mora. And those who do recognise the name might be inclined to associate it with his stint making satirical genre films like The Beast Within (1982), Howling II: Your Sister…
Which 2016 films would have won Academy Awards in 1929?
I tried. They’ll never know how hard I tried. I tried my very best not to write anything remotely related to this year’s Oscars. For god’s sake, I’m sixty pages into a new screenplay. I have minor dental surgery coming up. We have fruit flies. It’s not like I don’t have other things to do.…