Tag: movies
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,…
Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special: The Mysterious and Ineffable
How many movies does it take to establish a pattern? Jeff Nichols, who I have previously placed on my Mt. Rushmore of directors currently in their 30s, has just released his fourth feature film. The first and third – Shotgun Stories and Mud – are realistically grounded and physically violent stories of men searching their…
Reviewing The Clan: Two Sunny Afternoons, One Chaotic Mess
I’m sure if I thought about it for a little while I could come up with plenty of examples of movies which used a non-original pop song, in its entirety, as a piece of its soundtrack. It’s not terribly common because most directors would rather edit to their own rhythms and not that of an…
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…