Month: January 2022

“Paper & Glue,” the feature-length documentary that follows French artist JR as he plasters his provocative large-scale images of people in such places as the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the U.S.-Mexico border wall and a California supermax prison, has won the top prize at Uruguay’s inaugural arts film festival, ARCA, which wrapped on Friday,

In awards season, the word “snub” gets overused in a major way. A snub, in life, is a deliberate dis. The essence of it is that it’s personal. When an actor fails to make the cut of nominees for a movie award, to call that a snub is to make it sound like a conspiracy

Directors will tell you that every film is personal. Certainly, the amount of time and effort spent on even the most seemingly formulaic project demands an enormous investment from its creators just to get the movies made. In 2021, several filmmakers brought stories to the screen that began to gestate long before they started directing,

We live in a golden age of historical fiction, from Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” adapted for television by Barry Jenkins, to Mark Sullivan’s bestseller “Beneath a Scarlet Sky,” in development by Pascal Pictures, to Hilary Mantel’s novel “Wolf Hall,” adapted into a BAFTA-winning BBC limited series as well as a Broadway and West End

Do you like scary movies? North American audiences still do, even as most other theatrical releases continue to struggle amid a pandemic. “Scream” is the latest horror film to make a sizable impression at the domestic box office, with an opening weekend that should finally dethrone “Spider-Man: No Way Home” after the Marvel entry’s four-week

To craft the looks of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza,” costume designer and frequent collaborator Mark Bridges turned to references including high school yearbooks and store catalogs that showed how middle-class residents of the San Fernando Valley might have looked in 1973. “The yearbooks would verify we were on the right track and were incredibly

“The Power of the Dog” editor Peter Sciberras was drawn to the psychological tension woven into Jane Campion’s script. That tension underlined the relationship between the Burbank brothers Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), as well as their dealings with George’s wife, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), or the tense dynamic between Phil and Rose’s son

The writing and directing races are being dominated by familiar faces, which can break some records in Oscar’s history. Suppose the Variety awards circuit Oscar predictions charts are to be believed. In that case, eight of the top 12 candidates for director are former nominees and winners, leaving little room for first-timers, such as Maggie

The battle over how Hollywood studios share profit with talent and creatives has been raging since the invention of movies. The current tensions have ratcheted upward due to the advent of the streaming wars and the new business models the deep-pocketed players have developed. While Disney recently settled a compensation spat out of court with

To shoot “The Hand of God,” Paolo Sorrentino returned to his roots and did a lot of things backwards. “After 20 years of filmmaking I was perhaps a bit tired of the spot I was in,” he says. So in tackling the autobiographical story — which brought him back to his native Naples two decades

“Italian Studies” begins on that most minor, familiar but nonetheless disorienting of social embarrassments: You run into a person who knows you, but you cannot for the life of you remember them. For most of us, it’s a simple slip of the memory. For London-based writer Alina, confronted with a blank space in her brain

“C’mon, C’mon” is a buddy road movie of sorts, as Joaquin Phoenix, as Johnny, a radio journalist, tries to bond with and care for his 9-year-old nephew, Jesse (Woody Norman), but struggles in difficult circumstances. Ultimately, the exploration of family, parenting, relationships and responsibility, director Mike Mills says, means that the “hidden center” of the

Chukotka, where Indigenous teenager Lyoshka (Vladimir Onokhov, perfectly expressive despite a face that could be carved from stone) lives a hardscrabble life in a remote whaling village, is the easternmost part of Russia. Beautiful in a forbidding, raw-boned way, with about half its territory above the Arctic Circle, it is separated from the westernmost Alaskan

Filmmaker-actor Tim Blake Nelson commands the screen in the Western thriller “Old Henry,” written and directed by Potsy Ponciroli. Nelson’s intense performance as a man driven to extremes in order to protect his son in early 1900s Oklahoma drives the narrative. What appealed to you most about the script? I’ve always loved Westerns. It was