Sports makes for natural cinema. You’ve got the underdog hero, the heavily-favored villain, the climactic clash, the clear-cut winner and loser. That’s what fueled Rocky to eight films and $800 million at the box office in the U.S. alone. But many forget: Rocky lost the first championship fight. And losing can make for equally compelling viewing. …
HBO’s finale to True Detective hasn’t seen this much controversy since the end of The Sopranos, which is fitting, because both ended on anticlimactic notes. Throughout its eight-year run, The Sopranos suggested that death was sudden blackness, an unexpected and unexplained exit from existence. To prove the point, Sopranos capped its own fans, ending the series in such sudden …
You can tell Netflix is feeling its big-studio oats by the fights it’s accepting. First came the clash with major Hollywood studios with Roma, which is vying to become the first streaming service film to win Best Picture when the Oscars are handed out February 24. Then it won the bidding war at Sundance …
Roma‘s 10 Oscar nominations underscored not only the streaming service’s growing clout in Hollywood, but confirmed what analysts have been noticing since it hit airwaves a dozen years ago: Netflix is altering almost everything we view, from movies to TV shows to viral videos. Despite its fourth — and biggest — price hike in its …
As Michael Clayton and Nightcrawler illustrated, Dan Gilroy is masterful at portraying the horrific underbelly of human nature. When it comes to outright horror, though, his artistic style seems a little rough around the edges. Such is the mixed result of his fun-but-flawed latest work, Velvet Buzzsaw, which premiered at Sundance last week before …
High Flying Bird fittingly resembles a no-look pass in basketball: unexpected, deftly maneuvered, and usually resulting in a score. And while Steven Soderbergh’s latest movie accomplishes most of the achievements of the flashy pass — including a score — it isn’t quite a slam dunk. There’s no denying the basketball drama was unexpected, on a …
Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s latest masterpiece, wears several hats: It’s part homage to his Mexican upbringing, part love poem to his nanny and part examination of the political and social schisms of his country in the 1970s. It’s also something of a Hollywood double agent. The black-and-white film, which is garnering substantial Oscar buzz, underscores the …
I spent half my career as a police reporter. After watching Ronald Gene Simmons executed for killing 16 people over the Christmas holiday, I realized I wanted out of the death business. So I took a beat as far-flung from crime as I could imagine: movie critic. In writing this review for a website, …
The media outlet Buzzfeed had to down a plateful of crow today, served up by none other than Robert Mueller. The meal was unexpected for a couple of reasons. One, Buzzfeed is as much of a news outlet as Scientology is a religion. In fact, they share a similar modus operandi: Both try to …
M. Night Shyamalan’s career is something akin to the stock market. After making his Hollywood splash with the Oscar-nominated chiller The Sixth Sense, he was hailed on the cover of Newsweek as the next Steven Spielberg. But since then, his career has seen as many peaks and valleys as The Dow Jones. In anticipation …
