Article: “The Artist” leads the 2012 Spirit Awards winners
“The Descendants” and “Margin Call” also took home several awards.
“Arrested Development”‘s tear-jerking “Peanuts” song gag returns triumphantly in season 4
Bill Hader dishes on Justin Bieber to Stern
Ken Jeong talks stunts, breaking tropes and the evolution of Mr. Chow in “The Hangover 3″
David Cross and Portia de Rossi describe Lindsay and Tobias’s “trajectory of sadness” in “Arrested Development” season 4
Christopher Plummer
Article: Golden Globes 2012 recap: “The Artist” and “The Descendants” rule the night
Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams and Martin Scorsese also won major awards.
Article: Comparing the year end film polls
We’ve got one week left in 2011, so we’re running out of time to make lists, tear apart other people’s lists, make lists of lists, and list the lists we are going to list later. Better make the most of it. Last night, for example, I spent a couple of hours pouring over the two…
Article: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” reviewed
One word describes the tone, setting, and pacing of David Fincher’s adaptation of Stieg Larson’s wildly popular novel, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” That word is glacial. Its portrait of modern Sweden is bleak and bitterly cold, its story is sad and sordid, and its opening and closing scenes are extremely distended. Will fans…
Article: National Board of Review names “Hugo” best film of 2011
Basically when it comes to this year’s awards season, if you ain’t about old movies, you ain’t nothing. Earlier in the week, The New York Film Critics Circle named the silent film homage “The Artist” their Best Film of 2011. Today, the National Board of Review chose the silent film homage “Hugo” as their Best…
Article: “The Artist” and “Take Shelter” lead the 2012 Spirit Award nominees
At a ceremony in Los Angeles this morning, Anthony Mackie and Kate Beckinsale announced the nominees for the 2012 Spirit Awards, which will be handed out on IFC on Saturday, February 25. And one night after it scored Best Film and Best Ensemble at the Gotham Awards, “Beginners” built more awards season momentum by landing…
Article: Check out three new photos from David Fincher’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
We’re just under four months away from seeing David Fincher’s take on the bestselling novel “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and our curiosity is only piqued with each passing trailer or image. Today we got three new photos from the production, which stars Daniel Craig, Mara Rooney, Christopher Plummer and Stellan Skarsgard. The stills,…
Article: The Unique Acting Challenges of “Beginners”
We wrap up our week of coverage of Mike Mills’ “Beginners,” with one more batch of interviews with the director and his stars. Since the film is sort of the understated drama version of a “Law & Order” episode — ripped from the headlines, so to speak, of Mills’ own personal life — I had…
Article: Exclusive Premiere: Soundtrack From The Movie “Beginners”
Director Mike Mills’ film “Beginners” is about a young man named Oliver (Ewan McGregor) who learns his elderly father has both terminal cancer and a young male lover, and how Oliver tries to love a woman with the life lessons this dying father gives him. Mills wrote the screenplay based loosely on recollections of his…
Article: The Last Station, composer Sergey Yevtushenko.
The reviews are mixed but that doesn’t dilute the joy of seeing Christopher Plummer and the super hot, Helen Mirren go for a roll in the hay in Michael Hoffman’s “The Last Station. Plummer plays literary legend Leo Tolstoy. Mirren plays Countess Sofya Tolstoy, lover, muse, wife and nemesis, to the Russian novelist who renounces…
Article: Empty Calories
Director Guy Ritchie’s talent for stirring violence and barely concealed homoeroticism remain very much on display in “Sherlock Holmes,” his first period piece and most flagrant effort to start a new franchise. But for all the film’s wit and zing, there’s no momentum — we get a series of stirring, entertaining scenes, but they never…
Article: The Adventures of Baron Gilliam
When Heath Ledger passed away in January 2008, he was in the midst of shooting his second collaboration with famed filmmaker and former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam. His death should have doomed “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.” But Gilliam, who’d already had “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” fall apart, as famously documented in…
Article: Destroying the World to Save It
Is it too late for “9″ to be the action movie of the summer? Shane Acker’s dystopian fable shares a subject with the latest entries in the “Terminator” and “Transformers” franchises (not to mention “Battlestar Galactica”), but his direction is a model of clarity and grace, and his animated, inhuman protagonists are more life-like and…
Article: “I knew then that the SOB was going to be a ‘star.’ “
The world in quotes: “I knew then that the SOB was going to be a ‘star,’ “ –Christopher Plummer’s thoughts (and judicious use of quotation marks) on having to give understudy William Shatner a chance at his role in a 1956 stage production of “Henry V,” after a one-night stand dislodged a kidney stone and…
