dvd of the week Olivier Assayas wrote and directed this gorgeous and slyly cerebral backstage drama about aging actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) confronting her youth. In a play 20 years before, she became famous playing the ingénue who seduces an older woman, whose love and obsession drives her to suicide. Maria is asked to…
dvd of the week In her Oscar-winning role, Julianne Moore is Alice Howland, a renowned professor of linguistics at Columbia University, married to a handsome and successful scientist named John (Alec Baldwin), and mother to three children, slightly petulant Ann (Kate Bosworth), bright and handsome Tom (Hunter Parrish) and struggling actress Lydia (Kristen Stewart). When…
The writer-director of the Alzheimer’s drama Still Alice Richard Glatzer died Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 63. Glatzer co-wrote and directed the movie alongside his husband, Wash Westmoreland, while battling ALS. The Huffington Post reported that the pair took on the project of Still Alice in a very early stage of Glatzer’s disease. Their…
It’s likely that both the Best Actor and Best Actress winners at this year’s Academy Awards will go to portrayals of people suffering from chronic neurodegenerative diseases. The films couldn’t be more different, however. In The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne plays Stephen Hawking, who was struck with Lou Gehrig’s disease (or ALS) more than…
dvd of the week What a great idea: Remake Snow White, but throw out everything that made the Disney film work and replace it with everything that made The Lord of the Rings work. And it is, actually, a great idea. In this film, the huntsman who is charged with capturing Snow White has a…
also playing What a great idea: Remake Snow White, but throw out everything that made the Disney film work – the sweetness, the cuteness, and brilliant Technicolor – and replace it with everything that made The Lord of the Rings work: stunning cinematography, intense acting, special effects monsters and special effects little people, swordplay, and…
