This year’s Sundance breakout Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is the latest in the curious string of films based on dark young adult novels: The Fault in Our Stars, If I Stay, The Spectacular Now, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and, going back a bit, The Lovely Bones. As Gayle Forman, the…
dvd of the week In the stylish and slight Focus, Will Smith plays Nicky, an extremely successful and absurdly smooth conman who meets a blonde seductress named Jess (Margot Robie) when she tries to con him and fails miserably. Jess asks Nicky to teach her to be a better con artist, and while he is…
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…
dvd of the week The events in Selma, Ala., a town with a majority of black residents only 2 percent of whom could vote, helped force the Voting Rights Act into existence. One of 2014’s best films, Selma is about how that happened. Director Ana DuVernay’s work on Selma is tremendous, and it announces a…
The 100th anniversary of World War I is passing by in the United States quietly mostly because, I suspect, how little the United States suffered during that war, compared to Europe and its colonies. Around 17 million soldiers and civilians died during the war’s four years; it wiped away huge swaths of the British, French,…
LOS ANGELES – GLAAD today released its third annual Studio Responsibility Index (SRI), a report that maps the quantity, quality, and diversity of images of LGBT people in films released by the seven largest motion picture studios during the 2014 calendar year. For the first time, GLAAD this year also tracked LGBT representations in films…
I now live five blocks from the giant blue Scientology building in Hollywood, and I often catch a bus at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, where young Scientologists, wearing blue blazers and solicitous smiles pass out proselytizing leaflets proclaiming, as all religions do, that they have the true answers to enlightenment. I…
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…
I heard someone on the radio refer to Focus as “that Will Smith movie the studio is dumping in February.” I was surprised partly because Will Smith movies, even atrocious ones, don’t ever get dumped during the late summer or early winter dump zones, and partly because Focus is written and directed by John Requa…
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…
