As you read this, 94-year-old filmmaker Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2” is playing on 458 screens in France, where it opened at number one at the box office, according to reported figures. The movie is playing on just 50 screens in his home country, which also happens to be the home of its releasing company, Warner … Read more
This month, we’re paying tribute to an artist and a movie beloved by our site’s founder, the great and dearly missed Roger Ebert. If not for Roger’s love of Alex Proyas and “Dark City,” I might never have given this incredible visual stylist and marvelously ornery iconoclast a second glance. Still, our patron turned me into … Read more
The brilliance of Dick Pope, who died this week at 77, can be seen in nearly all of the movies he shot as a cinematographer. But the first examples that spring to this viewer’s mind are two shots from 1996’s “Secrets and Lies,” one of many collaborations with his greatest creative partner, Mike Leigh. The … Read more
Barry Champlain, the main character of 1988’s “Talk Radio,” a talk radio DJ based in Dallas, waxes poetic about American corruption in little arias of outrage, and sometimes a caller who’s obviously suffering will bring out his humanity for a minute, but his default mode is scorched-earth combativeness. It would be misleading to call him … Read more
John Amos was a pioneer in more ways than one. A tall, broad-shouldered man with a barrel chest, a winning smile, and an arsenal of “You’ve got to be kidding me” looks, he stood out in TV ensembles spanning four decades, from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Good Times,” and “Roots” in the 1970s to … Read more
This month, we pay tribute not just to a movie that almost instantly fell out of the public consciousness but to a great writer as well. North America may have no finer, no more eloquent defender of the director Paul Verhoeven than Adam Nayman, whose book, It Doesn’t Suck, is the final word on “Showgirls.” I … Read more
Set in 1964 and 1965, “The Featherweight” is a stylistically daring movie about an aging real-life boxer, Willie Pep (James Madio), who held the World Featherweight championship twice between 1942 and 1950 and invites a couple of documentary filmmakers modeled on the Maysles brothers to record his daily life as he attempts a comeback in … Read more
Whenever this day arrives, I think of how popular culture usually depicts momentous days in history as ones where ordinary life stands still, and the way it really is: the momentous thing happens, but there are also all of these ordinary things that have to occur as if it were a day like any other. … Read more
SPOILERS FOR ALIEN ROMULUS: Fede Alvarez’s “Alien Romulus,” the latest entry in the “Alien” franchise, is a sturdily constructed movie with two thoughtfully written lead characters at its center. One is Rain (Cailee Spaeny), an orphaned miner who joins a reckless scheme to break into a decommissioned space station, steal lifeforms that are still in … Read more
Today we’re going to celebrate the career of one of the great makers of genre and B-movies, whose robust adventure films and harrowing sci-fi pictures paved the way for the second half of the 20th and 21st century. Case in point this marvel, the too-little-seen and even less discussed “The Power,” a proto-superhero movie with … Read more