Movie reviewers are under the gun, one in particular.
For years Eric Childress has run a neat website entitled Criticwatch, which exposes reviewers whom he castigates as “quote whores,” tireless cheerleaders for the Hollywood studios.
He tallies those critics whose purple prose most frequently is trumpeted in movie ads. By his reckoning, the top “quote whore” in 2009 was Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, who scored 79 medi..
Sharing your name with a movie character ain't all it's cracked up to be.
It’s the dream of every film geek to have a lead character in a film named after them. I’m sure it happens a lot to you, Mr. General Public – there are five ‘H. Callahans’ on the White Pages website in Sydney alone, and I’ll bet at least two of them are ‘Harrys’.
But for this humble movie nerd, monikered with the largely-forgettable name ‘Simo..
Australian writer/director David Michôd speaks to Kylie Boltin from Los
Angeles, as he digests the extraordinary success of his debut feature,
Animal Kingdom.
David Michôd was in Los Angeles when the announcement was made that his debut feature Animal Kingdom, had won the World Cinema Jury Prize. “I had come back to LA from Sundance,” he says over the phone. “I caught wind of the fact that I might be about to win something. There were inclinations that the festival might like me to go back. I contemplated doing it but it would be..
Continuing a decades-old theme, two movies depict a bleak future for women in a post-Apocalyptic world.
Women are bit players in The Road, John Hillcoat’s gloomy adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel. In The Book of Eli, another post-apocalyptic movie which opens here in May, most of the female characters are whores or rape victims.
A coincidence? Not according to Cinematical’s Monika Bartyzel, who argues that futuristic movies have been giving women a raw deal for years, since Mad Ma..
As the nation of Haiti experiences unimaginable devastation we look
back at a portrait of the country and one of its favourite sons.
The first time you watch Demme’s documentary, The Agronomist you will cry in disbelief – no scratch that – every time you watch it you will be profoundly moved; especially now, as the nation continues to count its dead and begins the gargantuan task of rebuilding its homeland.
The masterful film is the story of the director of Radio Haiti Inter, Jean Leopold Dominique. It is ..
3D is being hailed as a godsend for the film industry and as a whole
new immersive experience for moviegoers, but it’s giving some people a
headache, and worse.
While Avatar is smashing box-office records around the world, the 3D version of James Cameron’s epic is making some people sick – and sparking a debate about the dangers of watching movies in that format, especially for those with eye problems.
In China, Cameron’s movie has caused a range of side-effects including eye ache, dizziness and nausea and even vomiting, among a small s..
Steven Soderbergh has been lambasted for pondering the fate of cinema, but maybe, just maybe, his critics protest too much.
So, Steven Soderbergh wonders, out loud, and in public, whether movies matter, in the way they once did? He has been gently chided for thinking twice about film as an Art – where it’s been and where it might be going – as if he were contemplating a kind of career hara-kiri. This sort of heresy has earned him scorn on this site and elsewhere. His critics, if they are to be underst..
Director John Hillcoat's next attempt to collaborate with Nick Cave has fallen victim to the GEC.
Little, it appears, comes easily for John Hillcoat. The Queensland-born, England-based filmmaker has directed just four features in 22 years: 1988’s Ghosts of the Civil Dead, 1996’s To Have & to Hold, 2005’s The Proposition and January 28’s The Road, the much anticipated adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Now it appears that the well-adv..
One of America’s most successful filmmakers is questioning whether movies are still relevant culturally.
When a filmmaker with the artistic and commercial pedigree of Steven Soderbergh questions whether movies still matter, you have to ask, “What’s he on about?”
After all, this is the guy who changed the face of independent movies 20 years ago with sex, lies and videotape, and since then has had the luxury of alternating between glossy popcorn fare like the Ocean’s mo..
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