Film
Monday, December 17, 2012
Film The 25 Best Films of 2012
Posted by The Editors on Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 5:00 AM
I used to take the creation of Top 10 lists very seriously. I still do, but I no longer try to impress unborn generations with my definitive record of the year's personal-cultural-critical consensus. That just makes for predictable lists. Instead, now I use them to tell readers about all the awesome, crazy, and amazing movies I saw that year, ones maybe they didn't know a lot about, or hadn't considered seriously. You know you should see The Master; you don't need me to tell you that. (Right?)
As the new editor of The L's film section, I hope that ethos somewhat carries into our Fourth Annual Film Poll—that this won't just be a list of the usual suspects (although you will find The Master and Moonrise Kingdom here; hey, it was a strong year for established auteurs!) but will also include surprises, confounding choices, movies you never heard of, and movies you wish you hadn't heard of—movies that reflect the particular and often peculiar tastes of our writers.
You should watch more movies. Here's a bunch of awesome ones. Henry Stewart
Film Our Film Writers' Top 10 Movies of 2012
Posted by Nicolas Rapold, Benjamin Mercer, Henry Stewart and Jesse Hassenger on Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 5:00 AM
(in alphabetical order)
Abendland
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
The Austrian chronicler gives us an addictive, HD nightscape of Europe at work, from security guards to mental-health hotline operators to Webcam porn actors to protesters and their riot police. A portrait emerges of a cordial, ever-fascinating civilization catered to and controlled to within an inch of its life—think Richard Scarry meets Harun Farocki.
Monday, December 10, 2012
Film More Controversy Over The Sheik and I
Posted by Henry Stewart on Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 12:45 PM
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Film We're Getting an Alamo Drafthouse!
Posted by Henry Stewart on Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:00 AM
Though the business model—a movie theater that serves food and drinks to your seat!—has already arrived in Brooklyn thanks to Williamsburg's Nitehawk Cinema, the brand most closely associated with it is following right behind: the Alamo Drafthouse will open a location in Downtown Brooklyn as part of the City Point development on the old Dekalb Market site, Eater NY reports. The seven-screen theater plans to open in 2015, the year after a planned Upper West Side location, making it the third Alamo in the metropolitan region. (There's also one slated for Yonkers.)
Friday, November 30, 2012
Film Your Weekend at the Movies Catching Up With the Last Few Weekends
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 11:50 AM
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Film / News Good News From The Rockaways: The Radio Days House Survived Sandy
Posted by Virginia K. Smith on Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 9:36 AM
Friday, November 23, 2012
Film Your Digitally Designed Weekend at the Movies
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 10:50 AM
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Film A Long-Lost Hitchcock Film Resurfaces
Posted by Jessica McKenzie on Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 12:15 PM
Friday, November 16, 2012
Film Your Weekend at the Movies with Leading Ladies
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 12:00 PM
Breaking Dawn Part Two: It's times like these, when typing out the title of the sequel to the adaptation of the fourth book in the Twilight series, that I am grateful for the concise, near-mercenary honesty of a title like Fast Five. Because let's be real: this is Twilight 5, for a story that has no more business expanding beyond two or three parts than any number of low-rent horror franchises. I held out hope that perhaps the comparably incident-packed Breaking Dawn Part One, directed by the reasonably decent Bill Condon, might inject some life into movies that generally play like a few boring mid-season episodes of a creatively stalled TV show, just as I hoped that maybe 30 Days of Night's David Slade would give the third one a bit more horror-movie style. It didn't. It didn't. It never does. The best Twilight movie is still the first one, because at least that one had an excuse to look low-budget and vaguely amateurish. Maybe the fourth one would've been more fun with the contents of this movie, which apparently include Vampire Kristen Stewart and more low-rent vampire skirmishes, were allowed to stay with it; then again, a vampire-human wedding, vampire-human honeymoon boning, a pregnancy via vampire that should be impossible, a vampire-assisted cesarean section for a human-vampire hybrid birth, and a werewolf falling in love with a baby weren't enough to gin up some energy in Breaking Dawn Part One. So: once more into the Twilight breach, expecting some giggles and enthusiastically half-embarrassed audience reactions, hoping for a movie that is better than semi-terrible.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Film Director Patrick Wang on How to Make a Melodrama Masterpiece
Posted by Zachary Gomes on Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 9:00 AM
The story of the movie’s progress is pretty interesting. It had a pretty rough start, didn’t it?
It was a really rough start. It kind of landed with a thud to begin with. You know festivals, distributors and even some of my collaborators weren’t that thrilled about the movie, and so it was a lonely time for about six months. Then the story changed, and it keeps changing. It’s unpredictable, and you never know if it’s going to change again over the next couple of weeks. The progress it’s made has been slow and I don’t know if we’ve had enough time that it’s going to pay off even more now that we’re back in New York. We’re returning to some other cities, too—San Francisco is one I’m very excited about.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Film Who Was the Best James Bond?
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 11:35 AM
Film The Greatest Puppet Movie Ever Made, This Weekend at BAM
Posted by Henry Stewart on Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 10:00 AM
Film In Williamsburg, a Video Store Becomes a Movie Theater
Posted by Henry Stewart on Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 9:20 AM
Can you give us a sense of what the space will look like? Will it feel like going to a movie theater or sitting in a video store?
The screening room will seat about 35 people, and it definitely won't feel like watching a movie in a video store. We'll have comfy chairs, a few booths, and table space for people's drinks and popcorn.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Film reRun Gastropub Movie Theater Returns to DUMBO!
Posted by Henry Stewart on Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 9:00 AM
I thought reRun was done! What happened?
Quite simply, it's too perfect a space to stay vacant for long. The New York City theatrical market is incredibly competitive. Most large movie theaters will only work with the major distributors, and a lot of the smaller art houses charge huge four-walling fees to filmmakers who want to screen there. reRun doesn’t charge anything, and they’re open to screening self-distributed films that wouldn't otherwise get a chance to open theatrically in New York. That’s what’s made the theater invaluable to the Brooklyn arts community—its daring, egalitarian programming choices. And that's what drew IFP and Filmmaker magazine to the theater. We have a long-standing mission to support voices that might not otherwise be heard, and that's just what we plan to do at reRun.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Film Your Zemeckis-Triumphant Weekend at the Movies
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 11:40 AM
Flight: Though I was surprised to learn they're all about the same age, I nonetheless have tended to group Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and Joe Dante together in a way that perhaps even overrides the classic Spielberg/Lucas/Coppola/Scorsese/De Palma "70s movie brats" categorization, probably because Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Dante are collectively responsible for a massive chunk of movie love for the first decade of my life. Since they made such iconic entertainment in the 80s (and, okay, also 70s, for Spielberg; that's why he seems older now), their careers have branched out in different directions. Spielberg has chased the ambition and scope of his peers at their best; sometimes he's dinged for trying too hard, or ruining those efforts with sentiment (have you guys seen Munich, by the way? Not so sentimental. Actually quite devastating. But more on that next week, when Lincoln comes out) or for retreating into populism, but with wildly different skills and interests, he's wound up with the varied, highlights-packed career I assume everyone thought Coppola would have circa 1980 or so. Dante, for his part, has stuck with his playful, reference-laden fun long enough for it to become a niche act: to think, the guy who made the Gremlins movies made a Looney Tunes picture in 2003, and pretty much no one showed up.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Film Girl Walk // All Day Might Be the Best Movie of the Year
Posted by Henry Stewart on Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 9:00 AM
Friday, October 26, 2012
Film Your Weekend at the Movies with an Auteur Threeway
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 11:00 AM
Cloud Atlas: Unlike, say, in hip-hop, where mega-star-producer-guest team-ups are expected and encouraged to top each other, there's something a little bizarre when auteurs get involved in the same movie. Though I love The Life Aquatic and Fantastic Mr. Fox, it's hard not to keep myself from attempting to parse out which lines came from Wes Anderson and which came from cowriter Noah Baumbach. The movies feel like Anderson in the end, of course, and I'm tickled by the idea that two strong writers would so enjoy each other's company (and come up with Steve Zissou as a result), but there's something strange about a pair of strong writing voices layered over each other. That would appear to go double, or at least plus 50 percent, for Andy and Lana Wachowski, already a two-person filmmaking team, adding in Run Lola Run's Tom Tykwer for a tri-writing, tri-directing, ampersand-heavy credit. Look at the Matrix trilogy or Speed Racer and tell me how a whole third person is supposed to fit into that vision (for better or for worse; mostly, I say for better).
Film Scary Movies 2012: Long Lost Wes Craven Classic Screens This Weekend
Posted by Henry Stewart on Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 9:00 AM
Directed by Wes Craven
This classical slasher, released 15 months after Friday the 13th, evokes that foundational film: a killer stalks a community, picking off its members in gruesome ways, terrorizing others. The only difference is we're not at summer camp: we're in a rural farming community, majority "Hittite," who "make the Amish look like swingers." They don't even use tractors—except for murder?
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Film Scary Movies 2012: The Gory, Deranged Maniac Remake
Posted by Henry Stewart on Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 9:30 AM
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Film Interview: Is Julia Loktev Antifeminist?
Posted by Steve Erickson on Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 9:00 AM
Do you think your background as an immigrant has informed your work?
Definitely. In the case of this film. It influenced it because I have a personal connection to Georgia. I’m not from Georgia, I’m from Russia, but there’s a common Soviet past that we have. For me, it was a very natural place to shoot because I could communicate with everyone over 20 by speaking Russian. The younger generation don’t speak Russian, but the older generation do.
