Harold and Lillian Michelson are the Hollywood power couple you’ve never heard of. Married for 60 years, the couple worked on dozens of major films from the 1950s through the 2000s. Lillian worked at and later owned a large research library, and Harold, a WWII vet who used the G.I. Bill to get an art degree, worked his way up from…
Bert Berns, a major figure in the early 1960s American pop and R&B recording scene, was certainly unsung, but it would be a stretch to call him a hero. A musical childhood lead to a fascination with Latin and Cuban music, which in turn lead him to co-write the classic “Twist and Shout,” sung first by The Top Notes and produced by a…
Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion, a bright and engaging portrait of Emily Dickinson, is more family drama than biopic. Steadfastly anti-romantic, the film exaggerates the conventions of the standard biopic, dishing out expository lines of dialogue without any attempt to make them sound conversational. It’s not just that the…
“I keep thinking that something went very wrong,” chuckles Mick Rock, the British photographer, at yet another major showing of his iconic work. “We were supposed to be rebels and outsiders.” But the rebels of the past are destined to become mainstream, and Rock was no exception, as we learn in Shot! The…
It’s hard to imagine anyone outside of Danny Boyle, Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, or Robert Carlyle who wanted, let alone demanded, a sequel to the 1996 adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s blackly comic, transgressive, subversive satire, Trainspotting, but here we are 21 years later with T2 Trainspotting, a near…
Like any good French filmmaker, writer-director Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours, Demonlover, Irma Vep) has crafted both an offscreen persona as a hyper-intellectual filmmaker and openly courted, if not controversy, then audience disengagement and alienation. Under one interpretation, a true auteur and mainstream filmmaking…
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau stars as Joe, a former cop heading back home after spending six years in jail for attempted murder. Once home, he immediately finds himself wrapped up in the mess he caused, only this time he has lost his hold on everything he once held dear…
It took about five minutes after the release of the first Atomic Blonde trailer for the John Wick comparisons to start. Sure, it makes complete sense, David Leitch was one half of the John Wick directorial team and the trailer featured…
All art is political, even superhero art. And there’s little doubt that Logan, the second collaboration between writer-director James Mangold (The Wolverine, 3:10 to Yuma, Night & Day, Cop Land) and star Hugh Jackman, qualifies as art, as superhero art, and as political art. Set in a possible future for the X-Men universe – both a…
“You’ve been beaten, and it’s been deliberate,” said author James Baldwin in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review, describing the desperation of living in America. “The whole society has decided to make you nothing. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.” Five years earlier in 1979, Baldwin…