Well, that does it. La La Land is winning Best Picture. Or is it Moonlight? Or Loving? How about Manchester by the Sea? Well, for sure Emma Stone is already a Best Actress lock. Or, hang on – it’s Ruth Negga in Loving. But what about Natalie Portman in Jackie? Or is it Amy Adams in Arrival? Or hell, how about Amy Adams in Nocturnal Animals?
Female driven funny features are often overlooked when it comes to almost arbitrarily piecing together lists of people’s favourite comedies. The truth is that over the past few years female-based farces have once more become incredibly smart, sophisticated and above all hilarious. Here are a few of the best.
Awards season is about to get real. End of the year lists have already started to roll in and this week, shiny little statues will begin to be handed out to those films that you just might get around to seeing in like February or something. Us critics get all excited about this time of year, it’s that time when we are seemingly rewarded for slogging through months of reboots, sequels, and the just plain bad, with something much closer…
We are just over two months away from Nomination Day. In the week’s time since my first set of predictions, let’s be honest – not a lot has shifted. And, of course, how one gauges the “shifts” when there is still very little we can say concretely is a bit of an anomaly. We’re still in the Shooting Fish phase of the Oscar race.
Jeremy Saulnier landed on my radar in 2013 with his second feature, Blue Ruin when it played at Fantastic Fest. Green Room has one hell of a cast: Imogen Poots, Patrick Stewart and Anton Yelchin to name a few. We haven’t seen a trailer yet, we only know that a punk band gets stuck at a venue after witnessing an act of violence. Saulnier has demonstrated the…
A couple weeks removed from the Oscars, there isn’t much in the way of relevant movie news, but somehow our heroes soldier on, defeating minor issues like dire sickness and a limp set of news stories to find incredible nuggets of filmic truth in Episode 23 of ProjectionCast, which finds NP Awards Pundit/Senior Critic Jason McKiernan fighting off the flu while NP Founder Christopher Misch and …
When, at an early juncture in American Sniper, Clint Eastwood frames Bradley Cooper in the doorway of a barn silhouetted against the bright light of day, the direct visual reference to John Ford’s The Searchers is less a tipping of the ten-gallon hat than a…
“Do you know how many stars are in the universe?” ventures the young protagonist at one juncture of Annemarie Jacir’s excellent When I Saw You, one of many movies that could have…
When people think of horror sequels, there’s always a temptation to denounce them as inferior films. True, it is easy to start citing examples of lesser films in franchises like Friday the 13th or Saw…
To call the history of the interplay between movies and video games “spotty” would be to commit an act of startling charity. Who could forget such classic films as Double Dragon or Street Fighter, not to mention the whole oeuvre of the highly esteemed Uwe Boll?…