#citizen-kane

#citizen-kane

The film's title, an obvious reference to profanity, also alludes to an incident dramatized later on, when John, on trial after inadvertently triggering a pub brawl, must give sworn testimony in court.

Film is like that. It developed from [the silent era] into Fellini and Bergman, Buñuel and David Lynch. [They] took these ideas and created a film that was really like a dream.

The film was based on the 1974 book of the same name by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about their investigation into the Watergate imbroglio that brought down President Richard Nixon.

While John Carpenter's 1982 remake was initially dismissed as an empty, nihilistic gorefest, The Thing (née Another World) has since been reevaluated as one of the greatest science-fiction films of the '80s, and certainly one of the most influential.

Martin Scorsese's direction transforms The Wolf of Wall Street from a gonzo financial thriller into a spectacle filled with fourth wall breaks and physical comedy.

They've done some wonderful brick work. There are some brick steps with inset lights leading down to a new pool in the back yard. The late actor's pool on another part of the 2.5-acre property has been filled with concrete, and the statuary he had installed has been sold.

If there's anything I miss in pop culture, it's the presence of ordinary movies. I don't mean blockbusters like Avatar or cultural events like Barbenheimer or Oscar contenders like One Battle After Another. I'm talking about the routine, well-made entertainments that, for nearly a century, used to open in theaters every week. You'd go see them because the story sounded good or you liked the stars or you just wanted to enjoy something as part of an audience.

Released amid the cast-iron censorship of the Hays Code, the second big screen version of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel had to heavily rely on subtext. In fact, it's likely many of the Academy's more conservative or sheltered members responsible for its nominations in Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, & Best Supporting Actor were entirely oblivious to its queerness.

Eyes Wide Shut was stranger than that: a meditative art film whose much-hyped orgy scene is more creepy than sexy, run by a cabal of rich and powerful men who prey on young women.

10 Cloverfield Lane Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr are locked in an underground bunker for the majority of this left-field sequel to Cloverfield, with thrilling results. In the film's final throes, Winstead's character exits the bunker, and finds that her captor was telling the truth about an alien invasion above - a twist that completely and ruinously dissipates the hard-earned tension that came before.

The esteemed film-maker was licking his wounds: his most recent picture, Far from the Madding Crowd, which imbued its 19th-century rural characters with an anachronistic King's Road style and panache, had flopped stateside. Childers approached the date with mixed feelings. He adored Schlesinger's previous movie, the jazzy Darling, starring Julie Christie as a model on the make, and had seen it three times.

Perhaps sensing this wariness, the creators of some of the more politically compelling movies and TV shows of the past year have instead explored how being alive feels during a tumultuous period. They capture the atmosphere, the mood, the ambient existence of everyday people who are living through a transformative time in history, whether or not they recognize that they are doing so.

I'm thrilled with any chance to collaborate with the Harvard Film Archive and to make use of Harvard's collection. I've taught several of Kubrick's films in different courses over the years, but never all of them together and never on the big screen. It is a unique opportunity. The HFA is one of Harvard's treasures. I'm really grateful to them for making this happen.

Taken from a widely read novel by Ken Kesey, it is a prime example of how a subject which must have looked destined for the cultural ghetto of the art circuit can be hoist by its bootstraps into the commercial field and festooned with Oscar nominations. You can do this of course only by making compromises by engaging a star with redoubtable box office muscle by jollying your audience along a little before the real crunch comes.

In all the dystopian visions of the future that the movies have trotted out over the last few decades, the one that sticks the most, surprisingly, is WALL-E. That's not just because of the chastening sight of an over-polluted Earth or those sedentary humans glued to their screens. It's because those quite plausible possibilities mean something different in a kids movie. It's their future, after all.