Days of Hope

Oct 3, 2017 — “American Gods star Pablo Schreiber will play astronaut Jim Lovell in Damien Chazelle’s moon-mission movie First Man,” reports Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro. In March, D’Alessandro noted that the story, based on James R. Hansen’s 2005 book, “follows NASA’s mission to land...

Oct 1, 2017 — “Having placed second in Toronto’s People’s Choice Awards, James Franco scored his first big outright win as a director, his The Disaster Artist scooping Saturday night the 65th San Sebastián Festival’s Golden Shell, the top plaudit at the highest-profile film...

Sep 17, 2017 — The Toronto International Film Festival has a single competitive program, Platform, now in its third year. This year, jurors Chen Kaige, Małgorzata Szumowska, and Wim Wenders have awarded the Toronto Platform Prize (25,000 Canadian dollars) to Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country,...

Aug 29, 2017 — We’re “in dire need of revolutionary narratives,” writes Dan Hassler-Forest. And he grants that a few Hollywood blockbusters have made a stab at it, specifically calling out The Hunger Games, Rogue One, and Mad Max: Fury Road. “But Hollywood’s most...

Jul 31, 2017 — Broadway World has broken the sad and startling news that “playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director Sam Shepard has passed away. Shepard, who had been ill with ALS for some time, died peacefully on July 27 at his home in...

Oct 20, 2015 — Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien is back with an awe-inspiring martial-arts epic.

May 7, 2015 — Movie comedies about moviemaking through the decades

Jan 8, 2013 — The two movies that opened the door to “youth culture” in Hollywood, The Graduate and Easy Rider, were milestones, to be sure. But can it really be said that they were milestones in the art of cinema? “I think The...

Jun 27, 2011 — Shot in Berlin on the eve of the Great Depression with almost no budget, an equally modest cast of amateur actors, a relatively untested, unknown crew, and no major studio backing, the late silent film People on Sunday (1930) has...

Jul 13, 2010 — At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Nineteen thirty-six was a decisive year for imperial Japan, marked by extreme violence at home and abroad. In the very early morning of February 26,...