Happy Easter and Passover, or just plain happy Sunday, everyone. News, links, etc: -JJ Abrams first real words about Star Wars (and some Star Trek). (Empire) -I guess Charlie Kaufman has officially given up on Frank or Francis now? He’s developing a series at FX. (/Film) -Bryan Singer on his return to (and abandonment of) X-Men,...
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Tags: Amazing Spider-Man, andrei tarkovsky, Before Midnight, Bryan Singer, Charlie Kaufman, Criterion, Derek Cianfrance, Ender's Game, Groucho Marx, Gwyneth Paltrow, Harry Knowles, JJ Abrams, Joel Edgerton, Jurassic Park, Leon Vitali, Life of Pi, Metallica, Rhythm and Huges, Room 327, Satyajit Ray, See Girl Run, Stanley Kubrick, star trek, Star Wars, Superman, The Apu Trilogy, The Shining, x-men, yasujiro ozu
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Just to supplement our home video column this week, Criterion announced today that they would be celebrating Akira Kurosawa’s birthday this weekend by streaming 24 of his films (plus a few bonus videos) for free all weekend. The titles include some of his most famous, like The Seven Samurai, Ikiru and The High and...
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Tags: Akira Kurosawa, Criterion, Hulu, Netflix, The Seven Samurai
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I finally caught Red Tails this week on HBO. I don’t wish to damn it with faint praise, but the George Lucas-financed Anthony Hemingway-directed story about the first all-black squadron of fighter pilots in WW2 was not as bad as you might expect it to be from the trailers or from Lucas’s involvement. Certainly,...
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Tags: A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, Alfred Hitchcock, Ang Lee, Aubrey Plaza, Ben Affleck, Bill Murray, Charlie Sheen, Common, Criterion, david o. russell, Derek Connolly, Dogme 95, George Lucas, Gus Van Sant, Hyde Park on Hudson, Jason Schwarzman, John Waters, Jonas Mekas, Lucasfilm, Luv, Made in Mexico, Marialy Rivas, mary elizabeth winstead, Memphis Belle, Michael Dudok de Wit, Oldboy, Park Chan-wook, Patricia Arquette, Pretty Sweet, Quentin Tarantino, Red Tails, Rick McCallum, Roman Coppola, Salvador Dali's Destino, Spike Jonze, Spike Lee, Stoker, Teddy Newton, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Tom Hooper, Top 10 nude Scenes, Tuskegee Airmen, Wreck-It-Ralph, Young And Wild
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HBO premiered its Alfred Hitchcock/Tippi Hedron biopic, The Girl, last night in primetime. A co-production with BBC, the film tells the story of the living prison Hedron was kept in by an obsessed Alfred Hitchcock in the 1960s. Aside from the diminutive English actor Toby Jones in the role of Hitch, there was very...
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Tags: A Brighter Summer Day, Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkin, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Argo, Argo Fuck Yourself, Best Buy, BEXCO, Criterion, Donnie Yen, Dragon aka Wu Xia, Edward Yang, funny or die, HBO Films, HBO's The Girl, Holy Motors, Jason Segel, joaquin phoenix, Kim Dotcom, Koji Wakamatsu, Leos Carax, Liz and Dick, Marti Noxon, Melanie Griffith, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, Pixar, Rachel Dratch, Rosie Perez, Sienna Miller, Star Wars, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Teacher of the Year, The Empire Strikes Back, The Other F Word, Tippi Hendron, Toby Jones
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This week was all about Criterion’s beautifully done bluray edition of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love for me. It is, as far as I can tell, flawless — just like the film itself. The picture is crystal clear without a spec of blocking, artifacting, halo or flutter. The one spot I thought...
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Tags: 28 Hotel Rooms, Aaron Sorkin, Before Midnight, Before Sunrise, BFI, Bi Rain, Brooklyn Castle, Chris Messina, Criterion, David Chase, Ethan Hawke, From Up on Poppy Hill, Girls Generation, Goro Miyazaki, Hayao Miyazaki, In the Mood for Love, ingmar bergman, james gandolfini, Korean Film, Lana Wachowski, Libyan New Wave, Liv Ullmann, Maggie Cheung, Marin Ireland, Mila Kunis, Not Fade Away, Payload, Psy, Roy Andersson, SNSD, Space Elevator, Studio Ghibli, The Thieves, The Wizard of Oz, tony leung, Wong Kar Wai
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It was a hell of a rough seven days, days that saw the end of Tony Scott, Phyllis Diller, Jerry Nelson and Neil Armstrong. For our purposes here, Tony Scott was the biggest loss, but personally, while I liked the other three, I admired the hell out of Neil Armstrong as much for his...
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Tags: amy adams, Apollo 11, Art Institutes, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Bone Brigade, bruce willis, Carrie Remake, Chloe Moretz, Crimson Tide, Criterion, Die Hard, Dreamworks Animation, Emma Watson, Fast Six, For All Mankind, Hitchcock, Howard's End, Jerry Nelson, joaquin phoenix, John McTirnen, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Looper, Merchant Ivory, Michael Winterbottom, Neil Armstrong, ParaNorman, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Phyllis Diller, Pixar's Brave, Quvenzhané Wallis, Stacy Peralta, Steven Soderbergh, Taking of the Pelham 123, The Girl, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Tony Hawk, tony scott, Top Gun, unstoppable
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Much of my week was spent devouring both the Jaws and Royal Tenenbaums blurays. Both films look completely gorgeous in their hi-def upgrades, but beyond that there are some problems. Tenenbaums is the same disc as the DVD that came out 10 years ago, thus all of the features were shot in native SD and nothing...
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Tags: 120Hz HDTVs suck, Arnold Schwarzenegger, bill and ted, Bill Murray, Brenda Chapman, Criterion, Disney, eastern promises 2, For Ellen, henry selick, Jaws, jose canseco, Kim Ji-woon, Lars von Trier, london olympics, NY Film Festival, Orson Welles, Paul Dano, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, poochie, seven psychopaths, So Young Kim, Steven Spielberg, terrence malick's badlands, the last stand, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Simpsons, Wes Anderson, West Memphis Three
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I absolutely loved Danny Boyle’s sweeping epic of an Opening Ceremony, despite the fact NBC decided to delay it and chop it up for prime time, cutting out a few sections (including, apparently, a Death Eater attack). Of course people complained. This is boring. This is lame. This is too multicultural. This is an...
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Tags: Alia Shawkat, Alison Janney, Andrew Sarris, Argo, batman, Ben Affleck, Brothers Quay, Bugs Bunny, Catherine Keener, christian bale, Cloud Atlas, Criterion, Dane Cook Sucks, danny boyle, Dreams of a Life, Evangelion 3.0, Frank Piersen, greta gerwig, Hayao Miyazaki, High Laurie, Jack and Diane, James Bond, Jiro Horikoshi, Juno Temple, Kiley Minogue, kirk douglas, Lasse Hallstrom's The Hypnotist, Leighton Meester, Les Stroud, Life of Pi, Lonely are the Brave, Middle of Nowhere, Mr. Bean. Rowan Atkinson, Noah Baumbach, Oliver Platt, Olympics, Queen Elizabeth, Rian Johnson's Looper, Riley Keough, Serpico, Side by Side, Stanley Kubrick, Survivorman, Terrence Malick's To the Wonder, The Ballad of Poisenberry Pete, The Oranges, The Place Beyond the Pines, The Shining, The Wachowskis, TIFF 2012, Tom Hanks, Tom Tykwer, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton
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This week in movies fucking sucked and I don’t want to talk about it. I stopped paying attention to Twitter and blogs on Friday morning, so this week is soft on links. When I went to sleep on Thursday night (well, Friday morning), the story was “unconfirmed shooting at Batman screening in Denver.” I...
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Tags: Ad Lucem, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Branded, Criterion, Ed Catmull, Ghislain Avrillon, Hayao Mi, Hulu, Jeannie Catmull, joaquin phoenix, Karate Kid, Kevin Smith, kino lorber, Leelee Sobieski, Max von Sydow, Moonrise Kingdom, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Pixar's The Incredibles, Ralph Macchio, The Dark Knight Rises
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For the last few years I’ve been doing a yearly piece trying to forecast the upcoming foreign films we might be talking about at some point. It’s tough work and it tends to be something I put months of thought into, whittling it down to 30 or so films to write about before I’m...
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Tags: Abbas Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bleak Night, Certified Copy, Criterion, foreign film, Haruki Murakami, hirokazu koreeda's I wish, im sang-soo's the housemaid, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, kino lorber, michel gondry's the we and the i, Norwegian Wood, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, The Forgiveness of Blood, Tran Ahn Hung, Uncle Boonmee, wong kar wai's the grandmaster
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