Big Bird was Sesame Street’s first break-out character. Forty years spent masking his Prince Valiant haircomb beneath fleece and plumage has afforded Caroll Spinney — the "I" in I Am Big Bird — the unbelievable good fortune of playing one of the most recognizable characters on the planet while retaining …
Commie propaganda has never had a champion capable of rising to the cause in a manner as distinctly and visually sumptuous as Mikhail Kalatozov’s (The Cranes are Flying). Politically facile? You bet! Sexually on par with Hef’s Playboy philosophy? Damn straight! But with images such as this, who has time …
Strange artifact unearthed thirty years later and co-promoted by Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola: a Russian celebration of the birth of her Communist sister, Castro's Cuba. Director Mikhail Kalatozov, best known for The Cranes Are Flying (1957), was thinking in terms of an Eisensteinian epic. Yevtushenko had a hand in …
An honest and humorous enough movie, despite some Godardian affectations, to bear up rather well under its reputation as one of the great landmarks of sexual liberation in the cinema. Lucky it has other merits to fall back on, because the bodies on exhibit are too close to the human …
Feature length documentary celebration of the life of Heath Ledger.
The third screen treatment of Richard Matheson's post-apocalyptic vampire tale is the first to retain the original title (cf. The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man), and the first to bring to it the total commitment of top dollar, most helpful in creating a weed-overgrown New York City. …
The mad passion of a wealthy Milanese matron (Tilda Swinton) for the much younger chef with whom her son has entered a restaurant partnership. Thus, there’s a food-film ingredient from the shelf of Babette’s Feast, Big Night, Like Water for Chocolate, Mostly Martha, and the like — a sensual awakening, …
Local music icon Brook Hyde (Dominic Bogart) is not happy unless he’s miserable. Parties bore him and promotional interviews quickly turn ugly. Hyde uses the woes of the world and the incognizance of others as shields to deflect the insufferable success that is his. Temporary relief arrives in the form …
Even if writer-director Rungano Nyoni’s film were a lesser achievement — less unsettlingly complicated, less bitterly funny, less bluntly sad — it would still have the witch truck, one of the great cinematic images of this or any other year. The witch truck is an old orange flatbed, purchased by …
Feng Xiaogang directs this story of a woman's tireless quest to bring the State to bear on her marital status. In Mandarin.
Director Raoul Peck takes African-American author James Baldwin’s notes for Remember This House — his unfinished “story of America” as told through the lives of slain activists Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evars — and fashions them into a freeform meditation on race and America, read masterfully …