According to screenwriter Susan Coyne, during the writing of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ sweat-free creative process consisted of listening to the harmonies of everyday life that surrounded him. Marley? The name of a rickety waiter at the club. The setting? Decided upon after a new nanny was overheard telling …
Hitchcock's remake of his own 1934 thriller. Many people claim to prefer the earlier version. But Hitchcock did not go to all the trouble to do it again because it had gone so well the first time; and he got it better, if still not perfect, the second time. (He …
Trisha Ziff directs this engrossing account of real-life nightcrawler Enrique Metinides. The tenacious photojournalist — he’s devoted his life to purposefully placing himself in the wrong place at the right time — has been taking official police photos since age nine. (As a child, it was not unusual for him …
The team of director Ian Samuels and writer Lev Grossman (adapting his short story for the screen) score points early on for referencing by name Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis’ revered romantic comedy that finds Bill Murray forced to relive the same day. Such is Mark’s (Kyle Allen) fate: a life …
Here’s hoping Denzel Washington’s ambition to bring August Wilson’s ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle to the big screen hasn’t stalled at number two. A deal with HBO generated one picture (the Washington-directed Fences) before production moved to Netflix for this vastly superior day-in-the-life of blues architect Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. (It was Rainey …
Animation pioneer Max Fleischer was the first to let audiences in on the creative process; his live-action presence opposite his pen-and-ink prodigy, Koko the Clown, delighted viewers. A century later finds Dean Fleischer-Camp (no relation) sharing the frame with Marcel, a one-eyed mollusk with two red shoes. Rotoscoped Koko would …
With Catherine Frot starring in a biopic based on the life of Marguerite Dumont — a grandiloquently pretentious diva who has buffaloed friends into thinking the tonsil-jangling that comes out of her pipes is the stuff coloratura sopranos are made of — it’s impossible not to think of the fifth …
It was the mid-‘60s, the era of free love, when Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen met on the hedonistic isle of Hydra. She complained of being the only non-artist in the commune. Little did she know that her “art” was to be serving as Cohen’s muse. (She was the inspiration …
“Without Pierre, I’m nothing,” cried Marie Curie after a freak traffic accident claimed the life of her renowned husband. She had a point: not only did she lose the first great love of her life, Madame C. soon learned that, no matter how closely the two had worked together in …
The name Mary Heurtin is as recognizable in France as Helen Keller’s is in America. (Heurtin was born in 1885, blind and deaf, five years after Keller.) Two-thirds of Marie’s Story is fundamentally a subtitled reiteration of similar material covered in the stage and movie hit The Miracle Worker, only …
A decorated Vietnam veteran, Jim Hanson (Liam Neeson) spends his days patrolling the border in search of “illegals.” He’s lost everything: his wife (to cancer), his livelihood, and now his ranch. And the mounting hospital bills have left him broke. Relax. It’s a movie. Things are bound to get worse …
Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) is the type who will reflexively engage in conversation with the petitioner outside the Ralph’s supermarket, a nurturing soul who abandoned a potentially successful career in Hollywood to move East and work with her husband Charlie’s (Adam Driver) fledgling theatre company. Her star waned, he became the …
Music’s golden couple (Jennifer Lopez and Maluma) are set to make it legal before a viewing audience of 20 million when tragedy strikes in the form of viral video evidence of the groom getting it on with the bride’s assistant. In the spirit of that nineteenth century theatrical axiom, the …
Slowly but steadily, a pair of case-hardened homicide detectives (Raúl Arévalo and Javier Gutiérrez) discover they have more in common with each other (and the serial killer they tenaciously pursue) than initially thought in this anything-but-routine cop picture. Using Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood as a touchstone, Spanish director and …
Two factors influenced the seafaring and soon-to-be self-educated Martin Eden’s (Luca Marinelli) decision to make the written word his stock in trade: the escape from his proletarian surroundings that it offered, and a shot at impressing Elena (Jessica Cressy), the learned but terminally-dullish sister of a boy he happened to …