On recent streaming and Blu-ray horror releases for spooky season.
The latest on Blu-ray, DVD, and streaming services includes Dreamland, Synchronic, Jungleland, and Criterion editions of Amores Perros, Crash, and Minding the Gap.
An updating table of contents for our videos and thumbnails covering the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
The winners of the festival's jury and audience awards were announced on Saturday night.
A dispatch from CIFF on new films by Pablo Larrain and Asghar Farhadi.
A celebration of actresses Jane Birkin and Charlotte Gainsbourg in anticipation of an upcoming series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in NYC.
The movie questionnaire and 2015 reviews of RogerEbert.com film critic Glenn Kenny.
A list of the two-and-a-half-star reviews so far posted on RogerEbert.com this year.
The best recent releases on Blu-ray and streaming services, including "Blue Ruin," "Middle of Nowhere," "Only Lovers Left Alive," and "Love Streams."
Barbara Scharres on the first day of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, including Grace of Monaco, Timbuktu, and the opening day press conference with Jane Campion.
While most of the broadcast and cable networks have gone into a holding pattern during the Sochi Winter Olympics, Amazon and Netflix have taken the opportunity to offer some interesting alternatives to downhill skiing.
MIchel Gondry's new documentary about Noam Chomsky fits into Gondry's body of work, if you look at his whole body of work and not just the most popular films.
* Available on Netflix Instant
The deliberate omission of a film's plot point draws intrigue, anticipation, and dread toward its eventual reveal, but in "The Loneliest Planet," director Julia Loktev's terse, quixotic drama, that secretive center should rightly be the least emphasized aspect. Its narrative indeed hinges on a gesture best left discovered (although easily imagined), but it excels instead in exploring what shifts that crucial action represents. Etching into relief the mislaid assumptions on which relationships are founded and forgotten, there is a quiet, terrifying accuracy to Loktev's work - one without fanfare or supernatural copout - that reveals itself under the guise of expressionistic travelogue into the Georgian mountains.
Take a breath and be brave. Very, very brave.... smile....Behold the "Willis Tower" in Chicago (formerly the Sears Tower) - the tallest building in North America and its famous attraction, The Skydeck. In January 2009, the Willis Tower owners began a major renovation of the Skydeck, to include the installation of glass balconies, extending approximately four feet over Wacker Drive from the 103rd floor. The all-glass boxes allow visitors to look directly through the floor to the street 1,353 feet (412 m) below. The boxes, which can bear five short tons of weight (about 4.5 metric tons), opened to the public on July 2, 2009.
The Grand Poobah writes: Here's a behind the scenes lookinside our control room! This is where the magic happens.
View image Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo in Fernando Meirelles' "Blindness."
To supplement the discussion below about acting on film ("Bardem, Ledger and the truth about movie acting"), here's a translated excerpt from the blog of Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles ("City of God," "The Constant Gardener") about the editing of his new film "Blindness," starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover and Sandra Oh.
This is as concise and valuable a primer on editing and acting as I've seen anywhere.
First Meirelles explains the rough assembly, the loose draft of the film that's usually put together by the editor while the film is still shooting: "This kind of assembly is just putting all the scenes together as they were written in the script. Even if a certain scene did not work out as we planned when we shot it, it will still appear in this rough assembly. (This does not include the scenes that were embarrassing beyond all doubt; some things are better off forgotten.)"
Note that Meirelles is not saying that his actors have flat-out failed, but that certain scenes just don't work and should be tossed right away, if possible. Eventually, after whittling down an assembly of three or four hours (or more) into, say, a 160-minute cut, the challenge may become one of reducing that to around two hours: And at this stage, when you succeed in diagnosing and locating where are the exact problems in the script or its cinematic interpretation, you can... change the design of certain characters, to make the acting more precise and logical than it was in the actual filming of the movie. (That’s why the best advise I can give an actor who wants to develop his career: suck up to the editor. Bring him chocolate, or flowers – if it is a woman editor. Even expensive wine, if your acting was exceptionally weak this time).
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