Forty years ago, a film crew with exploitation financing and art-house ambitions arrived in Chicago to create Cooley High, a funny and poignant slice of life that would eventually become a classic. The movie — which tells the story of black teenagers growing up in the Cabrini-Green housing project as they fall in and out of love, get into trouble, and try to figure out their futures — served as a launching pad for actors Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, Glynn Turman, and Garrett Morris, and provided inspiration for a later generation of filmmakers that included John Singleton and the Hughes Brothers. It […]

Kevin Macdonald’s Black Sea is a wonderfully entertaining action movie for adults, a hybrid of morality play and thriller that recalls the smart, terse genre films of John Huston and Raoul Walsh while referencing more contemporary issues relating to recent downturns in the global financial markets. It tells the story of recently laid off submarine captain Robinson (Jude Law), a man who has given his life to the sea and suddenly finds himself with no purpose and no way to make a living. When he hears about a WWII-era German U-boat filled with gold just sitting at the bottom of […]

Ron Howard is one of those filmmakers who often feels like a throwback to the directors of the classical studio era, guys such as Victor Fleming and Michael Curtiz, who would jump from action flick to comedy to melodrama and back again without missing a beat. At the beginning of his career, he followed up an R-rated comedy (Night Shift) with a romance for Disney (Splash) and then went on to do an Oscar-winning biopic (A Beautiful Mind), Westerns (Far and Away, The Missing), prescient satires (Gung Ho, EDtv) and massive tentpoles (The Da Vinci Code, How the Grinch Stole […]

As a moviegoer, there are few things I find more satisfying than a filmmaker who not only fulfills but wildly exceeds the promise of their early work. With his third film, A Most Violent Year, writer-director J.C. Chandor has done just that, elaborating upon the themes and techniques of his previous movies (Margin Call and All is Lost) to create a work far deeper and more ambitious than anything he’s done before. It’s another portrait of men and women under extreme pressure, but this time the broader implications are simultaneously more complex and more seamlessly woven into the narrative. Ambitious immigrant Abel […]

How do you interview the filmmaker whose work has meant more to you than any others’? Paul Thomas Anderson is, for me, the best and most important director of his generation, the only person I know of who not only invites but actually earns comparison with Martin Scorsese. Like Scorsese, Anderson is a voracious film scholar whose movies both honor traditions and shatter them; also like Scorsese, he’s a committed chronicler of 20th-century American history whose perspective is consistently deeper, broader, and more original than just about anyone else’s. He’s also the best director of actors since Elia Kazan – […]

15 years after his death at the age of 70, director Stanley Kubrick remains more than ever a figure of admiration, fascination, and curiosity – and the pleasure his work provides seems, at this point, to be as infinite as the universe depicted in the final act of his 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. A secretive and private director during his lifetime (though nowhere near the recluse he was largely reputed to be by the international film press), in death Kubrick’s process has steadily become more and more transparent, with a growing number of books, articles, and documentaries devoted […]

In July of 1964, director Monte Hellman and actor Jack Nicholson went to the Philippines to shoot two war movies back to back: Flight to Fury, which Nicholson also wrote, and Back Door to Hell. By June of 1965, Hellman and Nicholson had shot two more movies, the Westerns The Shooting (written by future Five Easy Pieces scribe Carole Eastman under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce) and Ride in the Whirlwind (scripted by Nicholson). Four movies in twelve months, and not one of them shows any sense of a director straining against limitations of time and money. To the contrary, The Shooting is a flat-out masterpiece, a […]

When I wrote about Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher a couple of months ago after seeing it at the Telluride Film Festival, I called it “extraordinary… a subtle yet extremely unnerving examination of how family, class, and competition inform and are informed by the American dream.” There’s always a little danger in writing about a movie in the heat of film festival hysteria, as one can easily overrate (or underrate) a film under the pressure of weighing in with an immediate opinion. In the time since Telluride, however, my admiration for Foxcatcher has only grown upon reflection; the supremely confident restraint of Miller’s visual style and the psychologically and […]

The 41st annual Telluride Film Festival kicked off with a packed screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now featuring Coppola, screenwriter John Milius (still recovering from his debilitating stroke but in great spirits), cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, producer Fred Roos, and editor and sound designer Walter Murch in attendance for a post-film Q&A. It was the kind of event that represents what Telluride does best as a kind of summer camp for movie lovers: presenting a great film impeccably projected before an appreciative crowd in a casual, conversational atmosphere. There’s something about the environment of Telluride — both the gorgeous Colorado […]