Looking beyond ‘Star Wars’ on Irvin Kershner’s resume
Most of the obits for director Irvin Kershner — who died Saturday at the age of 87 — stressed his work as a filmmaker-for-hire on the 1980 George Lucas production “The Empire Strikes Back.” As much as...
View Article‘Heights’: have a martini with Glenn Close & Elizabeth Banks
Longtime readers of this blog are aware of my affection for a little known 2005 independent film “Heights” which I have pushed as a video rental suggestion more than once. When it came time to put...
View ArticleLincoln Center Film Society celebrates ‘Hollywood’s Jew Wave’
Among the many movie revolutions of the 1960s was the way that the Hollywood studios finally allowed Jewish actors to embrace their ethnicity and Jewish writers and directors to explore their culture....
View ArticleSteppenwolf blows the cobwebs off ‘Virginia Woolf’
As hard as it might be to imagine, the Steppenwolf production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” finds completely new ways to present Edward Albee’s 50-year-old play about the battling academic...
View Article‘Blume in Love’: The way we were 40 years ago
The movies that Paul Mazursky wrote and directed from 1969 to 1980 have held up as smart entertainment, but the passage of four decades has made them vital time capsules of an era that feels as far...
View ArticleRent it now – the forgotten 2005 indie ‘Heights’
“Heights” was one of the dozens of American indies tossed into art houses in 2005, where the picture sank without a trace. Even devoted movie buffs give a blank stare when the film is mentioned....
View ArticleNetflix mining: ‘No Way to Treat a Lady’
It was fun to see the largely forgotten 1968 black comedy “No Way to Treat a Lady” the other night, thanks to Netflix. The movie opened right after Rod Steiger won his Oscar for “In the Heat of the...
View Article‘Act One’: better than its reputation
Although Moss Hart’s 1959 theater memoir, “Act One,” was an enormous best-seller, the subsequent 1963 movie version more or less vanished from sight until the Warner Archive DVD-on-demand program...
View ArticleWhen bad times produce great films
A friend on social media suggested last week that there could be an unexpected positive result from the chaos and corruption of the Trump Administration – a new wave of paranoid thrillers similar to...
View Article‘The Land of Steady Habits’: Westport ennui
Nicole Holofcener’s sixth feature film “The Land of Steady Habits” has most of the hallmarks of this wonderful independent filmmaker’s body of work – beautifully observed slices of life performed by...
View Article
