Steven Soderbergh Movies
My post on Steven Soderbergh movies is the first Director Spotlight I’ve done of filmmaker who’s no longer actively making movies, but with Soderbergh’s retirement so new and so odd (at least to me), it doesn’t yet feel like he’s gone away. Steven Soderbergh started making movies around the same time the Coen Brothers did, […]
Behind the Candelabra Review
RATING: (3.5 STARS) For his feature film swan song, director Steven Soderbergh has elected to tell a sordid tale about sex, drugs, plastic surgery, possible incest, and shattered dreams. Behind the Candelabra also happens to be a biopic chronicling the latter years of music legend Liberace. Dubbed (by himself and those around him) “Mr. Showmanship,” […]
10 Things We Learned from Cannes 2013
10.) The Coens can do no wrong. Of course you knew that already, right? Wait, you didn’t?!? Well Inside Llewyn Davis was one of the best received films of the festival, and it took home the Competition’s Grand Prix award. So let me reiterate: The Coens can do no wrong. They are the best filmmakers […]
2013 Cannes Awards Predictions
Now that every Competition film has screened, we have but 24 hours to wait for the Palme d’Or and Cannes’ other big awards to be handed out. Here’s where I’m thinking the Spielberg jury might land: Palme d’Or (Best Film): The Past This is arguably the most wide-open Palme race in a number of years. […]
Side Effects Review
RATING: (3.5 STARS) The auteur theory is a frequently debated and discussed topic within the film world. Behind the theory is the idea that an “auteur” is a prolific director whose work is easily identifiable based on just a few characteristics—themes, camerawork, music, regular collaborations with specific actors, and other things of this nature. Opponents […]
The 2013 Cannes Lineup
Looking over the 2013 Cannes lineup, which was announced this morning, it’s hard to identify the “big story.” The Competition lineup contains a good mix of the expected and some pleasant surprises (Roman Polanski’s Venus in Furs being the most high-profile of those surprises). No stunning omissions or head-scratching inclusions. Just a rock-solid-sounding group of […]
Side by Side
One wouldn’t necessarily expect Keanu Reeves to be as much an expert on the art of filmmaking as folks like James Cameron, George Lucas, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, David Lynch, Danny Boyle, Steven Soderbergh, and Martin Scorsese, but in the documentary Side by Side, he’s a very knowledgable window into the artistic and technical processes […]
Haywire Review
RATING: (2.5 STARS) If the ultimate point of Haywire, the latest film from famously eclectic director Steven Soderbergh, is to show off the ass-kicking skills of the film’s star (MMA fighter Gina Carano), it’s a rousing success. Carano’s fight scenes are surprising, innovative, and spectacular, but the film in which they live is a limp […]
Contagion Review
RATING: (4 STARS) By staying away from the familiar conventions of most thrillers, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion manages to reach a level of believability and natural tension that I thought impossible out of a film like this. There are no chases, nor are there any heroes and villains. In fact, the characters in Contagion take a […]
Erin Brockovich Review
RATING: (3.5 STARS) I don’t really understand the whole “Julia Roberts is America’s sweetheart†thing. Sure, Pretty Woman is great fun, but she spent most of the ‘90s doing average (or in many cases, below average) romantic comedies. For some reason, people ate it up, and by 2000, she was one of the biggest movie […]
