Wes Anderson has made a career exploring the childhood neuroses that keep adult characters in an arrested state of adolescence and stasis. It’s been a lively career with creatively energetic high points like Rushmore and The Royal Tennenbaums but an approach with diminishing returns. Until Fantastic Mr. Fox, a film that refracted his portraits of dysfunctional families […]
In Gosford Park (2002), Robert Altman brings his gift for big, sprawling dramas knit with a fine weave of characters and a massive cast up to the task of filling them up with lives to the Merchant Ivory idiom of the manners and manors of Britain’s upper crust of yesteryear, 1932 to be specific. The […]
Capote (2005) – Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his astounding screen incarnation of real life author and New York intelligentsia celebrity Truman Capote as he researched and wrote his masterpiece “In Cold Blood,” his poetic reportage on the shocking murder of a smalltown Kansas family and the killers he […]
HBO has just given streamers another reason to subscribe to HBO Now. Show Me a Hero, a six-hour miniseries developed by David Simon (The Wire) and William F. Zorzi from the non-fiction book by Lisa Belkin and directed by Paul Haggis (with a subtlety and nuance I didn’t know he had in him), stars Oscar […]
