Tweet No surprises. That’s the understanding from The Hunger Games faithful filling cinemas as I write this, beginning late last night and into the wee hours to a tune of $25 million in ticket sales. All of the suspense from…
Category: Film
Let Us Now Praise: ‘Wanderlust’ Filmmaker David Wain
Tweet One of my favorite books, from one of my most favorite writers, is James Agee’s 1941 collaboration with photographer Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Here’s my creative stretch. Agee’s book about Alabama sharecroppers, a community of…
This Week In Theaters: Fox Searchlight testing the NC-17 waters with ‘Shame’
Tweet Michael Fassbender’s powerful performance as a New Yorker struggling with sex addiction and London-born artist Steve McQueen’s precise directing are the highlights of Shame, arguably one of the year’s best movies. Still, the majority of the publicity on the…
‘Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football’ filmmaker Rashid Ghazi travels to Dearborn, Mich. to make a documentary about high school sports but exits with story of deep-rooted patriotism
Tweet Drive Interstate 75 through the brown fields of industrial Detroit and you’ll see countless stories of hardship and struggle just beyond your car windshield. Rashid Ghazi, a Chicago-based sports marketing and TV consultant, looks beyond the despair and tells…
‘Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football’ Review: Stories of tolerance and football come together on a high school field in engaging doc ‘Fordson’
Tweet Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football North Shore Films Unrated Running Time: 92 minutes Grade: B REVIEW BY STEVE RAMOS For Fordson High School football players in the working class section of Dearborn, Michigan, the big game involves hunger, thirst…
TIFF 2011: ‘Livid’ Review: French filmmaker duo Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo create a frightening fantasy
Tweet Livid The Weinstein Company Rating: TBD Running Time: 88 minutes Grade: B REVIEW BY STEVE RAMOS The French filmmaker duo Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo are undisputed masters of horror thanks to their incredible debut thriller Inside (A l’intérieur),…
TIFF 2011: ‘Damsels in Distress’ Review: Whit Stillman returns with quirky female comedy
Tweet Damsels in Distress Sony Pictures Classics Rating TBA Running Time: 98 minutes Grade: B REVIEW BY STEVE RAMOS Up-and-coming actress Greta Gerwig and long-absent filmmaker Whit Stillman make a comic dream team in the hip and intentionally odd…
Box Office Guru: ‘One Day’ Stumbles in its Debut; just like ‘Conan’
Tweet Long after the reporting of the weekend’s top-earning movies became an evening news fixture; past the rising popularity of showbiz websites dedicated solely to box office reporting, I wrote indieWire’s weekly box office column for a couple of years…
Let Us Now Praise: ‘A Little Help’ lead Jenna Fischer
Tweet One of my favorite books, from one of my most favorite writers, is James Agee’s 1941 collaboration with photographer Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In their extensive reporting project for Fortune magazine, Agee and Evans bring…