Some splendid counter-programming at the BAMcinématek starts Saturday, December 15, when Joe Dante’s Yuletide desecration “Gremlins” kicks off a seven-film series of downbeat or perverse Christmas movies. The only remotely feel-good movie in the bunch, Vincente Minelli’s “Meet Me in St. Louis”, showing Sunday, is notable for introducing the mournful standard, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (a song used to even more depressing ends in Carl Foreman’s “The Victors”).
J. Hoberman on movies and movie-related things
MOVIE JOURNAL: J. Hoberman on movies and movie-related things
Archive for the ‘Event’ Category
December 13, 2012, 5:44 pm
BAMcinématek Puts the “X” in Xmas
December 3, 2012, 6:45 pm
Report from the Front: NYFCC Garlands “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Lincoln”
In one of the lengthiest sessions I’ve sat through since joining the New York Film Critics Circle in 1981, the group took over five hours to decide upon its 12 annual awards, with Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” and Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” — serious pictures, both filled with topical resonance — emerging as the two big winners.
November 20, 2012, 5:21 am
“We’ll Always Have Paris!”: The City of Light Refracted Through Hollywood
October 17, 2012, 10:58 am
Live from the Kingdom of the Dead! Lubitsch’s Lavish 1922 “Loves of Pharaoh”
If there is any single personality who embodies the “genius of the system” (or kept the “whole equation” of movies in his head) it would be Ernst Lubitsch, the German-Jewish-American producer-director whose career spanned the Golden Age of the Motion Picture. Lubitsch made two-reel slapstick comedies, discovered the silent star Pola Negri, made rampantly exotic costume epics in Berlin, then came to Hollywood where he would serve as production chief at Paramount and set the standard for Hollywood sophistication.
June 25, 2012, 1:39 pm
“Beasts of the Southern Wild” Takes Magical Realism to the Outer Limits
A sensation in Sundance, Cannes, and points in between, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is set to explode on the nation’s screens this week. My only concern is that Benh Zeitlin’s exuberantly ramshackle exercise in gumbo magic realism may have been a bit oversold.
June 6, 2012, 8:18 am
The Legendary “We Won’t Grow Old Together”: Breaking Up is Hard to Watch
Better late than never: The ultimate bad break-up movie, and the sleeper of the 1972 New York Film Festival that closed with the tumultuous world premiere of “Last Tango in Paris,” “We Won’t Grow Old Together,” Maurice Pialat’s cinematic “No Exit,” gets its first American run this Friday at BAM.
