As befits a festival born from a star, the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival ends by celebrating one of co-founder Robert De Niro’s greatest performances, as the star-struck nerd Rupert Pupkin in “The King of Comedy,” the underrated 1983 Martin Scorsese film that might finally, after 30 years, be getting the respect it deserves. Still, for my money, the big stars this year appeared in a trio of archival portrait docs. All three were artists shaped by and to some degree shaping the social upheavals of the 1960s; all three successfully melded the personal with the political. Continue Reading
J. Hoberman on movies and movie-related things
MOVIE JOURNAL: J. Hoberman on movies and movie-related things
Tribeca Stars: Ali, Broughton, and Moms
April 25, 2013, 1:14 pm
Tribeca 2: Heralding the Unheralded
April 23, 2013, 10:22 am
Ransack the Tribeca Film Festival and ye shall find, in this case, three relatively unheralded items that are well worth seeing. Continue Reading
Three Two-Handers at Tribeca
April 22, 2013, 1:12 pm
Has the Tribeca Film Festival improved? That’s what everyone says and, on the basis of the first weekend, the 2013 edition would certainly seem to have less flash and more substance. Continue Reading
“A Horse, a Horse!” Olivier’s Greatest Vehicle
April 20, 2013, 4:31 pm
Not that it needs a peg but, newly remastered by Criterion, Laurence Olivier’s 1956 version of William Shakespeare’s “Richard III” is unexpectedly topical thanks to the confirmation that a skeleton discovered beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England, was indeed that of a much reviled 15th century British monarch.
“Portrait of Jason” (and Shirley Clarke)
April 18, 2013, 8:24 am
Restored and back in distribution thanks to the tireless folks at Milestone Films, the 1967 documentary “Portrait of Jason” is, without a doubt, Shirley Clarke’s most radical, as well as her most personal, film.
Melville’s Finale: It’s a Very Cool “Flic”
April 16, 2013, 1:20 pm
“Un Flic”, the great Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1972 swan song, opens with an invented quote and a masterful bank heist in an off-season North Sea resort—a clammy blue-gray composition in wind, fog and rain. It’s the big chill visualized, a perfect plan that results in a bungled shoot out.
Ulmer’s “Ruthless”–The Way It Was
April 13, 2013, 12:40 pm
The least predictable and most wide-ranging of DVD outfits, Chicago-based Olive sneaks an obscure auteurist touchstone onto the market with a clean and crisp Blu-Ray copy of the UCLA-restored, 104-minute version of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1947 “Ruthless.”
Skateboarding in East Berlin: “This Ain’t California” Prints the Legend
April 12, 2013, 9:17 am
Fiction framed as documentary, “This Ain’t California,” Marten Persiel’s prize-winning hybrid — opening today at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem — “prints the legend” in telling the tale of Denis Paracek, a fabricated character in the real world of East German Rollbrettfahrer (skateboarders). Continue Reading
Malick in “Wonder” Land
April 10, 2013, 10:27 am
There’s no American director who inspires greater devotion than Terrence Malick, as I discovered when I wrote a less than favorable review of “The New World” (“all is diffuse, gauzy, insubstantial, underwhelming”). There is also very little middle ground when it comes to his achievements. Continue Reading
Les Blank (1936-2013)
April 8, 2013, 6:57 pm
Les Blank, who died Sunday at age 77, was King of the Folkie Filmmakers, a professional Stranger in Paradise, the ramshackle poet laureate of a lost American gemeinschaft.
