Alejandro G. Iñárritu just made movie awards history. He may do it again at the Academy Awards this year, which will be fueled by the most unpredictable Best Picture race in at least a generation - maybe more. For the first time ever in the 68 years of the Directors Guild of America awards, Iñárritu became the only back-to-back winner of the DGA's top Best [...]
***1/2 out of **** Rated PG-13 for some suggestive content, language, and smoking Released: February 5, 2016 Runtime: 106 minutes Director: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Jonah Hill It’s not often that a movie gives us a prolonged discussion about the [...]
The Dude will not abide again. Shooting down hopes of Lebowski fans everywhere, the Coen Brothers recently told Variety they'll never make a sequel to The Big Lebowski, despite Ethan Coen's acknowledgment that "there’s a huge groundswell of demand for it." Pouring salt into the wound, Ethan and brother Joel also balk at making a [...]
The 2015 Oscar race has shifted yet again. By winning the Best Cast Award at the 22nd Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, Spotlight has regained the awards season edge. As an early favorite last fall along with the period drama Carol, Spotlight saw its front-runner status slide when Mad Max: Fury Road began to rack up critics citations and [...]
*** out of **** Rated PG for martial arts action and some mild rude humor Released: January 29, 2016 Runtime: 95 minutes Director: Jennifer Yuh Nelson & Alessandro Carloni Starring: Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Bryan Cranston, J.K. Simmons, Angelina Jolie, Kate Hudson, David Cross, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, Jackie Chan Within the scattershot and now faltering [...]
The Ingalls Family is coming to a theater near you. After being put into turnaround by Sony, Paramount Studios picked up the feature adaptation to the beloved books by Laura Ingalls Wilder about her family life in the 1880s American Midwest. With a script by Abi Morgan (whose recent screenplays for Suffragette and The Iron Lady centered around strong female [...]
And you thought this year's Academy Awards were competitive? 2016 is already an intense battle between the two hottest properties at the Sundance Film Festival, and the latest may guarantee that next year's Oscar race won't be so white. It also promises to add a theological dimension to the canon of slavery-themed films. Just days [...]
The first Oscar Contender for 2016 (by virtually all accounts) was just purchased by Amazon for $10 million at the Sundance Film Festival. Manchester by the Sea looks to follow in the footsteps of Brooklyn, the romantic drama that saw its Oscar buzz during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival pay off (it's currently up for 3 Academy Awards including [...]
Welcome to your new Oscar front-runner. Saturday night at the annual Producers Guild Awards, The Big Short was the surprise winner of the 26th annual Darryl F. Zanuck Award for the year's Best Picture, stunning the tongue-tied producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner (fellow producer and co-winner Brad Pitt was not in attendance). Variety reported that Gardener and Kleiner "were [...]
Daniel Radcliffe's latest role is playing a farting corpse. One of the hottest tickets at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival is for Swiss Army Man, a bizarre tale about a man (Paul Dano) who befriends a farting corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) after finding him washed up on a shoreline. Hundreds of eager viewers had to be [...]
I Can't Unsee That Movie: film news and reviews by Jeff Huston 