NYFF: "The Irishman"

Jason Adams  reporting on the opening night of the New York Film Festival

A camera stalks through the hallways of what we typically call an Old Folks Home. Old Folks. Ever think about that phrase? Disarming in its literal folksiness -- it's in truth a place where the day breaks are taken to pick out caskets. So the camera tracks through the Old Folks Home like so many cameras have tracked through Martin Scorsese's so many movies -- through the nightclubs in Goodfellas and the trading rooms and offices in The Wolf of Wall Street, the muddy mountain sides of Silence. We have walked with this man's camera through space and time together and now here we are, all of us Old Folks, stalking one another down antiseptic corridors on shaky wheels.

The camera comes to rest on Robert De Niro, as it must. De Niro looks old -- older than the actor looks right now in real life, and older than his character Frank Sheeran will look for the majority of The Irishman thanks to the (occasionally spotty) state of the art technology that will pinken his cheeks and taut up his neck flesh as the tale he starts to tell us winds us back, way back in time...

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Links: Joker, Spidey, Clint, Kristen, and more

New Yorker  “movies I can’t watch anymore because my climate anxiety is too real”

Filmmaker Laura Dern will get a tribute at the Gotham Awards on December 2nd. Your move Jennifer Lopez

Coming Soon - Because Warner Bros can't help themselves with Clint Eastwood flicks, The Ballad of Richard Jewell is joining the already crowded December calendar of film releases. Eastwood’s last Oscar-smash was American Sniper (2014) though the past three pictures (Sully, 15:17 to Paris, The Mule) have not interested Oscar much at all.

After the jump Kristen Chenoweth, Spider-Man, Joker and more…

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NYFF: Luca Marinelli is "Martin Eden"

Murtada Elfadl reporting from the New York Film Festival

How does a mercenary go about feeding off others? In particular an emotional mercenary. One who feeds on all those around him, particularly women, so that he can grow and thrive. Such is Martin Eden the eponymous character in Pietro Marcello's film which recently won TIFF's Platform award and the Volpi Cup in Venice for Best Actor. The film starts when Martin (Luca Marinelli) saves a young man from a bully and is taken in by his bourgeois family. At the time he is an uneducated labourer who gets by doing small jobs...

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Thoughts I had... while staring at new movie posters

You know how this works. Thoughts as they come without self-editing...

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NYFF: Kelly Reichardt's "First Cow"

Jason Adams reporting from the NYFF which opens tomorrow

First Cow is the sort of blunt title that you immediately have a bit of a chuckle with when you picture somebody speaking it at the theater's box office -- "Two tickets for First Cow, please!" (I'd love for somebody to program a double feature with Her Smell just for such whimsy. "I came for First Cow but I stayed for Her Smell.") It's just this sort of bluntness that sticks and that director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy & Lucy, Certain Women) lovingly specializes in. A first cow is what we are promised and a first cow is what we get, dagnabit.

Reichardt is nothing if not a documentarian of practicality and face value -- as in both that she sees the value in staring at faces, and in that things being what they seem to be is never boring to her. Her camera is always fascinated by ordinary people doing ordinary things, and under her eye the ordinary magnifies, finding itself extraordinary...

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