Great Scots!

by Jason Adams

It is always good news when the Coen Bros announce a new thing, even if the new thing turns out to be kinda hit-n-miss like I found their last new thing (that'd be The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which I reviewed out of NYFF last fall right here) to be. The hits are worth the misses. ("Pan shot!") But today's good news is more than good -- it's downright invigorating.

The Bros are taking on the Bard -- they're making their Macbeth, and it's going to star Denzel Washington (who previously played Don Pedro in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, pictured) and Frances McDormand (who is Frances f'ing McDormand) as the Lord and his Lady. O, Vaulting Ambition!

And you're a better person than I if you're not already casting this thing in your head with a bunch of Coen regulars -- as soon as I landed on Tilda Swinton playing all three of the witches I might've passed right out. Who are you play-casting?

Is There Still Sex in the City? You Tell Us!

By Spencer Coile 

Just when you thought the Kim Cattrall v. Sarah Jessica Parker feud would result in a discontinuing of the Sex and the City cinematic universe, Paramount Television and Anonymous Content swooped in to acquire the rights to Candace Bushnell’s Is There Still Sex in the City? A follow-up to her previous 1996 book, Bushnell – who will write the pilot and serve as executive producer – asks a new age question: how sexual can women in their 50’s and 60’s be? She adds:

I’m thrilled to be reflecting the rich complexity of their reality on the page and now on the screen.

Is There Still Sex in the City is set to premiere on August 6, 2019. And because we won’t be seeing the return of Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda, I couldn’t help but wonder: will this reincarnation into the Sex and the City-verse be as successful as its predecessor?  

Showbiz History: Faye's win, Winona's debut, Gaga's birth, and Angelina's first nuptials

7 random things to celebrate on this day in showbiz history...

And the winner is... Faye Dunaway in Network

1920 Silent superstars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford marry. Their marriage last only 16 years but their only child together is still going strong: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! We kid sort of. They were the two most famous of the 36 founding members of the Academy, originally the brainchild of producer Louis B Mayer though the Oscars were not initially the main idea of the group...

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Soundtracking: Gloria Bell

by Chris Feil

For everywoman Gloria Bell, you are what you listen to. In this retelling, as it was with his Chilean original starring Paulina García, Sebastián Lelio places his eponymous hero in a headspace where music is all around. This time it is Julianne Moore who frequents dance clubs with bisexual lighting and sings in her car as if no one is watching. But the film succeeds through the audience’s musical voyeurism of watching such vulnerable moments, all of them stitched together into the broader canvas that is her life.

Lelio curates a batch of upbeat standards of adult contemporary radio, many of them overly familiar but here they provide specific texture...

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Doc Corner: Orson Welles x2

By Glenn Dunks

It has been suggested that Mark Cousins is a very unique brand of filmmaker. In that regard, he makes a perfect filmmaker for a project about another very unique brand of filmmaker: Orson Welles. I have not seen Cousins’ much-loved The Story of Film: An Odyssey nor any of his other film-centric documentaries so I can’t speak to how his latest fits into his oeuvre, but I do know that I was pleasantly surprised to discover that The Eyes of Orson Welles was not a typical bio-doc about Welles.

Instead, it takes the novel approach of using his work in another medium, his love of drawing and painting, to approach his cinematic output and his character as a man more broadly...

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