NYFCC Obsesses Over Roma

The New York Film Critics Circle are one of the two most influential groups who pass out critics prizes (the other being their Los Angeles counterparts the LAFCA) during Oscar's preseason. Today the 40+ New York critics made their choices which involve multiple rounds of voting and discussions among the critics attending in the room. They were wild for Roma giving the Mexican black & white memoir the top prize and giving writer/director/producer/editor/director of photography Alfonso Cuarón two additional prizes with Best Director and Best Cinematography.

Their prizes went like so...

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Months of Meryl: Into the Woods (2014)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.  

#48 —The Witch, a witch.

JOHN: In his reserved review of the original 1987 Broadway production of Into the Woods, Frank Rich summed up the plot of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s beloved musical as such: “Cinderella and company travel into a dark, enchanted wilderness to discover who they are and how they might grow up and overcome the eternal, terrifying plight of being alone.” Rich noted that, “in remaking Grimm stories, Mr. Sondheim's lyrics and Mr. Lapine's book tap into the psychological mother lode from which so much of life and literature spring.” Sondheim and Lapine’s dextrous, intertwined reimagining of classic Grimm fairy tales, from Little Red Riding Hood to Cinderella, offers a subversively adult version of these hallowed childhood fables and an artistic vision that seems fundamentally at odds with family-friendly Disney, the machine behind Rob Marshall’s 2014 screen translation.

When unhappy fans pressed Sondheim upon the film’s release to defend what felt like a compromised adaptation, he admitted that concessions were in fact happily made to secure a PG rating...

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Review: Never Look Away

by Murtada Elfadl

Tense apprehension is usually how I approach 3 hour long movies. But I shouldn’t have fretted about Germany's Oscar entry Never Look Away. It was never less than totally engrossing and I was completely riveted throughout. For his third picture, following Oscar foreign-language winner The Lives of Others (2006) and Hollywood turkey The Tourist (2010), director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was inspired by the life and work of German painter Gerhard Richter. The film tells the story of a 20th century German artist, given the name Kurt Barnert here and played by Tom Schilling as an adult, from his childhood in the 1930s through WWII, growing up in Communist East Germany, then defecting to the West and finding his artistic voice there...

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Fatal Distraction

This exquisite screengrab posted by Peter Knegt here.

All I see when I look at this picture is Glenn thinking of boiled bunny rabbits. She's not going to be ignored, Dan. 

Rita Moreno to return to movie musicals - for real this time!

by Nathaniel R

You may recall that we were briefly very excited about Rita Moreno's return to her home genre, the movie musical. News broke but then was quickly retracted that she had landed a wonderful part in the film version of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tony-winning debut In the Heights which ran on Broadway from 2008 through 2011. Now, the news is for real but with a different film. She'll play "Valentina" in Steven Spielberg's remake of West Side Story. That's the "Doc" role, in a bit of racial and gender-flipped casting...

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