10th Anniversary: Milk (2008) is Aging Beautifully

by Eric Blume

This month marked the tenth anniversary of the release of Gus Van Sant’s semi-biopic Milk, chronicling the last eight years of the life of gay politician Harvey Milk.  If you’ve never seen Milk, get ye post haste to it, if for no other reason than to be fully immersed in this crucial window of history.  If you saw Milk when it was released a decade ago and haven’t seen it since (which was true for me), watch it again:  it’s aging beautifully.

Olympic diver Tom Daley’s husband, Dustin Lance Black, won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for this movie, and the trophy was richly deserved.  Black not only manages to avoid almost every biopic cliché, he captures the beginning of the gay rights movement with precision, pain, and most importantly, humor.  Black’s script starts when Harvey Milk turns forty, had been mostly closeted, and was not politically aware. He chronicles his consciousness-raising without a hint of clumsiness or fake nobility.  And while Black keeps his focus squarely on Milk, his real achievement is in casting a wider net: he gives Milk’s real-life contemporaries a vivid presence, and shows us a full community within the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco.  This script manages to be both macro and micro, and throughout you can see Black’s gigantic heart and passion for this story...

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Sundance 2019 Lineup: Lots of Promising Topics and Great Actresses

The Sundance Film Festival runs January 24th through February 3rd next year. Let's look at the five of the key program lineups in brief. Which films are you most excited about. TFE might be going this year, we're not yet sure.

U.S. DRAMATIC COMPETITION

Alfred Woodard stars in "Clemency"

16 World Premieres will be competing for the Sundance crown (won last year by The Miseducation of Cameron Post). The new crop is all writer/directors (except where noted) and Sundance has been very careful about diversity, noting in their press release that the US dramatic competition section is 53% female directors, 41% directors of color and 18% LGBTQ directors. But they had a ton to choose from which helps with diversity. There was a record number of submissions for the 2019 festival with 4,018 features hoping to be selected, 1767 if those made from within the US...

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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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