Link is a cabaret...

Marisa Berenson, Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli at the premiere of Cabaret (1972)Vanity Fair smart piece by Mark Harris on what four Oscar campaign's (or rather the potential success thereof) might tell us about the "new" Academy including Lupita Nyong'o in Us

The Guardian talks to Marisa Berenson (Cabaret) on why she walked away from the spotlight so many years ago.

After the jump animated short Oscar hopefuls, Taylor Swift Cats news, Jeff Goldblum, a new film from The Lighthouse's Robert Eggers and more...

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Podcast: Last Black Man in San Francisco, Toy Story 4

by Murtada Elfadl and Nathaniel R

 

Index (49 minutes)
00:01 Toy Story 4. Fun but was that necessary?
06:57 Emma Thompson shines in Late Night. Deserves a bigger audience.
20:10 Sienna Miller's character study American Woman 
32:00 We highly recommend the stylized, moving The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
47:11 The wrap-up 

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Late Night and Last Black Man in San Francisco

First Look: Sienna Miller in "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof"

Why is it that Sienna Miller has had quite a successful and diversified stage career, but can't seem to break from the suffering wife roles that have marked her film work? Miller always gives these roles more than they ask of her, so you would think she would be given a role with more narrative heavy lifting. This year, she got to flex a little more muscle in The Lost City of Z (out on DVD next week) within the trope, giving the film its haunting final note.

Miller's next stage role is a similar suffering wife, but of the iconic sort: she will be playing Maggie in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in London's West End beginning next week. Miller joins a growing list of actresses like Scarlett Johansson and Anika Noni Rose that have played the role in recent years - this play never seems to go away. Unbroken's Jack O'Connell plays her closeted husband Brick. Take a look at Miller in rehearsals and muse on her career in the comments.

Review: "The Lost City of Z"

by Chris Feil

A sprawling, formally immaculate epic like James Gray’s The Lost City of Z is a rare enough to seem like a novelty these days, and Gray’s rendering makes the film feel no less precious. It plays almost like a delicate jewel box on the screen, as if any minute it will crumble to our modern touch. Z looks and breathes of a bygone era.

Charlie Hunnam stars as Colonel Percival Fawcett, an unheralded military man who rises to prominence for exploring the uncharted Amazon in the early 20th century. His first expedition leads to an obsession when he discovers signs of an ancient ruins, suggesting a developed civilization previous undiscovered by western eyes. Fawcett’s three increasingly less successful journeys could be seen as indicative of the virtue or punishment of an obsessive goal, depending on your vantage.

While the film’s trajectory is familiar to epics over the most recent decades, what sets the film apart is its complex emotional terrain...

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NYFF: The Lost City of Z

Here's Jason reporting from NYFF on the Closing Night film from James Gray.

Most of us aren't fortunate enough to have our lives live themselves in a perfect three-act structure. "Here I was born, and there I died," says the ghostly Madelaine in Vertigo, with an entire lifetime intuited by a comma - that's just second-act stuff, after all. Colonel Percival "Percy" Fawcett -- the real-world explorer whose explorations formed the basis first for David Grann's book The Lost City of Z and now the movie from The Immigrant director James Gray -- made three trips into the Amazonian jungle searching for his El Dorado, lending his life-story the perfect apparatus for yarn-spinning. A beginning, a wandering middle, and something approaching an end...

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