In this week's Oscar Talk podcast, In Contention's Kris Tapley and I debate Steven Spielberg's "The Adventures of Tintin," performance capture vs. animation. Will animators support it? We think visual effects is a stronger, well-deserved shot.
Read More »Last night I watched Ellen Barkin act her heart out in Sam Levinson's Sundance screenplay-winner "Another Happy Day" (Phase 4, November 18), which is saddled with an unfortunate generic title. At 57, Barkin has been around the block a few times, and while the movie opens with her two y...
Read More »In this week's Oscar Talk, Kris Tapley and I debate the Shame NC-17 issue. Will Fox Searchlight be able to push Michael Fassbender for an Oscar nomination? (I weigh in on this here.)
Read More »Now that we've both seen George Clooney's political thriller The Ides of March, Kris Tapley and I dig into not only Oscar prospects for that film, but the list of supporting players in contention for this year. We also debate the respective box office fates of Drive and Warrior as well as how succes...
Read More »The Gurus have spoken. Post-festivals, Alexander Payne's The Descendants (1) has taken over the frontrunner spot from Steven Spielberg's unscreened period war adventure War Horse (2). Interestingly, Spielberg was considering submitting the film to Venice but decided not to do so. He usu...
Read More »The most recent poster for The Iron Lady, a biopic about Margaret Thatcher, shows Meryl Streep's face fading into the buildings of Parliament, under the tagline "Never Compromise." This poster coincidentally resembles recent art from an upcoming feature about another iron-willed lady, Lizbeth Salan...
Read More »The trick with the fall film festivals is to gauge expectations going in vs. what was actually achieved. Various distributors launched their fall slates, and watched with pleasure or horror at how their movies were received by audiences and critics. Oscar contenders either moved forward in the award...
Read More »Oscar Talk is back. The first podcast of the fall season with In Contention's Kris Tapley runs for a good hour, so gird your loins, Oscar mavens, listen and weep. We cover the Cannes films, the summer releases, the Fall Festival entries and the end-of-year possibilities. We talk Meryl and Glenn and ...
Read More »In advance of the coming festival season, the Gurus 'O Gold have made their first picks of the ten top contenders for best picture nominations. Here's my top ten list--with many of the films sight unseen (the Gurus list is on the jump). 1. The Artist2. Jane Eyre3, Midnight in Paris4. The Tree of Lif...
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