CategoryFILM AND TV

What can animation achieve that live action films cannot? And what sorts of stories are better equipped for one or the other? Nowhere are these questions more pressing than when it comes to adaptation, yet the default formatfrom Jane Austens oeuvre to Jurassic Parkis almost always live action. However, Pierre Fldess new Haruki Murakami adaptation, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, reveals exactly...

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the worlds leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew talks to the movie critic and author of the Ty Burrs Watch List newsletter, Ty Burr, about why Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 movie, Vertigo, remains so relevant today. Find more...

Novelist, screenwriter, and Writers Guild of America member Benjamin Percy joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss the Hollywood writers’ strike, which began May 2. Percy talks about several WGA contract proposals tied to streaming services’ rise in popularity, and reflects on how streaming has upended the traditional 22-episode television season, causing writers to...

May 17, 2023, 10:00am News from the Cannes Film Festival: An adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s 1950 novel (his last one) Across the River and Into the Treeshas found a distributor in Bleeker Street. The novel centers on Colonel Richard Cantwell, a 50-year-old US Army officer, tracing his placement in Italy during World War I, with general themes of death, death, and death (in the present-day, at...

In June 2021, I became obsessed with a video of an unidentified flying object, or whats now called an unidentified aerial phenomenon. The video, which circulated first from a Twitter account called @Today_China and was later picked up and elaborately dissected on the r/UFO subreddit, was taken from a rooftop in downtown Shanghai. The phone camera points up at the night sky, brownish clouds...

May 16, 2023, 11:36am Benedict Cumberbatch—the Oscar-nominated star of Power of the Dog, The Imitation Game, and Patrick Melrose, as well as all of those epilepsy-inducing Marvel movies—has signed on to play the lead (not the crow) in an upcoming film adaptation of Max Porter’s 2015 novel, Grief is the Thing With Feathers. Porter’s debut, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was named a Sunday...

May 12, 2023, 12:27pm Move over, Dame Hellen Mirren, there’s a new Patricia Highsmith in town. Shailene Woodley, star of Big Little Lies and [checks Wikipedia] a lot of films I’ve never heard of (sorry, I am old and there are so many YA things…), will play the lead in an upcoming genre biopic of thecaustic queen of the psychological thriller. As reported by Deadline yesterday: Titled The...

As I suffered through David Lowery’s Peter Pan & Wendy on Disney+, I kept wondering what it is about this character that has kept him alive for more than a century. Hell, how about just the past 30 or so years? Every cinematic adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s children’s tale in those years has been a critical and commercial disaster. Why do we keep going back to this well? Although this latest...

Joanne (Adle Exarchopoulos) slips through the wintery woods, burying herself under twigs in an attempt to hide from her blindfolded daughter. But no matter how far she goes or how much of the dead foliage she pulls over herself, she cant disguise her scent from the little girls preternatural sense of smell. Vicky (Sally Dram) seems pleased with the game and with her mothers acknowledgement of her...

May 11, 2023, 1:14pm Shooting is set to begin on Pedro Pramo, a Spanish-language movie adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s seminal 1958 novella about a man who promises his mother on her deathbed that he will he will travel to Comala to meet his wayward father for the first time, only to find the town populated entirely by ghosts. Manuel Garca-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer) has been cast in the title role and...