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Nina Simone was a powerful force to be reckoned with, strong on politics and even stronger on expressing her views,… Read More

Far From the Madding Crowd, in theaters Friday, appears to have plenty going for it. It’s only the third film adaptation of the classic Thomas Hardy novel — and the first since John Schlesinger’s in 1967, though there was also a TV movie in 1998 — and its cast includes such promising names as Carey Mulligan and Michael Sheen. And it’s directed by Thomas Vinterberg, a Danish filmmaker best known for two movies that examine child sexual abuse from very different, equally unflinching perspectives: 1998’s The Celebration, which kicked off the Dogme 95 movement, and 2013’s The Hunt, which was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. He is an excellent director of actors, capable of efficiently capturing the psychological complexity of characters and their relationships — which should make him the perfect interpreter for Hardy, whose detailed internal portraiture is the centerpiece of his work. So why is Vinterberg’s Far From the Madding crowd frustratingly mediocre? 

1977’s Roots, based on Alex Haley’s 1976 book of the same name, was a Big Deal: spanning generations and aired over… Read More

Andrew Lesnie, Oscar-winning cinematographer who worked on the Lord of the Rings film trilogy,

Earlier today, TMZ broke the story that Joni Mitchell was in a coma and unresponsive, and that her friend Leslie… Read More

We heard them in the hallway, chattering and joking before the Friday afternoon press conference that launched Monty Python’s takeover of the Tribeca Film Festival’s second weekend. The festival folks were keeping the surviving members of the iconic British comedy troupe busy that weekend: after the press conference, they had a 40th anniversary screening of their classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail Friday night, a Saturday afternoon premiere of the new documentary Monty Python: The Meaning of Live (chronicling their smash reunion shows at the O2 arena last year), and revival screenings of The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. So in light of all that activity, the question that drifted into the room got a laugh: “What are we selling?” As did Eric Idle’s guess: “Ice cream? Cocoanut ice cream?” Or, as John Cleese would eloquently put it early in the press conference, “It’s very simple, it’s economic: Now that we’re no good any more, we’re trying to squeeze every last penny out of the days when we were able to do it.”

With Game of Thrones’ current season steadily and gruesomely unfolding, showrunners David Beinoff and Dan Weiss (along with producer/writer Bryan Cogman)