Julianne Moore
Stephanie Archer takes an in-depth look at Wonderstruck, the official centerpiece selection of the 2017 New York Film Festival.
Our latest “In Defense Of” is The Lost World, the Jurassic Park movie that has typically been overshadowed by its masterful predecessor.
Maps To The Stars is about the aspects of Hollywood that, as a film fan, I‘d rather not think about. Written by the acerbic Bruce Wagner, it is about the cynicism of the industry, about the actors who are motivated by vanity and the money-minded executives who exploit them. These people’s heads have been long removed from their shoulders, their molly-coddled lives are run by other people as they incessantly try and top up their serotonin through drink, drugs, sex and bastardised spiritualism with increasingly less success.
It’s often stated that January and February are the two worst cinematic months of the year, as all of the major new releases are more often than not the terrible movies major studios have just “dumped” there. Yet it could easily be argued that the months leading up to the end of the year (“awards season” or “prestige season”, if you prefer to forget that Hollywood backslapping ceremonies exist) are equally bad. They do usually provide the year’s best movies, yet they also provide the kinds of movies that have been made cynically to get awards.
It is undeniable that the new millennium has seen fantasy novel adaptations reign supreme over Hollywood territory. It began in the year 2001 when the British again invaded America: now in the filmmaking industry.