Tag: Woody Allen

Would you rather speak out to defend a baby with Down syndrome or sign a petition to support a pedophile? In some Hollywood circles, the answer is simple, support the pedophile. Let’s go back to 2009 when Roman Polanski was

Ed. Note: Please welcome Hunter Duesing to the BH family. For a while now he’s put together a terrific weekly review of new DVD releases for our friends over at Parcbench. My thanks to both for allowing us to syndicate

Most film critics start off each year with a list of their top 10 movies for the year before, an act of timing that often masks the fact that the first week of a new year is used to dump

In many people’s eyes, being a film critic might be a pretty frivolous enterprise. I’ll admit that watching a movie for two hours with a box of popcorn and taking notes before picking apart their artistic merits doesn’t exactly rank

1986 might be one of the most underrated years for movies. Or it might not. Maybe I’m just nuts, but, a year in which “Top Gun,” “Back to School,” “Ruthless People,” “Pretty in Pink,” “Rad,” and “Sid and Nancy” were

Director Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” opens with a pretty amazing and terrifying sequence involving a deadly Tsunami that rips through everything including the person of a vacationing star-reporter from France, Marie LeLay (played by exquisite French actress Cecile de France). After

Well, I’m four chapters into this series and I’m ready to cheat. Why? The 1984 Nominees for Best Picture: Places in the Heart A Soldier’s Story A Passage to India The Killing Fields Amadeus At the risk of sounding like

French mystic Eliphas Levi had the most profound, yet, mostly ignored observation about his compatriot Voltaire when he said that Voltaire was a great man but he laughed at every opportunity when he was supposed to learn. Had Voltaire been

When Jack Schaefer’s novel Shane first appeared in France, the translator did a curious thing: he snuck Brandon De Wilde’s famous movie line “Shane! Come back!” into the text. That bit, of course, never appeared in the novel. But the

Back in the summer of 1951, Jackson, Wyoming was a sleepy town nestled amidst a vast untamed wilderness, and George Stevens was there in the valley shooting a film called Shane. To maintain as much creative control as possible, he

One of George Stevens’ filmmaking maxims was: “The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.” Nowhere in his oeuvre is this more evident than in Shane, perhaps the most peculiarly cast A-grade Western in Hollywood history. It

I have a request for Whoopi Goldberg. I wish that she would go back to using her birth name Caryn Johnson, at least the Johnson part. Because of her adopted last name, some people may think she may be Jewish.

In 2008, when Woody Allen last spoke of Barack Obama to a group of Spanish journalists, he declared that it would be a “disgrace” if the then-U.S. Senator failed in his quest to become the 44th President of the United

Why does talent get a pass? And to what extent does the “morality paradox” color our view of great artists? Roman Polanski’s best films, like all great films, are very moral–in particular Chinatown and The Pianist. They deal with socially

Film blogger and sometimes Turner Classic Movies’ programmer,The Self-Styled Siren, came up with a terrific idea for a movie list: That which we love in filmdom that puts our cool credentials into question (And yes, I do have Cool Credentials.

Sure, you’ve seen it all before: an inexperienced nebbish who’s never experienced a moment of real danger in his life suddenly finds himself thrust into one life-threatening situation after another after meeting a crazed, adrenaline-junkie cop or spy. The two

Last week, I stirred some folks up with my Top Ten Most Overrated Directors of All Time. To recap, they were: Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, David Lean, Darren Aronofsky, Mike Nichols, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and

Ever since the advent of the modern motion picture industry, critics have praised directors as the key to great film. The auteur theory of cinema is idiotic, since writing is truly the key – no director could make a masterpiece

It always impresses me when an aged actor manages a comeback that is authentic, one based on more than mere nostalgia, one appealing to an entirely new generation of moviegoers. Jackie Gleason spent most of the 1970s appearing in pale

After more than thirty years Oscar winning director Roman Polanski, the infamous child rapist and decades-long fugitive from justice, has been captured. He should be extradited back to California as soon as possible for sentencing. Some of Polanski’s early apologists

Harvey Weinstein Members of the Hollywood community have signed a petition to have Roman Polanski released from jail. When is the Hollywood community also going to demand the release of 58 year old rapist Bruno Vece? On January 31st 2009