After playing the perky and hedonistic fan favorite Mike “Wags” Wagner for six seasons on the Showtime, David Costabile knows that better than just about anyone. “There’s a responsibility that you have to the rest of the company to help them focus. If somebody starts fucking around, then everybody wants to start fucking around. There’s a time and a place for it, and there’s plenty of fucking around that we do....
In a brisk 86 minutes, “Body Parts” mashes together interviews with the likes of Jane Fonda and Rosanna Arquette, analysis from film historians, intimacy coordinator trainings, and whirlwind montages from both classic and contemporary films. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and Guevara-Flanagan runs a tight ship. Though each piece could easily fill more time, the filmmaker shrewdly stays focused on the portrayal of women’s bodies, earning the film’s provocative title....
The 2021 Golden Globes bring the total number of women nominated for Best Director up to eight in the ceremony’s 78-year history. Barbra Streisand has two nominations, one for “Yentl” and one for “The Prince of Tides,” as does Kathryn Bigelow, one for “The Hurt Locker” and one for “Zero Dark Thirty.” The other three women nominated at the Globes for Best Director are DuVernay, Jane Campion for “The Piano,” and Sofia Coppola for “Lost in Translation....
This year’s nominees were led by “Ascension” and “Summer of Soul,” two films by first-time documentarians. Each had six nominations. But “Ascension,” Jessica Kingdon’s look at the pursuit of the Chinese dream, failed to score any prizes November 14. “Summer of Soul,” which won the top documentary prize and an Audience Award following its Sundance premiere earlier this year, won five of the six awards it was nominated for at the critics awards: Best Documentary Feature, Best First Documentary Feature, Best Editing, Best Archival Documentary, and Best Director, a prize Thompson shared with “The Rescue” in a tie....
In a virtual discussion screened for select press ahead of the “Dune” trailer launch, Villeneuve stressed that tackling “Dune” and “Blade Runner 2049” could not have been more different. While both science-fiction tentpoles presented massive challenges for the filmmaker, the pressures that were created by signing onto them remained unique to each project. “With ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Dune,’ its two different pressures,” Villeneuve said. “With ‘Blade Runner’ I had to be respectful of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece....
“Maybe it’s a fear of how I would fit into that world,” Patel said about his decision to stay out of the studio tentpole world after “The Last Airbender,” which he called “one of the worst movies I’ve ever done, and I shouldn’t even bring it up, but do a quick IMDb search and you’ll know what it is.” Directed by M. Night Shyamalan and based on the animated Nickelodeon series “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” the movie was a critical and commercial flop....
And yet, for all of the truth contained in that wisdom, certain films make it almost impossible to shake the feeling that cinema — the most palpably fourth-dimensional of all popular art forms — possesses an unrivaled ability to make us appreciate how we can waste it. Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up” is nothing if not one of those films. A star-studded comedy of terrors that boasts more A-list celebrities than actual laughs, “Don’t Look Up” may be the most interminable “Oscar movie” of the year (and just when it seemed like “Being the Ricardos” was finally on track to win something!...
