Making the pie should have been easy. The recipe calls for the usual ingredients: flour, sugar, lemon (both zest and juice), blueberries and an egg. But the parenthetical after the egg complicates matters. “Preferably speckled,” it reads. In truth, any egg would have been fine. But Jodie (Skyler Peters), Alice (Phoebe Ferro) and Hazel (Charlie Stover), the precocious trio at the heart of Weston Razooli’s fanciful debut feature Riddle of Fire, are not only novice bakers — they’re also children. So what should have been a suggestion becomes a mandate.
The search for the speckled egg is the crux of Razooli’s film, which renders the American West (it’s set in Wyoming but was shot in Utah) as a landscape baited with obstacles. There’s a painterly quality to the director’s depiction of the Great Plains state: Billowing white clouds drift across the powder-blue sky, their path...
The search for the speckled egg is the crux of Razooli’s film, which renders the American West (it’s set in Wyoming but was shot in Utah) as a landscape baited with obstacles. There’s a painterly quality to the director’s depiction of the Great Plains state: Billowing white clouds drift across the powder-blue sky, their path...
- 5/26/2023
- by Lovia Gyarkye
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
This story about Sam Mendes and “Empire of Light” first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Sam Mendes’ follow-up to his epic World War I film “1917” is a gentler film set in a rundown movie palace on the southern coast of England in 1981, as middle-aged Hilary (Olivia Colman) struggles with mental illness and finds unexpected romance with Stephen (Micheal Ward), a young Black man whose world is being shaken by the rise of the anti-immigrant, racist National Front.
It feels as if a lot of the movies that have been released this year came directly from directors’ experiences of isolation during the pandemic, of sitting at home thinking, “What do I really want to do now?”
Yeah. I can’t speak to the other guys, but I felt compelled to make this. I had started writing something completely different, larger and more visually ambitious.
Sam Mendes’ follow-up to his epic World War I film “1917” is a gentler film set in a rundown movie palace on the southern coast of England in 1981, as middle-aged Hilary (Olivia Colman) struggles with mental illness and finds unexpected romance with Stephen (Micheal Ward), a young Black man whose world is being shaken by the rise of the anti-immigrant, racist National Front.
It feels as if a lot of the movies that have been released this year came directly from directors’ experiences of isolation during the pandemic, of sitting at home thinking, “What do I really want to do now?”
Yeah. I can’t speak to the other guys, but I felt compelled to make this. I had started writing something completely different, larger and more visually ambitious.
- 1/10/2023
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
Early on in “Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things,” singer Patti Austin tells the story of how Fitzgerald — traveling with a big band in the 1930s and apparently the only one on the bus with no interest in getting high — would sit in the back with her coat over her head to act as her “own personal filtration system.” That’s good for a laugh, and it’s also good for a sense of relief, in being reminded that this will be the rare film about a 20th century jazz giant that doesn’t have to worry about when to start in on the tragic foreshadowing. Living to a ripe old age, in this genre of documentary, is not just one of those things.
It’s suggested in director Leslie Woodhead’s film that Fitzgerald lived a fairly lonely life when she was off the road — but it’s...
It’s suggested in director Leslie Woodhead’s film that Fitzgerald lived a fairly lonely life when she was off the road — but it’s...
- 6/27/2020
- by Chris Willman
- Variety Film + TV
Exclusive: MGM has set Dee Rees to write and direct a feature film adaptation of George Gershwin’s acclaimed Porgy and Bess. Irwin Winkler and Charles Winkler will produce. The film rights were granted to MGM by the Gershwin Estate, which worked closely with Winkler and Rees to secure them.
Originally written as an opera and adapted from the 1925 DuBose Heyward novel by composer George Gershwin with libretto by Heyward and lyricist Ira Gershwin, Porgy and Bess is a tale set in the slums of Charleston, Sc. There in Catfish Row, a disabled beggar named Porgy tries to rescue Bess from her violent lover Crown, and drug dealer Sportin’ Life. It first reached Broadway in 1935, and was turned into a 1959 film that Otto Preminger directed with Sidney Poitier playing Porgy, Dorothy Dandridge as Bess, Brock Peters as Crown, Sammy Davis Jr as Sportin’ Life, and a cast that included Pearl Bailey and Diahann Carroll.
Originally written as an opera and adapted from the 1925 DuBose Heyward novel by composer George Gershwin with libretto by Heyward and lyricist Ira Gershwin, Porgy and Bess is a tale set in the slums of Charleston, Sc. There in Catfish Row, a disabled beggar named Porgy tries to rescue Bess from her violent lover Crown, and drug dealer Sportin’ Life. It first reached Broadway in 1935, and was turned into a 1959 film that Otto Preminger directed with Sidney Poitier playing Porgy, Dorothy Dandridge as Bess, Brock Peters as Crown, Sammy Davis Jr as Sportin’ Life, and a cast that included Pearl Bailey and Diahann Carroll.
- 2/11/2020
- by Mike Fleming Jr
- Deadline Film + TV
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