MANY film buffs have already anointed 1939 — the year of ”Gone With the Wind” and ”The Wizard of Oz” — as the apex of cinema history. But it’s time to revise the pantheon for a (somewhat) younger generation. The movies of 1939, slick and rousing as they were, simply didn’t have the audacity or range or depth of the movies made in 1962.
This week, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of that extraordinary year, Landmark …
Tom Stoppard’s extraordinarily ambitious trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia,” was a big winner at this year’s Tony awards, nabbing seven in all. Among the victors was Billy Crudup, who was named best featured actor for his portrayal of Vissarion Belinsky, a literary critic who was at the forefront of Russian intellectual ferment during the mid-19th century. This award was richly deserved; Crudup has shown himself to be a splendid actor in both theater and films. …
In a business where imitation trumps originality, remakes rule. Desperate producers have regularly raided the vaults in a most-often futile effort to seize the sure thing. There have been multiple versions of “Mutiny on the Bounty,” “The Prisoner of Zenda,” and “King Solomon’s Mines,” to name just a few. But the next year or so will see the largest number of high-profile remakes ever to hit theaters in one concentrated time period.
First off, the Coen …
Is “Crash” the worst movie ever to win the Oscar for best picture? Probably not, though it definitely reeks. Academy members had a chance to make history by honoring “Brokeback Mountain,” a trailblazing gay love story that also happened to be the best movie of 2005. Instead, they voted for arguably the worst of the five films nominated—a ham-fisted expose of racial tensions in Los Angeles that pulled its punches by ending on an incongruous …
