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Valuable documentary on the vigilant genius whose highly coloured 70s and 80s images revealed the white working class as never before

The beguiling work of English photographer Martin Parr is the subject of this brief, but thoroughly enjoyable study which sets out to introduce his extraordinary work, particularly the fierce brilliance of his colour images in the 70s and 80s celebrating the white working class on holiday.

Parr is an inspired combination of seaside-postcard artist Donald McGill and Alan Bennett, with a bit of American street photographer Vivian Maier, and a sliver of Diane Arbus, although the grotesques in which Arbus specialised are not what Parr has in mind. Everyone here is at pains to emphasise that Parr is never cruel or mocking, and, yes, it’s quite true. But as a real artist, Parr naturally has what Graham Greene called the splinter of ice in his heart. He knows...

Any photographer who shoots what’s happening in the gleaming, raw, people-packed carnival of New York City — the stores and walls and towers and alleyways, the celebrities, the endless cross-section of humanity — already has an artistic leg up. But the other leg is what he or she does with it. Weegee shot the violent night world of sin and crime. Diane Arbus captured the hidden freak show and showed us its humanity. Alfred Eisenstaedt and William Klein caught the hurly-burly of the everyday. But as you watch “Uncropped,” an addictive look at the life and work of the magazine and newspaper photographer James Hamilton, you may think: He’s the greatest New York photographer of them all.

Hamilton’s black-and-white images — in the documentary, we see hundreds of them — have a burnished tactility, and a psychology so effortless that every one of them tells a story. The photographs are gallery beautiful,...

Robert Downey Jr. has been active in the industry since his childhood. His career started with roles in movies made by his father, the underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., director of Putney Swope and other satirical comedies. Although Robert Downey Jr. is more often recognized for his performance as Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies and other MCU productions, he has never limited himself to playing the same type of character. On the contrary, he's constantly taking on both leading and supporting roles that are unrelated to his previous works.

With such an extensive and impressive catalog now, Downey Jr. is in much more than just ten great films. Some, like True Believer and Wonder Boys, come close to being included as the best of his movies that aren't in the MCU. And the ones included are so contrasting, that there's something for every taste. Fur has a different...

Harmony Korine used to be a movie junkie, someone who’d watch anything and everything. These days, when people recommend a movie, “I’ll look at it and I feel nothing, like dead inside,” says the guy whose own films, from “Spring Breakers” to the controversial screenplay for Larry Clark’s “Kids,” are nothing if not disruptive.

“Watching a lot of this shit, you really feel the algorithms,” he says the day before receiving the Pardo d’onore Manor prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Whereas, “I’ll see a clip on TikTok that is so inexplicable, so outside the realm of what I even imagine someone creating. Like, I can have an experience with a 30-second clip that goes so far beyond” what movies do for him.

TikTok. YouTube. Video games. Those are the influences operating on Korine’s latest feature-length provocation, “Aggro Dr1ft,” which is premiering at the Venice Film Festival.

Film at Lincoln Center has revealed the poster and poster artist for the 61st New York Film Festival, tapping Jim Jarmusch for the honor. The acclaimed filmmaker’s films have been selected by NYFF seven times in the past, with Down by Law opening the 24th edition of the festival in 1986.

As a poster artist for NYFF, Jarmusch joins the ranks of Andy Warhol, Richard Avedon, David Hockney, Diane Arbus, Martin Scorsese, Julian Schnabel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Almodóvar, and John Waters. Jarmusch said in an official statement that “since arriving in New York City decades ago, attending the NYFF has been my version of going to church.”

The image for the poster, he continued…

“was pulled from the files of several thousand useless photographs I’ve taken since getting my hands on a camera as a teenager. I consider them to be useless not necessarily in a negative way, but...

New music from brothers Jared and Shannon Leto is on the way. On Monday, Thirty Seconds to Mars also announced their first album in 5 years, It’s the End of the World But It’s a Beautiful Day, out this September. The band also released their newest single, “Stuck.”

“I knew I’d stay with you after just one touch/The way you move has got me/Stuck,” sings Leto on the chorus for “Stuck.”

The Jared Leto-directed video for the track features both siblings singing into the camera,...

Thankfully there seems to have been a moratorium lately on movies that mine the Lgtbq+ experience for tragedy and awards. There’s also been a move towards authenticity, notably in the area of casting trans actors for trans roles, and both of those factors help and hinder photographer Luke Gilford’s feature debut, a film as rich in personality as a Diane Arbus snap but, dramatically, about as punchy as an instalment of High School Musical. In another year, this might be more of a problem than it actually is, since, perhaps more by coincidence than design, National Anthem arrives at a time when everything it celebrates is under attack, and such a low-key affirmation of personal growth and freedom might actually be what we really need right now.

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The title character of “M3GAN,” a slyly preposterous and also somewhat clever satirical sci-fi horror film, is a beautiful creepy android doll from hell who doesn’t look like other sinister movie playthings. Her placid soft features — the oversize light gray eyes, the smooth alabaster skin, the mouth that grins, pouts, and signals approval or displeasure — have been enhanced with a heavy layer of digital effects, but there’s a real actor under there named Amie Donald, and that helps to place this humanoid in her own uncanny valley. You might say that M3GAN, as a character, achieves the apotheosis of dollhood. She seems completely fake and completely real at the same time.

Gemma (Allison Williams), a robotics engineer, works for the Funki Toy company, where she spends her time designing gizmos like PurrpetualPetz, a programmed fuzzball that eats, poops, and makes snarky comments. But Gemma has bigger dreams.

In “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” the photographer Nan Goldin tells a woeful, revealing, and in its way rather funny anecdote about how in the 1980s, when she first gathered up her photographs — casually transgressive images of her and her friends, who were often drag queens and addicts, along with shots of the assorted other people and situations she experienced as part of the hummingly squalid East Village New York subculture — and tried to shop them around to galleries and museums, they were roundly rejected, because the arbiters of taste, who were inevitably men, favored photographs that were black-and-white and composed in elegant meticulous ways. Goldin’s photographs were in garish verité color, set in environments that were so scruffy that it looked, to the gallery mavens, like there was no visual organization to them, no art.

This, with 40 years’ hindsight, is telling, because what you see now is...

Dean Stockwell, who died Sunday at 85, made every movie and television show he was in better. As an actor, he had a scurrilous twinkle that could light up a scene. He started off as a child star in films like “Gentleman’s Agreement” and “The Boy with Green Hair” — the latter of which I was shocked to discover really was about a boy with green hair (I’ve never forgotten what a poignant urchin the actor made him).

Stockwell was born in Hollywood in 1936, the same year as Dennis Hopper, and if his career had taken a slightly different turn he would have been part of the James Dean/Marlon Brando new-wave-of-Method-Hollywood rat pack. In 1959, he took on his edgiest studio-system role, playing one of the kinky killers in “Compulsion,” the drama based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, and he wound up sharing the award for best actor at the Cannes Film Festival.

Even in the late 1960s, when it seemed like the world was turning upside down, no one had ever seen anything quite like Tiny Tim. Standing onstage in an oversize plaid jacket, a mop of curls draped over his face, strumming his ukulele as he sang “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” in a trilling falsetto quaver so high it sounded like he was being tickled and tortured at the same time, he was like a troll and a little girl in one body — a flower child who was also a come-hither vampire. He presented himself as an “angelic” creature, not quite of this earth, and maybe that’s what he was. Yet there was something else going on in those bedroom eyes, which he would bat like a silent-movie ingenue. Was he for real? Or was he the original Andy Kaufman and Pee-wee Herman, a kind of postmodern put-on sprite?

The...

In his latest book about Hollywood, “Murder and the Movies,” prolific film author David Thomson examines the ways master filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick lure audiences into their twisted murders and sinister plotting. The book’s second chapter, “Red Rum,” focuses on Kubrick’s 1980 classic “The Shining.” Our excerpt (slightly edited for length) is below.

I’m starting with “The Shining” (1980), the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of Stephen King, because of its pioneering balance of horror and satire, and its lethal-dainty script by Diane Johnson. So the Torrance family goes off to the Overlook Hotel in the bracing but desolate heights of Colorado. Life seems perfect there — everything the idiot mastermind Jack Torrance ever wanted. He will be caretaker for the off-season winter — time to write the novel he’s always promised himself, time to defeat the blank pages. He can work alone in a vast room. His wife Wendy will go...

Patricia Bosworth, an actress-turned-writer whose biographies of fellow Actors Studio alumni Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda were best-sellers and, certainly with the Clift book, definitive for their times, died Thursday of complications related to Covid-19. She was 86.

Bosworth’s stepdaughter Fia Hatsav told The New York Times that the author died of pneumonia brought on by the coronavirus.

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Bosworth began her show business career as a model in the 1950s before enrolling in New York’s Actors Studio to study with Lee Strasberg. Classmates included Brando and Marilyn Monroe. She appeared on Broadway in,...

Actress Patricia Bosworth, who later chronicled Hollywood’s Golden Age and wrote a bestselling biography of Marlon Brando, died Thursday of coronavirus complications. She was 86. Bosworth’s death was announced by the Actors Studio, of which she was a longtime member and board member.

Bosworth acted alongside Audrey Hepburn in “The Nun’s Story” and had a second act writing bestselling celebrity bios. In addition to covering Brando’s life, Bosworth also wrote bestselling biographies about Montgomery Clift, Jane Fonda and Diane Arbus, for whom she had modeled in a Greyhound bus advertisement earlier in her career.

“Patti was more than a great writer. She was an inspiration and a pillar of support to so many wonderful people. And she was so dear to me,” her friend Ray Leslee wrote on Facebook. “She was the youngest and most vibrant 86-year-old I know. I last spoke to her on March 10th. She...

The star and co-writer of the new film Banana Split walks us through some of her favorite comedies.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Banana Split (2020)

Big (1988)

West Side Story (2020)

E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982)

The ’Burbs (1989)

Back To The Future (1985)

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Cape Fear (1991)

The Foot Fist Way (2006)

Best In Show (2000)

This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

The Hours (2002)

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006)

Black Mass (2015)

The Irishman (2019)

Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion (1997)

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Zoolander (2001)

Knocked Up (2007)

Armageddon (1998)

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)

The Room (2003)

The Disaster Artist (2017)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery (1997)

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)

Young Frankenstein (1974)

Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970)

Gremlins (1984)

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

Bruce Almighty (2003)

Liar Liar (1997)

The Ten Commandments (1956)

Obvious Child (2014)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

Harold And Maude (1971)

Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans...

Given that the entertainment industry is pretty much the center of the #MeToo universe in terms of generating its most public effects — and, needless to say, causes — probably no Sundance film this year will be as hot a conversation topic as “Promising Young Woman.” Emerald Fennell’s first directorial feature is a female revenge fantasy that hews to some of the tropes in that genre, but also takes considerable joy in upending viewer expectations. Starring Carey Mulligan as a woman on a singular mission, this unclassifiable, somewhat uneven but always compelling mix of thriller, black comedy and a whole lot of whatnot is going to stir a lot of debate in Park City and beyond.

The commercial prospects for this Focus Features release are harder to predict, as what’s actually onscreen is much trickier than the cheerily titillating exploitation-horror suggested by its early slogan (“Take her home and take...

Nicole Kidman admits the subject matter in “Bombshell” “may be disturbing and cause you to recoil … but at the same time it does entertain you.” The film tells the true story of the sexual harassment scandal that brought down Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of Fox News. Kidman plays Gretchen Carlson, who first blew the whistle by suing Ailes in 2016, opening a floodgate of allegations against the network and its chief executive. Watch our exclusive video interview with Kidman about “Bombshell” as well as the second season of “Big Little Lies” above.

Ailes’s abuses of power were no laughing matter, but director Jay Roach and writer Charles Randolph were an “alluring” combo for Kidman because of their track record making sharp satires out of difficult subjects. Roach won multiple Emmys for exploring the 2000 presidential election (“Recount”) and Sarah Palin‘s 2008 vice presidential bid (“Game Change”), while Randolph won...

On the face of it, making a sequel to “The Shining” does not sound like a promising idea. Stephen King’s original novel, which was published in 1977, remains one of his greatest (it’s not a tale that needs to be messed with). And in the 40 years since Stanley Kubrick’s spooky cerebral film version came out, the movie has come to define the look and mystique of this story in our culture. Nearly every aspect of Kubrick’s visualization of the Overlook Hotel and its live-in demons — the corridors with their ’70s-suburban-acid-trip orange-and-brown hexagon carpeting, the Diane Arbus twins in their teal party dresses, the Hawaiian Punch blood splashing out of the Navajo Deco elevators, the lobby with its adobe walls and high-ceilinged wagon-wheel chandeliers, the somnambulant British caretaker talking in the bathroom in hypnotic dream time, the rotting-old-lady specter emerging from behind the shower curtain of Room 237 ­— is...

It’s an amazing time for documentaries — in fact, there are so many looks into fascinating lives and subjects out there right now that it’s hard to keep track of them all. The brilliant, complicated life and legacy shown in “Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable,” which premiered at SXSW last year, is as compelling as many of the other lauded docus of the past year. But if it slipped under the radar amongst the riches, there’s another chance to catch it when it airs on PBS’ “American Masters” on April 19.

Over three decades of street photography, Winogrand confronted some of the most central themes of mid-century America, from sexism to fame to race and poverty. Though he became one of the last century’s most important visual artists, the photographer died at 56 leaving thousands of negatives unseen — a mystery that underpins the first documentary made about him.

A documentary about an artist or photographer should feel like an adventure, one that burrows into the boldness of its subject. “Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable” is an exceedingly good documentary, produced by American Masters in the sturdy and enlightening house style of that series, and in this case the adventure emerges directly from the work itself, because Garry Winograd was a revolutionary photographer. He drew on a mode of raw-slice-of-life documentary and “street” photography that traced back to figures like Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and a shutterbug that the film, oddly enough, never mentions: Weegee.

But Winogrand turned that tradition into something that could spin your head with its verité virtuosity. Beginning in the mid-’50s, he took his camera out into the New York streets and came back with images that were so suffused with the life unfolding in front of him that those images may...

Genuine scares give way to generic cliche in Ari Aster’s much garlanded debut feature

Breathless comparisons to The Exorcist, The Shining and Psycho do this fitfully frightening yet ultimately frustrating chiller few favours. Talented writer-director Ari Aster’s flawed feature debut has more in common with such recently challenging titles as The Witch or It Comes at Night (both also distributed in the Us by indie-kings A24), although this tale of a cursed family possesses neither the sustained bone-chilling intensity of the former nor the sociopolitical dread of the latter. Veering erratically between promising setups and disappointing payoffs, it shifts from something reminiscent of the scary satire of Ira Levin toward the altogether dopier domain of Dennis Wheatley. Ironically, it’s the very things that Hereditary gets just right that make its clunkier missteps seem so wrong.

We start in fine form, with an Ordinary People-style opening that seems...

‪Leon Vitali, who played Lord Bullingdon, on Stanley Kubrick: "We had taken a walk when we were filming. It was like a whistle-stop tour of every Stately Home in England, it seemed like, when we were filming Barry Lyndon." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the final installment of my conversation on the afternoon of the première in New York of Tony Zierra's Filmworker, Leon Vitali reveals that Stanley Kubrick was "nuts for animals", that the ballroom used in Barry Lyndon was "full of Joshua Reynolds' and Van Dykes", and that a scene they called the "Masked Ball" was filmed in the home of Lord Carnarvon, who discovered the Tutankhamun tomb.

We speak about Kubrick, the photographer, a secret nostalgia, the casting of the twins Lisa Burns and Louise Burns for The Shining, Diane Arbus and Bruno Dumont's Jeannette, The Childhood Of Joan Of Arc.

Leon Vitali on Stanley Kubrick,...