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(05/09/24 10:04am)
Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are ready to put their Barbenheimer rivalry behind them. In “The Fall Guy,” stuntman-turned-director David Leitch’s latest action-comedy extravaganza, the supporting stars of last summer’s two biggest hits join forces to trade in feminist satire and apocalyptic angst for an unabashedly giddy kickoff to Hollywood’s favorite time of the year.
(05/02/24 10:03am)
Fresh off a year in the fragrant markets of Florence, Italy, the Forest kitchenettes just couldn’t contain the culinary dreams of Jill Santopietro ’99. Soon, she found herself at a roundtable discussion with Middlebury Dining. She recalled being nervous to present her big idea: a student-run restaurant.
(04/11/24 10:03am)
Denis Villeneuve has never been shy about his adoration for “Lawrence of Arabia.” The 56-year-old Canadian filmmaker first saw David Lean’s 1962 epic when he was 19, and the film, which Villeneuve calls “the perfect movie,” has held a grip on his imagination ever since.
(04/04/24 10:04am)
Popular culture. It’s the music we listen to, the movies we watch and, in this media-saturated twenty-first century, it seems to be the very air we breathe. There’s no escaping pop culture — just ask the Middlebury staff.
(03/14/24 10:03am)
The Hirschfield International Film Series returned to Dana Auditorium on March 7, bringing an audience of Middlebury College students, faculty and community members an exclusive screening of one of 2023’s most celebrated films: “The Zone of Interest.” Written and directed by British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, the German-language film observes the daily lives of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family as they enjoy a serene existence in an idyllic compound located just outside the walls of the Nazi concentration camp.
(03/07/24 11:05am)
Two years ago, I wrote an article in the lead-up to the Oscars spotlighting three award categories that typically get outshined by the major awards in the press. Well, sadly, my days of sticking up for cinema’s little guys are over, as this article is squarely focused on the splashiest titles on the awards season marquee: acting, directing and overall film.
(02/22/24 11:02am)
He is only two films in, but Bradley Cooper seems to have already found his thematic sweet spot as a director. “A Star is Born,” the 49-year-old actor’s 2018 directorial debut, swept audiences away with its music-centric retelling of a classic Hollywood romance, making a movie star out of Lady Gaga and revealing Cooper as a multi-talented screenwriter, singer and filmmaker. The twelve-time Oscar nominee has once again set a love story against a musical backdrop, this time in “Maestro,” a biopic about the relationship between American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre.
(01/18/24 11:02am)
Racing movies typically make for a fun time at the theater. Think “Rush,” Ron Howard’s moving 2013 Formula One drama starring Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl, or “Ford v Ferrari,” the energetic 2019 blockbuster from James Mangold led by Matt Damon and Christian Bale. Those films follow sympathetic characters through affecting passages of drama off the racetrack that are interspersed with thrilling sequences of action on it. They are crowd-pleasers, and very good ones at that.
(09/28/23 10:04am)
After over a yearlong hiatus, the Hirschfield International Film Series is returning to Middlebury College. The upcoming Oct. 5 screening of “The Royal Hotel” marks the series’ first event since May 2022, offering the college community the chance to see an Australian social thriller the day before it is released in theaters following its recent run at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals.
(09/14/23 10:01am)
Magnum opus is a term that has been used to describe “Oppenheimer.” Coming from Latin for “great work,” it is a mark of acclaim used to designate the single most important piece of an artist’s career. Having a single opus to one’s name is rare, but even fewer artists attain the contradictory status of having multiple works asserted as their magnum opus — in their case, magna opera. In film, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg are two figures who occupy this space of rare renown. How can you isolate “Vertigo” as Hitchcock’s sole magnum opus when he also made “Psycho”? Spielberg directed the timeless blockbusters “Jaws” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” but can either of those films be elevated as his “great work” without slighting the accomplishments that are “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindler’s List”? Now, after releasing his historical epic about the father of the atomic bomb, Christopher Nolan has introduced a new critical dilemma: Can “Oppenheimer” truly be the magnum opus of the director behind “The Dark Knight” and “Interstellar”? The answer depends on how strictly you adhere to the dictionary definition.
(03/09/23 11:01am)
At the 2023 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Martin Scorsese made one of his regular pronouncements on the state of cinema when he presented writer-director Todd Field with the Circle’s Best Film award. “The clouds lifted when I experienced Todd’s film, ‘Tár,’” Scorsese said. Referencing an earlier comment in which he asserted that the cinematic art form has fallen upon “dark days,” Scorsese’s statement is based on his conviction that modern films are guilty of babying the audience, ferrying them through narratives beat by beat without leaving any space for individual viewers to form unique attachments to a film. “Tár,” he claims, does not do this, a refusal to coddle that grants the film its salvational status for an embittered cinema devotee like himself. Does Scorsese, who once likened Marvel movies to theme parks, have a point this time? That depends on whether you accept the notion that expertly dealing in ambiguity, even at the price of emotionally distancing its audience, makes “Tár” ideal cinema.
(03/02/23 11:04am)
The Axinn 232 screening room was nearly full on the frigid night of Feb. 24 as Middlebury students and community members packed inside to watch “The Earth Is Blue as an Orange,” a 2020 Sundance-award-winning documentary about a Ukrainian mother and her children trying to live a normal life amidst the devastation of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Introducing the screening were students Mariia Dzholos ’24 and Kseniia Lebid ’26, both citizens of Ukraine who organized the event by coordinating with director Iryna Tsilyk and a producer to secure the rights to screen their film. The hosts began the night by emphasizing the screening as a commemoration of the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Speaking with grace, Dzholos and Lebid implored the audience to recognize the tragedy being endured by their country for what it is — war — and to not accept the diminishing label of “conflict” that has shaped the conceptions of many foreign observers. Such an eloquent appeal for earnest consideration of the plight of the Ukrainian people was followed by the film. A beautiful documentary about carrying on in the face of overwhelming hardship and danger, “The Earth Is Blue as an Orange” gently observes the daily lives of a family of filmmakers in Ukraine’s embattled Donbas region, granting Western audiences a lens of compassion and fellowship through which to see themselves in their Ukrainian neighbors.
(02/23/23 11:05am)
Oh, how great this could have been. The director of “Out of the Furnace,” a grimy exposure of industrial and moral decay in poor Appalachia, and “Hostiles,” a modern classic of the American Western, reuniting with the leading man who fueled those films’ searing power. This time, it would be a story with alluringly high prospects to shock and move, one involving a grizzled, 19th-century New York City detective who recruits a certain poetically inclined West Point cadet to aid his investigation of a gruesome killing on the grounds of the military academy. But “The Pale Blue Eye,” an adaptation of the acclaimed 2003 novel of the same name and the third collaboration between writer-director Scott Cooper and Christian Bale, never fulfills the potential of its log line. Intensely frustrating because of the proven talent and tempting source material that bore it, the film is a lukewarm thriller that fails to grip as tightly as it should, only taking hold in a third act that raises the lingering suspicion that this tale is tauter than it initially lets on.
(01/19/23 11:03am)
He made us afraid to go in the water with “Jaws.” He gave the world its most beloved whip-wielding adventure hero in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” He even resurrected the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park.” Now, with “The Fabelmans,” Steven Spielberg has given audiences the story they didn’t know they wanted: his own. Sure, the semi-autobiographical premise doesn’t scream “blockbuster excitement” like many of the director’s biggest hits. Scale and spectacle, however, are not the trademarks of Spielberg’s filmography that have made him possibly the most revered director in history. They are certainly integral to his mass appeal, but it has always been the way that Spielberg puts them in service of his commitment to sound storytelling and his singular, childlike sense of wonder that causes people of all ages to fall in love with his movies. “The Fabelmans” brims with both of these characteristics, and together, they make Spielberg’s latest a warm, disarmingly earnest portrait of how a young man learned to express himself through the viewfinder of a Super 8 camera.
(12/08/22 11:02am)
After the sudden death of Chadwick Boseman in 2020, the star who embodied the Black Panther while silently suffering from cancer, there was likely not a single movie fan who did not want “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” to be a resounding success in his honor. And with writer-director Ryan Coogler returning to direct the sequel to 2018’s “Black Panther,” there shouldn’t have been any doubt that it would be. Coogler is the director behind varied hits such as “Fruitvale Station” and “Creed,” and he has carved out a niche for himself in Hollywood as a filmmaker with blockbuster ambition tempered by the humanist sensibilities of an indie artist. As such, the young director approached “Wakanda Forever” well-positioned to take on the emotionally nuanced task of at once delivering a superhero spectacle and a cinematic eulogy. When the credits on the nearly three-hour epic finally roll, however, it’s hard to ignore the realization that even a director as great as Coogler couldn’t do both. Save for its handling of Boseman’s passing in a powerful opening sequence, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is an oddly unsatisfying film that suffers from a critical case of muddled character writing, stranding what could have been a triumphant tribute to a beloved hero on the growing list of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) disappointments.
(11/17/22 11:05am)
The Middlebury College Orchestra held its fall concert on the evening of Saturday, Nov. 12 at the Olin C. Robison Concert Hall in the Mahaney Arts Center. Over the course of two hours the group of nearly 70 student musicians and visiting professionals played to a packed hall of Middlebury students, parents and community members. Leading the orchestra was conductor Evan Bennett, a Juilliard-trained musician who also directs the Northeastern University Symphony Orchestra.
(10/13/22 10:01am)
After spending the early years of his career known only for playing a severely underdeveloped supporting character in Disney’s fleet of modern “Star Wars” films, Englishman John Boyega has finally received his proper introduction as an actor. It comes in “Breaking,” the debut feature from director Abi Damaris Corbin that tells the heartbreaking true story of Lance Corporal Brian Brown-Easley. In 2017, the 33-year-old African American Marine veteran held up an Atlanta bank to protest Veterans Affairs’ failure to pay him the disability check he needed to survive. Boyega is powerful in his portrayal of Brown-Easley, at once channeling the crazed recklessness of Al Pacino in Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon” and evoking sympathy for a good man driven to criminality by a society that refuses to care for him. But for all the merits of his performance, “Breaking” is not Boyega’s movie, nor Corbin’s, nor any of the other impressive actors or crew. Rather, it belongs to the men and women who served the United States overseas only to be forgotten upon returning home, especially those — like Brown-Easley — whose fight to be heard is further beaten down by racism.
(09/29/22 10:01am)
The promotional material for Jordan Peele’s “Nope” made it clear that the director’s otherwise cryptic third feature film would be an alien invasion movie. Trailers and posters featured a UFO, farm animals being sucked into the sky, an isolated desert locale — everything but the little green men themselves. So when Peele opens the film with a chimpanzee brooding on the set of a television shoot, his hands and mouth dripping with the blood of the people lying dead around him, audiences might believe that an act of fiendish narrative trickery is set to ensue. How else would the writer-director famous for making the subversive, socially conscious thrillers “Get Out” and “Us” interlock such disparate subjects as aliens and a murderous ape? The problem with “Nope” is that Peele does find another way, and in forgoing the twist, he robs a film so rich with atmosphere and provocative imagery of the dramatic payoff that would have propelled it to greatness.
(09/22/22 10:06am)
Early in “Thor: Love and Thunder,” the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film from writer-director Taika Waititi, a world-weary Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is meditating when his trance is broken by Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy. “Thor, we need your help to win this battle,” Quill says. The god of thunder rises, flies to the battlefield and proceeds to decimate an army of aliens to the tune of Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.” Watching Thor answer his friends’ call to save them from defeat and then deliver on their request with rockstar swagger, it’s difficult not to imagine Waititi jamming to Led Zeppelin in his office only to be interrupted by MCU president Kevin Feige with an urgent plea: “Taika, we need your help to save the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
(09/15/22 10:04am)
“Top Gun” is not a great movie. It’s certainly good — it launched Tom Cruise into superstardom and boasts one of the most iconic soundtracks in Hollywood history — but the juvenile dialogue and stilted action will always bar director Tony Scott’s 1986 classic from greatness. The same cannot be said for its sequel 36 years in the making. Propelled by thrilling aerial sequences and an endearing story that pivots seamlessly from one emotional tone to the next, “Top Gun: Maverick” soars beyond its predecessor to remind us of the joys of experiencing not just a well-executed sequel but an original blockbuster film.