The New Republic

Once upon a time, Orson Welles is supposed to have lamented that he spent 95 percent of his life running around trying to raise money for movies and 5 percent making them. “It’s no way to live,” he concluded, but that imbalance lasted Welles until he was seventy, when he died, alone, in a cottage in the Hollywood hills. READ MORE >>

Stories We Tell is not just very moving; it is an exploration of truth and fiction that will stay with you long after repeated viewings. For a first screening of this picture is simply a way of getting in training for it. It is fiendishly difficult to review and to praise properly. This is not just documentary, but narrative magic. READ MORE >>

Dear Nick, READ MORE >>

So the movie adaptation of What Maisie Knew has dropped the character of Mrs. Wix, but it does have Onata Aprile. Not that anyone should have settled for that enticing trade-off in making a picture based on the Henry James novel, published in 1897, and setting it in contemporary New York, READ MORE >>

It was only in the late 1920s, just as sound came in, that Hollywood realized its audience had achieved a demographic balance: there were as many people living in the cities as in the country. Today it’s nearly five to one in favor of cities. That shift helps to account for the decrease in rural films. Sound meant talk, gunfire, and music, and those generally were urban attributes. The Western seems rural, but it is more interested in epic space and a moral stage than actual country life. READ MORE >>

After its two-part conclusion on Monday night, Top of the Lake seems imperfect, but so is life and so are the mountains in the show—they are wild, insisting on shapes of their own. The show was ragged, too, and the channel showing it was tattered yet strident. You could despair of those things, or begin to see them as part of the message. I don’t know whether Jane Campion selected this narrative autism in advance, or to what extent it was happenstance or mistake. READ MORE >>

If you don’t know that Gatsby is coming (again), then Warner Brothers might as well give up now. READ MORE >>

So who is green-lighting these end-of-the-world movies that just keep coming—Oblivion, After Earth, Star Trek Into Darkness, Olympus Has Fallen, White House Down, World War Z, Pacific Rim? Is it the triumvirate of David Stockman, Paul Krugman, and Kim Jong-un? I grant that Armageddon has been a recurring theme on screen. READ MORE >>

It is characteristic of Roger Ebert, speechless for some years, that he should take his life departure just a day after admitting that he would have to drop down from doing 300 reviews a year. I daresay that rate of work was some compensation for not being able to talk, retort, tease, laugh, and snort. Ebert was a big man in every way who had charged through so many obstacles. The first of those was that he continued to write when beset by complicated and disfiguring cancers. READ MORE >>

Every boost to the New Zealand tourist trade from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is endangered by the doominess of Top of the Lake, a Sundance series that has run three of its seven episodes so far. READ MORE >>