Charles Bramesco

The newly announced title nods to the Washington Post, the newspaper instrumental in denouncing Vietnam.

The BFI polled 253 critics and the official funniest movie in cinema history is...

In the wake of the masterful comedian’s passing, Jerry Lewis’ forbidden film will become available for the first time. But when?

We won’t know if the upcoming live-action Lion King remake is a ‘good movie,’ however you might define the term, until its release on July 19, 2019. But with two years to go until the big unveiling, director Jon Favreau is already off to a strong start. There‘s been a clever little edge to his casting thus far, as he’s tapped black actors for the lion roles in the film (Donald Glover will voice Simba, and James Earl Jones will lend his velvety baritone to sage father Mufasa) and white actors as the other members of the animal kingdom (Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen will voice Timon and Pumbaa; John Oliver has signed on as toucan Zazu), reinforcing the allegory of discord among the royal family and fully transposing it to its African setting.

Channing Tatum’s a delight — fleet-footed dancer, lovably lunkheaded actor, and crooner of the occasional showtune, he’s got more of a claim to the title of America’s sweetheart than just about anybody. But while I may love Channing Tatum, and you may love Channing Tatum, he’s got one critic he just can’t seem to win over: his four-year-old daughter Everly.

With the arrival of San Diego Comic-Con last week, the major announcements started flying fast and furious. After the avalanche of release date announcements, trailer releases, and other first-look headline-generators, the news broke that the gears of progress had begun turning for James Bond’s next cinematic outing. The official Twitter account posted that the still-untitled James Bond 25 would hit American theaters on November 8, 2019 after an earlier release in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and also presumably after shiploads of online pirates have gotten their mitts on it. Americans do not tend to take delayed release dates lying down.

The Hollywood Reporter recently unearthed a vintage interview with comics giant Stan Lee from back in 1977, and on the occasion of Spider-Man: Homecoming’s release, they’ve decided to share some of its contents with the public. And if I may editorialize for a moment, it’s the single most relatable, humanizing media appearance the famously camera-friendly Lee has ever done. Because the unearthed truth of this Q&A is that Stan Lee did exactly what I would do — what any of us would do, really — if I was the head of Marvel Comics during the ‘70s: mess with DC all the time.

Are Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino rivals? The answer is “no,” and yet that’s still how I prefer to imagine them, and what’s more, it helps makes sense out of a recent news item. In 2015, Tarantino mounted his Hateful Eight “70mm road show” to great fanfare (much of it self-generated), offering audiences around the country an opportunity to see his Western thriller in all its splendor and glory. It was a massive undertaking: corralling the necessary equipment, shipping it to the participating theaters, installation costs, training multiplex projectionists unfamiliar with the 70mm format, the whole deal. And in what I can only assume is a diss aimed directly at Q.T., Nolan has now announced a 70mm engagement for Dunkirk dwarfing anything attempted in recent memory.

Christopher Nolan doesn’t do small movies — if he’s going to mount a war picture, you can bet it’s gonna be one of the biggest (and priciest!) to date. He’s seemingly spared no expense for his new film Dunkirk, reportedly corralling thousands of extras, destroying vintage planes, and dominating the land, sea, and air all for a grand new vision of combat. And in order to fully convey the enormity of his ambitions, Nolan went all-in and mounted his production on 70 millimeter film. For laymen, that means he used a larger film strip while shooting to capture more brilliant colors, richer sound, and a greater sharpness of detail. For those who don’t give a hoot, it means this film will rattle your bones.

Here’s a bit of a thought experiment. What, in your estimation, are major movie studios for? In the most basic and obvious terms, they exist to finance, facilitate the production of, and distribute motion pictures. But it’s not that simple — what ambitions should that work represent? Does a studio use its clout, resources, and organization to endorse art, to give a voice (and budget) to filmmakers who can entertain and challenge us, hopefully well enough to make a tidy sum for the studio as well? Or is the lone purpose of a movie studio to generate money, film production just happening to be the method by which they’ve chosen to do that?