Author Archives: Nicholas D.
She’s Got the Look: Top 10 Lauren Bacall Performances
Lauren Bacall would have been 90 this September. She died two weeks ago. There have been many tributes to her as one of the last icons of the Golden Age of Hollywood, to being Humphrey Bogart’s wife, to her signature whistle line, and to even the last living name mentioned among the celebrities in Madonna’s […]
X Marks the Spot: The X-Men Franchise Is Given A Second Chance
****There are spoilers in this commentary*** You could say that the X-Men film franchise officially bit the dust with Brett Ratner’s clumsy X-Men: The Last Stand back in 2006. It’s taken eight years and two movies since then to return to the same caliber of filmmaking that came with the first two original X-Men films. […]
The Golden Girl: Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine
Why Cate Blanchett Will and Deserves To Win There’s been a lot of speculation of late if Cate Blanchett’s chances for Oscar gold this year may be deterred because of the Woody Allen scandal that’s plagued the media for the last month or so. Despite the fact that this entire conversation seems in poor taste, […]
Actor in Focus: Amy Adams
During the past few years, Amy Adams has had an interesting career turnaround. When she came on the scene with her Academy-nominated supporting performance in Junebug, Adams played the role of the “perky, sweet girl,” and seemed in some ways typecast with a variety of similar roles from the singing and dancing Princess Giselle in […]
The Conjuring
NOW AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY I haven’t watched a movie with my eyes half closed in quite some time, until I watched The Conjuring last week. Half Exorcist, half Amityville Horror with a mix of Robert Wise’s 1963 classic The Haunting, the film reignites the classic horror trope of the haunted house to suspenseful and deeply satisfying […]
10 Minutes Ago I Saw You
Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella has been adapted three times for television (in 1957 with Julie Andrews, in 1965 with Lesley Ann Warren (my personal favorite of the three), and in 1997 with Brandy), yet this new musical on Broadway feels the freshest and most magical of the three adaptations. With a new book by Douglas […]
An Ode to Winona
If I can think of one actor who totally embodied the culture of one particular decade, it would have to be Winona Ryder. You can’t think of the 1990s without her. She’s also the one actor in my opinion who desperately deserves a comeback. Ryder burst on the scene as a young girl in 1986’s […]
You’ll Never Be Hungry Again – Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait
I’m biased in my affection for actress Vivien Leigh. She lived a vibrant, but tragically short life, dying of tuberculosis at 53. With only 19 film credits to her name, she became an instant worldwide recognized star for her portrayal of Scarlett O’Hara in 1939’s Gone with the Wind, winning Best Actress. 11 years later […]
No Shame in Not Campaigning
2011 was the year that America began to take notice of German-Irish actor Michael Fassbender. He played broody, secretive Edward Rochester in Cary Fukunaga’s refreshing take on Jane Eyre, Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, the younger version of Ian McKellen’s magnetic super villain Magneto in X-Men: First Class, […]
Always a Bride, Never a Bridesmaid
“Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?” Last week writer Mark Harris lamented about the “deplorable state” of the Best Actress race this year, arguing that by having a lineup of women who have already won awards (either in lead or supporting), we miss some of the lesser-known, yet […]
You gotta get a critic. 