“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” screenwriter Nicole Holofcener offered a blunt assessment of the lack of Academy Awards recognition for director Marielle Heller, and women directors everywhere. “I feel Marielle was cheated and I feel badly about that,” Holofcener said backstage after winning a Spirit Award for screenplay with Jeff Whitty. Holofcener was originally attached [...]

Some directors make their presence felt in every frame of their films, while others operate in service of the stories and the stars. There is no such thing as an egoless director, but Stanley Donen, who died at age 94, made every effort to efface himself from the picture in order to let a film’s [...]

Glenn Close, Ethan Hawke and “If Beale Street Could Talk” took home the top prizes at the 2019 Film Independent Spirit Awards, held Saturday on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif. Close stole the Aubrey Plaza-hosted show by inviting her dog Pip up on stage to accept best female lead, causing massive oohs and ahhs [...]

Watching the Academy Awards telecast, then grousing about it the next day, has become a hipster parlor game — it’s what the Complete Oscar Experience now is. The complaints are legion, and we all know what they are, because we’ve all made them. The show was too long. The host bombed. His or her opening [...]

“Sorry to Bother You” director and musician Boots Riley, who wrote a scathing criticism of Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” for its positive representation of law enforcement, said that he and the “Do the Right Thing” auteur are good now. But it took some time (and drama) to get there. Last year, Riley called Lee’s Oscar-nominated “BlacKkKlansman” [...]

“Green Book” viewers who are not totally versed in the ways of ’50s and ’60s jazz may come away from the heavily Oscar-nominated movie wondering just how well known and respected the film’s central musical figure, Don Shirley (played by Mahershala Ali), really was in his heyday. The answer: revered enough to have picked up [...]