ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

Female Film Critics 24/375

robert deniro

Commentaries 

DROP DEAD CITY: NYC in Film During the 1970s – Essay by Yael Friedman (Guest post)

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The wonderful recent documentary Drop Dead City by Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost about the 1975 fiscal crisis is a fittingly dramatic retelling of this pivotal moment in the city’s history. It is, of course, titled after the famous Daily News headline from when President Gerald R. Ford allegedly told the city to “drop dead,” after Mayor Abe Beame and Governor Hugh Carey arrived in Washington, hats in hand, asking for federal aid. The film shows the disdain for New York held by politicians and folks elsewhere, and the righteous indignation of New Yorkers after seeing the headline. Ultimately, President Ford’s conviction to let New York City fail did not prevail, his coarse morality tale about the role of government and the spendthrift Sodom was disrupted. With aid from Washington and a new austerity plan created by the newly formed Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), New York pulled back from the brink–––even if to emerge a lesser city in many ways.

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Reviews 

BREAKDOWN: 1975 – Review by Lynn Venhaus

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In this Wayback Machine, called Breakdown: 1975, we travel back 50 years to a pivotal year that defined daring, imaginative filmmaking, and how coincidentally, it happened between the resignation of President Nixon and the Bicentennial birthday celebration. In Morgan Neville’s well-intentioned documentary, he puts the chaotic 1970s in perspective, touching on how young talented filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg were inspiring a cinematic revolution. Studios took risks, and moviegoers responded in this heralded New Hollywood. As exuberant as this fertile time was, in real life, America was going through dismal days post-Watergate and Vietnam.

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Reviews 

EZRA – Review by T. J. Callahan

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When a 15 year old boy on the autism spectrum, acting in his first movie, outshines his heavy hitting Hollywood co-stars, you know he’s something special. If only his film, Ezra, was just as exceptional. William A. Fitzgerald is Ezra. The teen was a mild mannered New Jersey school boy who liked acting when, on a whim, he auditioned for the film and won the part. He makes the movie watchable, stealing every scene he is in, which fortunately is a lot.

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Reviews 

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON – Review by Susan Granger

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Master storyteller Martin Scorsese’s harrowing epic Killers of the Flower Moon relates an American true-crime drama, set in the 1920s. Adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction 2017 best seller, the ambitious, solidly structured screenplay by Eric Roth and Scorsese focuses on the ruthless murders of members of the Osage Nation whom the U.S. government forced out of Kansas to relocate on 2,300 acres if barren land in what is now Oklahoma.

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Reviews 

AMSTERDAM – Review by T.J. Callahan

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The cast of Amsterdam reads like an Irwin Allen disaster picture lineup…Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Rami Malek, Robert DeNiro, Anya Taylor-Joy, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Chris Rock, Zoe Saldana, Ed Begley, Jr, Timothy Olyfant and Taylor Swift…and like the Poseidon Adventure, this film is a sinking ship that barely manages to stay afloat.

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Interviews 

Martin Scorsese on THE IRISHMAN, Crime and Corruption in His Cinema – Jennifer Merin interviews

Jennifer Merin 0 Comments , , , , , ,

Martin Scorsese’s latest film, The Irishman, releasing November 1 in theaters and available on Netflix on November 27, is the director’s eighth foray into the world of crime and corruption. Perhaps because The Irishman’s truth-based narrative is about relatively recent events that actually changed the course of history, the engrossingly complex, superbly structured and thoroughly gripping crime thriller serves not only as an intense decades-spanning character study, but also as a provocative sociopolitical primer. In our present era’s predicament about finding truth in media, this is a history-making film about historical events. Read what Scorsese has to say about truth in narrative.

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