Latest news with #TheShrouds'
USA Today
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Would you watch your loved ones decompose? 'The Shrouds' imagines a grave future
Would you watch your loved ones decompose? 'The Shrouds' imagines a grave future Show Caption Hide Caption A man clings to his dead wife in David Cronenberg's 'The Shrouds' Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger star in David Cronenberg's "The Shrouds," following a husband haunted by the memory of his late wife. David Cronenberg knows exactly how he wants to be buried. In his new movie 'The Shrouds' (in theaters nationwide April 25), the Canadian filmmaker imagines a near future where high-definition cameras are placed in luxury coffins, allowing people to check in on their loved ones via livestream after they die. It may sound macabre, watching your family and friends as their bodies gradually decay through the years. But if such technology actually existed, Cronenberg would be all in. 'I would have done that, I really would,' he says on a Zoom call. 'In Toronto, we have a walk of fame with plaques in the sidewalk. I thought, 'I would like to be buried under my plaque.' In fact, it should have Plexiglass so people could look down and see me there disintegrating. I know my fans would love that.' Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox 'The Shrouds' movie tells a 'very personal' story about grief 'The Shrouds' follows an anguished entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who starts a casket surveillance company known as GraveTech following the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). But after her cemetery plot is vandalized one night, along with many others, Karsh sets out to catch the culprits and uncover the secrets of Becca's past. The film is extremely meaningful to Cronenberg, 82, the body-horror maestro behind 'Scanners,' 'Videodrome' and 'The Fly.' In 2017, he lost his frequent collaborator and wife of 38 years, Carolyn Zeifman, to cancer. She was 66. 'I made a lot of notes throughout the two years I was taking care of my wife,' Cronenberg says. Writing this movie, 'I just had to remind myself what I was thinking and feeling.' In an early scene, Karsh explains to a blind date (Jennifer Dale) why he invented GraveTech. Watching as Becca was lowered into the ground, he felt an intense urge to hop in there with her. ('I couldn't stand it that she was alone in there, and that I would never know what was happening to her,' Karsh says.) That sentiment is drawn from Cronenberg's own grieving experience. 'I might not have jumped, but I would have been in there,' Cronenberg says. 'Those were feelings that really surprised me; I didn't anticipate them, but they hit me very hard. Without really being conscious of it, I always thought I was her protector. When she died, I realized how vulnerable I was to the world and that she had been protecting me all that time.' Kruger plays three characters in the movie, including Becca's consoling twin sister, Terry, and Karsh's A.I. assistant bot, Hunny. Reading the script, 'there seemed to be this enduring love story in the film that was very emotional and touched me profoundly,' the German actress says. Meeting him afterward, "David was very generous in sharing a lot of stories and inspirations for these characters. It made it very personal.' 'Shrouds' helped Kruger to understand the physical torment of losing your soulmate. She wonders how it must have felt for her grandfather, who was married to her grandmother for 70 years before she died. 'The pain of continuing to exist, and not having her body, has new meaning to me,' Kruger, 48, says. 'It's uncomfortable and sad to think about death: the fear of really being gone and not seeing that person again. It's not something I particularly look forward to.' 'Shrouds' director David Cronenberg reflects on his own mortality, legacy Cronenberg, who is atheist, has long-explored mortality and the unhappy realities of the human body, most recently in his 2022 sci-fi drama 'Crimes of the Future.' British writer Christopher Hitchens once said that 'death causes religion,' and 'I think that's the truth,' Cronenberg says. 'People can't face it. It's very powerful for us to imagine not existing, and so to avoid imagining our own oblivion, we make up stories that say you will not really disappear; that you'll be in heaven or get reincarnated.' But ultimately, life is about 'accepting the beauty and absurdity of existence. It's that very beauty that makes it so painful to imagine leaving it.' Cronenberg has worked steadily for six decades, directing Oscar-nominated films such as 'Eastern Promises' and 'A History of Violence,' although he himself has never been nominated. The unassuming filmmaker downplays his Hollywood impact, but speaks highly of horror provocateurs Coralie Fargeat ('The Substance') and Julia Ducournau ('Titane'), both of whom have cited him as a major influence. 'They're really talented and it's very sweet. They're like my cinematic daughters,' Cronenberg says. 'The fact that I've inspired younger filmmakers is lovely, but it doesn't pay the bills.' He also has little patience for directors like Quentin Tarantino, who has proclaimed for years that he plans to retire after his 10th and final movie, as a career 'mic drop.' 'Who cares? The people who like his films won't remember which order they were in,' Cronenberg says with a shrug. 'Frankly, you're kidding yourself if you think you're in control of your legacy. You aren't."
San Francisco Chronicle
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘The Shrouds' review: David Cronenberg mixes eroticism, body horror in his wildest film yet
It's one thing to be a little bit nuts, but to be a little bit nuts in the exact same way for 50 years — that's worthy of respect. At this point, it's clear that David Cronenberg has not been trying to gross us out purely for effect. He has been coming from a real place inside, and that place has never seemed more honest and raw than in 'The Shrouds,' his best film since 2007's ' Eastern Promises.' It's the story of a businessman, Karsh, who is grieving the death of his wife to such a degree that he wishes he could crawl into the grave with her. Instead he invents a new kind of cemetery, in which bodies are buried with multiple cameras all around them, so that loved ones can monitor the deceased's decomposition. Cronenberg's wife died in 2017, and he has said that this film comes indirectly out of that harrowing, anguished experience. As if to emphasize the personal connection between the lead character and the director, Vincent Cassel as Karsh wears his hair in the distinctive Cronenberg style: white, combed straight back and shaped like a parabola. There are scenes of decomposition here that are genuinely disgusting and disturbing. (I did mention this is a Cronenberg movie, right?) But what is surprising is that the movie has an erotic component, as well. When his wife (Diane Kruger) was alive, Karsh was obsessed with her body. It was the locus and meaning of his life. Now in death, while she appears to him in dreams and flashbacks, he has his wife's lookalike sister (also played by Kruger) and there's definitely an erotic element to their interactions. But Cronenberg is not so creepy as to suggest that Karsh is attracted to his wife's corpse. Rather, there's the suggestion that this man's love for his wife and his obsession with her as a physical entity preclude the possibility of him ever being grossed out by her — even in a decomposed state. For Kruger, 'The Shrouds' is quite a showcase, in that she plays two sisters with very different styles and personalities. Both roles are extremely frank in terms of nudity and sexuality, and yet one can see why Kruger thought the movie worthy of such intense investment. There's nothing salacious about it. In its own deeply weird and appalling way, it's a film about something beautiful. This is Cronenberg's version of ultimate romance, of eternal love. And yet, I've revealed very little about the story here. It's hard to make much sense of it, anyway. There's something to do with computer hacks, and a plot by the Chinese and the Russians. Originally conceived as a series for Netflix, 'The Shrouds' might have thrived in that format had the streaming giant taken him up on it. Instead, what we get in this film is what would have been the first episode — and it feels like it. It's the worst thing that can be said for 'The Shrouds,' which ends on a diminuendo and with very little resolved. That's what keeps it from being the great film it might have been. But still, it's an absolutely original vision. It's a wail of grief, an expression of love, a testament to the body. Cronenberg puts it all on the line here, and he gets his actors to put it all on the line with him. If you don't feel its visceral charge, you're not paying attention.
New York Times
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
David Cronenberg Lost His Wife and the Will to Make Movies. Then Came ‘The Shrouds'
In 2017, during the funeral of his wife and longtime collaborator Carolyn Zeifman, the director David Cronenberg found himself struck by an unusual impulse: As the coffin holding her dead body was lowered into the ground, he wanted more than anything to get into that box with her. That reluctance to let go is taken to even more morbid extremes in Cronenberg's new movie, 'The Shrouds,' about a high-tech cemetery where the ongoing decomposition of a corpse can be viewed through a video livestream meant for the loved ones left behind. When those graves are mysteriously vandalized, it's up to the cemetery owner Karsh (Vincent Cassel) to determine the culprits, who he suspects may have something to do with the death of his own wife (Diane Kruger). The 82-year-old Cronenberg has always been guided by a unique point of view as a filmmaker, and his classics like 'Scanners,' 'Videodrome' and 'The Fly' helped establish the body-horror genre. Still, he admitted in an interview via Zoom this month that 'The Shrouds' could be considered one of his most personal films: It's not for nothing that Cassel is costumed to look like his director, donning dark suits and teasing his gray hair upward in a familiar manner. Even so, Cronenberg cautioned against drawing too many links between himself and his lead character. 'As soon as you start to write a screenplay, you're writing fiction, no matter what the impetus was in your own life,' Cronenberg said. 'Suddenly, you're creating characters that need to come to life. And when you start to write them, they start to push you around if they're really alive.' Here are edited excerpts from our conversation. As your wife was dying, did you think you might channel what you felt into your work someday? Or did it feel too taboo to tackle? At that point, I thought I wouldn't make any more movies. I thought possibly I'd end up writing another novel, but the moviemaking process seemed just too overwhelming. I just didn't think I'd have the heart for it when my wife died, which surprised me because it made me realize how much her support meant to me in everything that I was doing. I wouldn't have thought that it would be: 'She's gone. I can't work anymore.' But that's how I felt, really. Does making a film like 'The Shrouds' give you any perspective on what you've gone through? Not really, no. It's the exercise it's always been, which is to understand and explore the human condition as you personally experience it. So in that sense, it's cathartic, but it's not in the sense that it can alleviate or lessen grief. In other words, I don't think of art as therapy. I think it might work better for people who see it than for me. Meanwhile, I'm just left with the grief that I always had. 'The Shrouds' originally began as a show you pitched to Netflix. What intrigued you about tackling it as a series rather than a film? I was really fascinated by the whole streaming phenomenon. It's a different kind of cinema, in the sense that a movie is more like a short story or novella but a series is quite close to being a novel and that lets you take your time and really get into details of things that you cannot do in a movie. I've never made a movie that was two hours long — they've all been under two hours. So the idea of making a 10-hour movie, wow, that's pretty shocking. Honestly, I don't know if I would have had the stamina to do that. I talked to Steve Zaillian about 'Ripley,' which I thought was a fantastically good series that he wrote and directed every episode, and it took three or four years. Very exhausting. I talked to Alfonso Cuarón about 'Disclaimer' — same thing, he wrote and directed every episode. I asked him if he would do that again and he said, 'I'm not really sure I would.' And I knew that David Lynch had just about destroyed himself doing 20 episodes of 'Twin Peaks.' How did Netflix receive your pitch? They liked it enough to finance the writing of the first episode, then they liked that enough to finance the writing of a second episode. And at that point, they decided not to continue with it. I was disappointed, but I had to say: 'Well, thank you Netflix for at least getting me to this point. I have two episodes written that I quite like and I'm going to try and see if I can make this as a feature film.' What I was pitching to Netflix, and perhaps this was one of the things that scared them, was that every episode would take place in a different country. So if it was eight episodes, it'd be eight countries. Now that is an expensive series, and although they had a lot of money at that point, the pinch was already starting with Netflix. They could see that once they hit the upper limit of their subscribers, they were not going to be able to finance $300 million for a series so simply. Streamers used to spend that money like it was nothing. I think the streaming entities are very conservative now. They pulled back on their financing and they're getting to be very mainstream in their thinking. I went to Netflix hoping that they would be some strange alternative to the studio system where they would be more willing to take chances and basically do independent filmmaking, but what I felt there was that they were already well on the way to becoming just another studio entity. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I was hoping they'd be a little more radical. You've previously compared cinema to a cemetery and said, 'I'm often watching movies in order to see dead people.' Particularly during the pandemic, when I was watching a lot of old movies, it occurred to me that every person who worked on this movie is dead now. The director, the producers, the actors — they're all dead, and I'm watching their ghosts. I suppose somewhere back in my head there was that idea with Karsh's shrouds that basically the shrouds are cinema. The audiovisual presence of the dead in our lives has certainly grown over time. It used to just be pictures or letters. Now there are so many more ways that the dead feel present in a way that's nearly tangible. And beyond that is the artificial-intelligence avatar where people now have enough data on their loved ones — videos that they've taken, recordings of their voice — that it's very possible to find a company that will create a very spookily realistic avatar of the dead person you're missing who can actually talk to you. The thing that will always be there, though, is that they're still disembodied. You still can't hug them. You can't go to bed with them. You can't walk down the street holding their hand. So is that more frustrating? Is it going to exacerbate the grief or will it alleviate it? We shall see. But at the moment, body is reality, as the line from 'Crimes of the Future' goes. That's one way to use A.I., and Karsh has his own A.I. assistant in 'The Shrouds.' But what do you make of A.I. that's based on art that you've made, that could be trained on screenplays that you've written? I understand the copyright wars but honestly, once it's out there, it's up for grabs. It always has been. I mean, when James Joyce wrote 'Ulysses' and showed English-speaking writers a different way to write a novel, that was up for grabs and you could use that in the work that you were doing. So in a way, it's not really different, the A.I. thing. The complexity of copyright — Is it theft or plagiarism? — you have to let that play out in specific cases with lawyers. But it doesn't surprise me and I think it's inevitable and in a way it's always been there, frankly. How would you feel if we went to ChatGPT right now and said, 'Generate a plot summary for a new David Cronenberg movie?' It's been done. I haven't done it myself with my own work but apparently, sometimes the results are actually quite viable. It's like, 'Yeah, this is a movie that could get made.' And does that unnerve you or tickle you? No, no, it tickles me. I enjoy it, actually. We have filmmakers like Coralie Fargeat and Julia Ducournau who are obviously taking inspiration from you. Oh, yes, I watched 'The Substance,' I saw 'Titane.' I've met Coralie, I've met Julia. It's very sweet, they're like my cinematic daughters. And I have a son and a daughter who are also moviemakers, so it doesn't threaten me, I don't feel like I've been taken advantage of. Especially in those cases, they completely acknowledged that I have influenced them and it doesn't diminish my movies. Coralie got a couple of Oscar nominations that I've never had for writing and best picture and director, so it pleases me, honestly. Viggo Mortensen, who starred in many of your films, has chastised the Academy for never nominating you. What do you make of those snubs? 'The Fly' won an Oscar for best makeup, and that was my first time attending the Oscars. It was interesting and fun, but you can only take it so seriously. I think I have 50 lifetime achievement awards from various festivals and things and it would be nice if I could live those 50 lifetimes, so it's all in perspective. [At least] I wouldn't have to make an Oscar speech and get really nervous and perhaps fall as I went up onto the stage and break my hip like old guys tend to do. So that's the upside. When 'The Shrouds' premiered at Cannes last summer, there was speculation that it could be your last film. Is that your intention? No, I'm writing a script based on my novel 'Consumed,' so we'll see how that works out. Definitely, I'd be willing to do another movie. I felt doing the last two movies that I did have the focus and the stamina and all that stuff that you need. Eventually, I might get to the point where I don't feel that I have the energy or the focus because it is rough making a movie. It's physically difficult. But at the moment, I seem to be OK, so we'll see what happens. Does the notion of your eventual final film have any importance to you? For example, Quentin Tarantino has announced he only plans to make one more movie, but he's had some difficulty picking a project that feels like a worthy end point. It means nothing to me. Zero. You never think, 'Well, if this is my last movie, at least it feels right'? No. Five years later, they won't even know it's your last movie. They won't know which movie you made when and they won't care, either.
Los Angeles Times
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
A rarely screened Elaine May and Jeannie Berlin comedy, plus the week's best films in L.A.
Hello! I'm Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies. I've had a few conversations recently where I've had to ashamedly admit that this year has been a little thin so far when it comes to worthwhile new releases. Which is why this weekend feels so energizing, with Ryan Coogler's 'Sinners,' Isaiah Saxon's 'The Legend of Ochi' and David Cronenberg's 'The Shrouds' all hitting theaters. 'Sinners' is Coogler's first film since his tour through 'Creed' and two 'Black Panther' movies. Michael B. Jordan plays Smoke and Stack, twin brothers who return to their home in 1930s Mississippi to run a juke joint and find things have changed. Reviewing the film, Amy Nicholson writes, 'What a blood rush to exit Ryan Coogler's 'Sinners' aware that you've seen not merely a great movie but an eternal movie, one that will transcend today's box office and tomorrow's awards to live on as a forever favorite.' Coogler and his musical collaborator, composer Ludwig Göransson, spoke about how the music-heavy storyline of the film was a new challenge for them. 'Everybody had this sense of urgency,' said Coogler. 'where we all knew that this might be the last time in our lives where we could make something like this, that requires this much of ourselves.' Carlos Aguilar wrote a fantastic deep dive into how the old-school animatronic puppetry in 'Ochi' was done, bringing fantastical creatures to life. 'The goal was that it felt like it was something from nature, not something from a movie,' said director Saxon. 'I want kids to accept that maybe this is a real place and maybe this is a real animal that they just haven't discovered yet.' Cronenberg spoke to Josh Rottenberg about 'The Shrouds,' which he made in the aftermath of the death of his wife of 43 years, Carolyn Cronenberg. The film tells the story of a tech entrepreneur (Vincent Cassel) grappling with memory and grief. Yet Cronenberg does not see the film as therapeutic. 'Art, to me, is not therapy — it's something else,' Cronenberg said. 'Even a somber movie, it's really playtime. You're in the sandbox. You're putting on funny mustaches and funny voices, playing people that you aren't. The creativity, the playfulness — that's life-affirming. But the pain and the grief is exactly the same as it was.' Cronenberg will be in Los Angeles this weekend for Q&As after select screenings, including one on Saturday at the Grove moderated by filmmaker Richard Kelly. In what is being billed as the film's first 35mm screening in the 35 years since its initial release in 1990, 'In the Spirit' will be presented Tuesday at Brain Dead Studios by Hollywood Entertainment. The only feature directed by noted acting coach Sandra Seacat, the film was written by Jeannie Berlin and Laurie Jones and stars Berlin along with her mother, Elaine May, as well as Marlo Thomas and Peter Falk, with appearances by Jones, Olympia Dukakis and Melanie Griffith. Jones will be there to introduce the screening and co-producer Julian Schlossberg will offer a video introduction as well. Something of a New Age satire, the story veers into becoming a murder-mystery caper. Schlossberg recalled the project in an interview this week when he said, 'A group came together who were friends who cared for one another. And we had a good time. And we had a tough time because when you make an independent movie — oh, boy, that's one tough thing to do.' The recent book 'Miss May Does Not Exist,' written by Carrie Courogen, details how May took over postproduction of the film, overseeing a lengthy editing process. Yet Schlossberg is careful to note that May did not shadow-direct the movie during production. 'Sandra directed the movie — there's no question,' said Schlossberg. 'But in the postproduction, Elaine did come in. I asked her to come in and work with Sandra and myself. If you hire an actor who happens to be a writer-director, it's kind of dopey not to use them if they're willing to help.' In her original review of the film, Sheila Benson wrote, 'Households vary, but at ours there's at least one firmly held belief: Elaine May is the funniest woman in America. To be truthful, after a richly funny start, 'In the Spirit,' in which she stars, crumbles around her at roughly its halfway point. To an Elaine May junkie, however, that is almost irrelevant.' Benson added, 'Berlin, co-writer of the screenplay with Laurie Jones, has her mother Elaine May's timing, her deadpan, her enormous eyes and her briskly unforgiving slant on life. If their screenplay could keep up the pace of the movie's first half, she and Jones would have a grand-slam home run.' May did write and direct a short promotional film for 'In the Spirit' that is extremely funny on its own. (And makes Schlossberg himself a running punchline.) As Schlossberg recalled, after May watched a few other examples of short behind-the-scenes promo films, she called him up. 'She said, I never saw such a bunch of crap,' he said. 'Talk about how great everything is. It's not great. It's a tough thing to make a movie. If you want me to write a promo, I'm going to write a promo to say how difficult it was, and you are not going to come out great. And I said, great. Do it.' According to Schlossberg, May is aware of Tuesday's screening and is pleased to see the film revived. Schlossberg added that he values the trust that May has put in him for many years, allowing him to speak to some extent on her behalf. 'In the motion-picture or the show-business world, the word genius is bandied around and the word artist is bandied around. I've met very few geniuses and, I must say, very few artists. And Elaine May is both.' The Academy Museum is playing a series, 'Something Mysterious: The Art of Philip Seymour Hoffman,' that showcases the work of the Oscar-winning actor who died at age 46 in 2014. It's an astonishing array of performances, particularly when taken together like this. The series will feature many of Hoffman's greatest roles, with 'Magnolia,' 'The Savages,' 'Almost Famous,' 'Jack Goes Boating,' 'Love Liza,' 'Owning Mahowny,' The Big Lebowski,' 'Along Came Polly,' 'Charlie Wilson's War,' 'Doubt' and 'Synecdoche, New York' all being presented in 35mm. Additionally, 'The Master' will be screened in 70mm. Hoffman's last starring role, in 'A Most Wanted Man,' will play as well. In a 2000 review of Cameron Crowe's 'Almost Famous,' Kenneth Turan called Hoffman 'more and more the most gifted and inspired character actor working in film.' Of Paul Thomas Anderson's 'The Master,' Turan called Hoffman's performance 'impeccable' and 'magnetic' while adding, 'This is a superbly crafted film that's at times intentionally opaque, as if its creator didn't want us to see all the way into its heart of darkness. It's a film bristling with vivid moments and unbeatable acting, but its interest is not in tidy narrative satisfactions but rather the excesses and extremes of human behavior, the interplay of troubled souls desperate to find their footing.' In reviewing 'Charlie Wilson's War,' a political satire adapted by Aaron Sorkin that stars Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts and was the last film directed by Mike Nichols, Turan wrote, 'The only actor who comes off well, as he always does, is the redoubtable Hoffman. He gets the best of Sorkin's dialogue as Gust Avrakotos, a gruff, hot-tempered CIA career officer everyone avoids who bonds with Wilson over their mutual desire to kill as many communists as possible.' Reviewing Charlie Kaufman's dense, dizzying 'Synecdoche, New York,' Carina Chocano wrote, 'Hoffman commits himself completely to Caden's mournfulness, to the sadness that comes with realizing, as he does in the end, as what was once 'an exciting, mysterious future' recedes into the past, 'that this is everyone's experience, every single one; that you are not special; that there is no one watching you and there never was.' This sounds hopeless — too hopeless, even, for some of the characters in the film, who chafe at Caden's vision.' 'Pride & Prejudice' at 20 Joe Wright's 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen's 'Pride & Prejudice' is coming back to theaters for its 20th anniversary. Starring Keira Knightley as romantic heroine Elizabeth Bennet, the film also features a then-relatively-unknown Matthew Macfadyen, pre-'Succession,' as Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth's sisters are played by Rosamund Pike, Jena Malone, Talulah Riley and Carey Mulligan, the last in her screen debut. Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn are in the cast as well. Reviewing the film in 2005, Carina Chocano wrote, 'In Joe Wright's exhilarating new version, the first feature film adaptation of 'Pride & Prejudice' in 65 years, Lizzie has been liberated from period fashion victimhood, scruffed up a little, and let loose on the wily, windy moors. So what if the style seems a touch anachronistic — it's close enough to the spirit and the letter of the novel, and makes up for the differences in energy and fun.' In a 2005 interview with Susan King, Wright addressed why the movie emphasized the Bennet family's circumstances and lifestyle, surrounded by pigs and chickens and mud. 'Aesthetically, I like mess. I don't like tidiness,' Wright said. 'On an emotional level, I kind of felt that Elizabeth Bennet was a very earthbound character. If she has her feet in the mud and she's reaching for the stars, it would help dramatize the heroism of what she was doing.' Pink Floyd returns to 'Pompeii' Newly restored in 4K from the original 35mm footage with remixed sound, the classic stoner concert film, renamed 'Pink Floyd at Pompeii — MCMLXXII,' captures the group performing in 1971 at the ruins of an amphitheater in Pompeii, along with footage of them at work in the famed Abbey Road recording studio. Playing most widely in local theaters on the 24th and 27th, there will be other scattered showtimes in L.A., including at the mammoth TCL Chinese Imax on the 28th and 30th, where surely some audience member will discover they are in fact too high to handle it. There is something at once elegant, epic and ludicrous about the Pompeii footage as, amid the eternal splendor of their surroundings, a quartet of stringy-haired, pasty shirtless Englishmen play their spaced-out jams. (The Beastie Boys would later pay tribute to the film with their 1992 video for 'Gratitude.') In a 1974 review of the film, Dennis Hunt wrote, 'The idea of filming a rock group performing in an ancient Pompeii arena, without an audience, is a good one. Using this unusual setting is a laudable attempt to break out of the old rock-movie formula of filming artists performing in concert halls. It is unfortunate that such a colorless group was chosen to be the focus of the project. Pink Floyd is not very exciting on stage and even duller on film … Occasionally there is a successful marriage of music and image, but most of the time the images seem irrelevant.' 'My Dinner With Andre' Directed by Louis Malle and written by André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, the film 'My Dinner With Andre' stars Gregory and Shawn playing versions of themselves, as they meet for dinner having not seen each other for a number of years. As their conversation flows freely, they move from the petty and small to bigger philosophical questions about life itself. Deceptively engaging, representing a peak of a certain kind of self-styled urbane intellectualism, the film will play on Tuesday at Vidiots, with an introduction by author and filmmaker Fred Beshid. In reviewing the film when it first came out, Kevin Thomas said that it 'completely disregards what movies are supposed to be all about.' Thomas added, 'It is lots of things — one of the things it is not is a filmed play — but it is more important as an instance of two people talking their way past the neurosis that is the climactic impasse in most serious contemporary plays and films. It suggests that life may have some meaning after all — if an attempt to know is balanced with an acceptance of the unknowable.' France's Malle came to the film after having made 'Pretty Baby' and 'Atlantic City,' both also set and shot in America. In a 1981 interview with Clarke Taylor, Malle said, 'In this economic structure, movies everywhere are terrible. The medium is geared to mediocrity and is a miracle when one movie is good. If anything, the American industry is more honest, because they make it clear to you right away that it's all about money. In Europe, they pretend it's about art.' And lastly from LAFCA… On Tuesday, the Egyptian will host a special 4K presentation of 1995's 'Devil in a Blue Dress,' directed by Carl Franklin, who will participate in a Q&A moderated by UCLA programmer Beandrea July. The Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a yearlong screening series singling out its winners. Don Cheadle won the group's supporting actor recognition for his explosive turn as Mouse Alexander, opposite Denzel Washington's Easy Rawlins.
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The living monitor their buried loved ones in body horror film 'The Shrouds'
The new film 'The Shrouds' is a body horror film that follows a prominent businessman crushed after the loss of his wife who invents technology that enables the living to monitor their buried loved ones' decomposition via high-tech shrouds and headstone screens. Writer and Director David Cronenberg and actress Diane Kruger join Morning Joe to discuss.
