Evolving movie-watching habits have brought new buyers in recent years, with Netflix and Amazon.com Inc leading the march of digital outlets to Sundance. The streaming services had started to outbid Weinstein Co for standout films. Filmmakers prospered as Amazon paid $12 million for “The Big Sick” and Netflix paid $12.5 million for “Mudbound” in 2017. This year, it was unclear whether those outlets will replace Weinstein as the pacesetters.
Writer-director J.C. Chandor follows his well-received, 2011 drama “Margin Call” with an unusual cinematic feat: a one-actor picture with virtually no dialogue. The movie, “All Is Lost,” centers on an unnamed protagonist who becomes stranded at sea, and Chandor’s only actor is cinema icon Robert Redford. In the film, Redford’s character awakens to find his small sailboat lodged on a metal cargo container that was drifting at sea. The collision tore a hole in the side of his craft, which is rapidly taking water.
It also helps that the picture is a musical. When Chu isn’t moving his cast from one beautifully dressed location to another, he is guiding it through some of the most eyepopping musical numbers to hit the screen in years. The splashy (literally) presentation of the tune “96,000” uses Highbridge Pool to great creative effect, with water becoming part of the choreography. This number is so intense that one might draw comparisons to the beautiful traffic jam dance sequence in La La Land.
On the occasion of the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain de Nice’s 30th anniversary, the She-Bam Pow Pop Wizz! The Amazons of Pop exhibition plunges back on a strong axis of Nice history: the face-off between France and the United States and movements of appropriation between New Realism and Pop. Behind the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, the emblematic figure of the museum’s collection, a whole generation (European and North American) of amazons of art is being honored.
