Quick Read By Peter Rainer Special correspondent
Do I miss seeing films in big theaters on a big screen with a big audience? You bet I do. But those days will return.
My initial concerns of a famished 2020 movie year were vastly exaggerated: After the pandemic began, a large backlog of small-scale, independent movies transitioned fairly smoothly to the home screen. The big studios had a rougher time of it: Many movies have been pushed well into next year.
Why We Wrote This
This year, movie watching moved largely from theaters to living rooms â where it may stay for some time. Monitor film critic Peter Rainer surveyed the landscape and offers his top choices for armchair watching.
Gregory Kershaw s
The Truffle Hunters, will receive top honors at the 25th and first virtual edition of Capri, Hollywood The International Film Festival,
The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
This year s edition of the Capri, Hollywood fest, which normally takes place on the island of Capri off the coast of Naples, will run from Dec. 26, 2020 through Jan. 2, 2021, with screenings available via MyMovies.it, an Italian website, and talks, panels and workshops held via social media platforms.
Notturno, which chronicles people who have fled Middle Eastern war zones and are trying to start new lives, and which is Italy s submission this year for the best international feature Oscar, has been chosen as the European Movie of the Year, and will screen on the fest s opening day.
Showing at the Showgrounds!
Film lovers will flock to the Bangalow Showgrounds, and the A&I Hall, from January 14, as the village lights up for eight exciting days of films and events. And tickets are on sale now!
Opening with the not-to-be-missed drive-in screening of Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece,
La Dolce Vita, the program is jam-packed with films for everyone:
High Ground, starring Jack Thompson, Simon Baker and Jacob Junior Nayinggul is a Northern Rivers’ premiere. Shot in Kakadu National Park by Andrew Commis (
Babyteeth) and directed by Stephen Maxwell Johnson
(Yolngu Boy), this is a great opportunity to preview the film before it hits our local screens.
OK, so I snuck in one doc. Whether Spike Lee s thrillingly immersive record of this sui generis theatrical concert is the best film of 2020 is open to debate. What I can say with absolute certainty is that the hyper-kinetic hymn to community and connection in a politically divided, environmentally ailing world is by far the most therapeutic time I had at a movie in this trying year of isolation and anxiety. Byrne s show was already something special on Broadway, with the silver-topped, professorial art-rocker flanked by a hard-working multicultural troupe of 11 virtuosic musicians, dancers and backup singers. Lee and nimble DP Ellen Kuras achieve miracles by somehow heightening that joyous experience, putting us right in there among the performers in a concert film that stands proudly alongside Jonathan Demme s landmark in the genre, the Talking Heads jam,
Gunda are a few of the films nominated for the 14th annual Cinema Eye Honors.
Time (pictured), Bradley’s portrait of a family’s struggle over years of incarceration, was nominated for six Cinema Eye Honors, including outstanding feature, direction, editing, score and debut.
Both Nanau’s
Collective – about journalists who uncovered health care fraud in the wake of a deadly nightclub fire in Bucharest, Romania, in 2015 and Kossakovsky’s
Gunda which follows the daily life of a pig, two cows, and a one-legged chicken had four nominations and joined
Time in being nominated for best feature, direction and editing.