Category: Filmmakers
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Sean Baker Makes Academy Awards History with Four Oscars in One Night
Sean Baker set an Academy Awards record on Sunday, March 2, 2025, winning four personal Oscars as the writer, director, editor, and part of the producing team of his $6 million comedy-drama Anora. (Only Walt Disney had previously won four Oscars in a night, but for different films.) Throughout awards season Baker had been a…
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Nick Park and Peter Lord’s ‘Chicken Run’ Turns 25
Four-time Academy Award winner Nick Park is back in the Oscar race with Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the latest delightful adventure featuring his irresistible stop-motion creations, eccentric inventor Wallace and his melancholy dog Gromit. Co-directed by Park and Merlin Crossingham, this Netflix release is the animated duo’s first screen appearance since the 2008 short A…
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Remembering Visionary Director David Lynch
David Lynch has died at the age of 78. I had the pleasure of meeting the visionary director way back in 1984 to discuss his third feature, the much-maligned adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel Dune, which today has its staunch defenders. (I was frankly bored by Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated 2021 version and find Lynch’s…
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Back to ‘The Village’ with M. Night Shyamalan
M. Night Shyamalan is getting some of the best reviews of his career with his new thriller, Trap. The writer-director broke through in a big way in 1999 with his third feature, the Oscar-nominated smash The Sixth Sense. Since then, he’s had hits and notorious flops, but he’s kept generating original stories with often startling twists. Twenty…
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Edoardo Ponti Celebrates the First NYC Retrospective Devoted to His Legendary Mother, Sophia Loren
It’s shocking but apparently true: Film at Lincoln Center is currently presenting the first-ever New York City retrospective of one of the greatest movie stars in history, Sophia Loren. Over the course of her seven-decade career, the native of Naples enjoyed success in both Italy and Hollywood, in both comedies and dramas, co-starring with the…
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Edoardo de Angelis’s ‘Comandante’ Tells an Epic Tale of WWII Humanism
Film at Lincoln Center’s 24th annual “Open Roads” series of new Italian films launched in spectacular fashion with Comandante/The War Machine, the incredible true story of an Italian submarine crew during the early years of World War II. What makes the epic stand out is its humanism: After the Cappellini sinks the ostensibly neutral Belgian freighter Kabalo, Italian captain…
Kevin Lally on Film 