Variety used to cover everything. I remember a magical night in Rome in , when I sat late at night on the Via Veneto and gawked at the last remnants of la dolce vita. A held a copy of Weekly Variety, all black and white on newsprint and easily more that pages thick. I became fascinated by the back pages, the items two paragraphs long about cabaret performers in Boston, dancers in Miami, magicians in Philadelphia, lounge acts in Las Vegas, jazz clubs in London.
Variety got its name from variety artists, and for decades they lived off a favorable notice in its pages. The paper then truly was "the showbiz Bible. Well, those days over with. The glory days of the famous Variety critics are finished. I knew one of them, Gene Moskowitz, who signed his reviews Mosk. In the s, dying of cancer, he came to what he knew was his last Cannes, bringing along his wife and the young son he was so proud of.
Under an umbrella on the beach, he looked toward the old Palais and said, "I saw a lot of good movies there. About Todd McCarthy I am not very worried. He's one of a kind. I can think of no better candidate as the director of a major film festival. Or as a professor, or of course as a film critic. What I lament is the carelessness with which his 31 years of dedication were discarded. Oh, the paper cites its reasons.
Sometimes "downsizing" is necessary cost-cutting. Sometimes it symbolizes the abandonment of a mission. If Variety no longer requires its chief film critic, it no longer requires me as a reader. An early blog entry of mine: "Critic" is a four-letter word.
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Roger Ebert Variety: This thumb's for you. Roger Ebert March 09, Latest blog posts. Latest reviews. Belfast Christy Lemire. Passing Odie Henderson. The Drummer Robert Daniels. How do you know when the spark is gone? When your latest romantic comedy looks like TV, feels like greeting-card poetry and sounds like a self-help manual.
By Peter Debruge. Chief Film Critic. When your latest romantic comedy looks like TV, feels like greeting-card poetry and sounds like a self-help manual — the unfortunate combo that befalls writer-director James L. Olympic softball team together, but however adorable she looks in uniform, the actress is hardly the hoss such a role requires. While Wilson could pass for a cocky baseball star, his credibility disappears the instant his character, a narcissistic Washington Nationals player named Matty, opens his mouth.
Why, then, does he offer Lisa a lone sock drawer rather than clearing out these cupboards when she moves in? Home Film Reviews. Dec 15, am PT. By Peter Debruge Plus Icon. Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic askdebruge.
In the UK, where cinemas can open in lower lockdown tiers, distributors have largely chosen to delay releases until a time when they can complement a digital release with a cinematic one, while in the US — where cinemas are broadly closed — a digital-only strategy has been more widely adopted.
Promising Young Woman is one of a number of key titles — including The Mauritanian and Nomadland — eyeing a UK opening in late March, when it is hoped the lockdown measures may ease.
This article is more than 9 months old. Variety's apology to Carey Mulligan shows that the critic's ivory tower is toppling Peter Bradshaw. Read more.
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