September 11th, 2009

Inspired by his young daughter’s question, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” Chris Rock in November travels the globe in the Roadside Attractions documentary “Good Hair” to contemplate the roots of her query.

Juliette Binoche “Talks Paris and Dancing” with The Village Voice.

A hellaciously impressive cast — including George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and J.K. Simmons — cavorts in a too-crazy-not-to-be-true tale about military psychics in Grant Heslov’s “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” Based on Jon Ronson’s 2005 book detailing stupefying U.S. Army supernatural intel techniques, “Goats” opens in November.

In an absorbing interview about “Crude,” Marshall Fine discovers how, after initial reluctance, for the director of the seminal documentaries “Brother’s Keeper” and “Paradise Lost,” the legal battle waged against the nefarious decades-long assault by Texaco on Ecuador’s Amazonian rainforest became “the movie Joe Berlinger had to make.” “Crude” opens today, with a steadily widening release in North America through the rest of the year.

One Film Wonder: For the first 20 films of her Hollywood career, Dorothy Comingore was known professionally as Linda Winters, if she was known at all (nine of the roles were “uncredited.”). In 1941, at the age of 28, she appeared in her 21st movie for the first time under her given name. It was a significant role as the mistress who becomes the second wife of the film’s megalomaniacal protagonist; the film was “Citizen Kane,” the movie critically regarded as the greatest American motion picture of all time. Orson Welles cast Comingore as the unrefined Susan Alexander Kane, the reluctant singer for whom Charles Foster Kane built an opera house. In a notable performance, Comingore inhabited the role with a palpable pathos and a memorably shrill, henpecking delivery; she is particularly effective in the somber scenes at the “El Rancho” nightclub after Kane’s death. Comingore made only three more films until she was blacklisted in 1951 following her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

 

Leave a Reply