Category: media

“Leaving aside, for the moment, the political realism of the request, the plan is a good one. In an increasingly scattered but ever more Internet-dependent and globalized media environment, the country needs a public producer, curator and distributor to craft a powerful Brand Canada across all platforms, offering not only news, public affairs and documentaries, but also fiction, variety and arts programming. It needs an iconic institution to nurture and lead the cultural industries, a rallying point for Canadian creativity.”

The results show that the battle might be between “La-La Land” (which won the New York Film Critics Circle award) and “Moonlight,” though “Manchester By the Sea” was a runner up in many categories as well.

Now that all 19 of the director’s feature films are available for streaming on iTunes, here’s a survival guide to making it through the holidays with family, friends, and Almódovar.

Issa Rae’s HBO show “Insecure” accomplishes something nothing else has: Showing the beautiful, complex tenderness of the Los Angeles that African Americans inhabit. “The city’s sprawl becomes a playground for both Insecure’s characters and its soundtrack’s artists, not a coincidence but an asset to the story itself.”

The project was ambitious, with $100 million in start-up costs, and the producers had to shut down production to revamp, revise and rewrite, so everyone in the industry thought it would tank. But it seems likely that “Westworld will surpass True Detective’s season-one audience and end up with the biggest viewership of any HBO first-year series ever.”

Spencer and actor Dev Patel talk about representation at the movies, and why what they’re doing is important. Patel: Their films are “anthems of diversity, they’re anthems of love, and they’re anthems of perseverance.”

So, this is abhorrent: “According to Bertolucci, he and Brando agreed not to tell Schneider what would happen to her because he wanted her reaction ‘as a girl, not as an actress.'”

“Under the umbrella of [his production company] El Deseo, Pedro makes whatever movie he wants. A new one comes out every couple of years, as with Woody Allen, but no two Almodóvar movies are alike. His aesthetic has become harder and harder to pin down. Critics regularly announce that he has finally left behind his taste for gender games and melodramatic plots with murdered spouses, only to have his next movie prove them wrong.”

“[They] gave three apiece to each movie, … But lest we forget that there is a beloved modern-day musical starring charming actors Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling also campaigning vigorously for critical attention, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land snuck in at the tail end of voting to win Best Picture.”

New York Times music writer Nate Chinen, who grew up in Hawaii, picks out the traditional elements and scrutinizes the ways in which Disney used and adapted them (and yeah, maybe co-opted, too).