Blog Posts by Jonathan Crow

IFC FilmsAbbas Kiarostami helped put Iranian cinema on the map back in the '80s and '90s with movies such as festival faves "Close Up," "A Taste of Cherries," and "The Wind Will Carry Us." For the past couple of years, however, Kiarostami has been making movies abroad, no doubt because of the increasingly political environment in his native country. In 2010, he released "Certified Copy," starring Juliette Binoche and set in the Tuscan countryside. That movie -- about marriage, identity, and authenticity -- was beautiful and elusive, leaving many critics baffled and enraptured.

Kiarostami mines similar thematic territory in his follow-up movie "Like Someone in Love," but it's set in Tokyo with an all-Japanese cast. The result is very odd but strangely satisfying.

Photo: Open Road Films

In the first half of my interview with director Steven Soderbergh, he went into great detail about what he's going to do during his retirement: He's looking to do nothing less than reinvent cinema.

In this second half, Soderbergh talks about his insanely busy schedule -- he's made five, count 'em five, movies in the past two years -- the difficulties of working in Hollywood, and how he completely freaked out of Matt Damon.

Soderbergh on the set of 'Magic Mike' (Photo: Warner Bros)

Steven Soderbergh will talk to you only in 45-minute chunks of time. For most press junkets, the standard interview time is a mere 4 minutes. So when I got a chance to interview the director of "Magic Mike," we had plenty of time to talk.

Soderbergh has had one of the most enviable careers out there. The director has made Oscar favorites like "Traffic," Hollywood blockbusters like "Ocean's Eleven," and art-house flicks like "The Girlfriend Experience" and "Che." Most remarkably, he navigates these very different spheres of filmdom without changing the way he makes movies. Soderbergh not only directs but also shoots and edits his films, no matter what the scale of the project.

Recently, Soderbergh has been making movies at a breakneck rate. Since 2011, he's cranked out five flicks, including "Side Effects," which comes out this week, and a Liberace biopic for HBO, "Beyond the Candelabra." When the latter airs sometime later this year, that will be it, according to the director. He's either retiring from big-budget movie making or he's taking a long extended break. He's not sure.

In this interview, the first of two parts, Soderbergh talks about what he wants to do during his retirement. It looks as though a Hawaiian vacation or catching up with his stamp collection isn't at the top of his priority list. No, Soderbergh wants to take time away from the Hollywood rat race to reinvent the language of cinema.

[Related: Malik Bendjelloul talks about his Oscar-nominated movie ‘Searching for Sugar Man’]

Photo: Disney

“The Avengers” isn’t going to be much of a presence at the 2013 Academy Awards – the movie received just one nomination, for Best Visual Effects. But that doesn’t mean last year’s biggest blockbuster won’t be getting some love on the upcoming Oscar telecast.

Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the producers of this year’s Academy Award show, have announced that five of the stars of “The Avengers” will be presenting as a team. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Renner and Mark Ruffalo will be joining forces to defend justice and hand out some statuettes.

In a press statement, Zadan and Meron said, “We are happy to re-unite the ‘Avengers’ cast to present on our show. Audiences who enjoyed the year's biggest box office hit will be excited to see these terrific actors back together again.”

While Iron Man, Captain America, Nick Fury, Hawkeye, and The Hulk will be on hand, a few members of the crime-fighting crew will not.

Scarlett Johansson (aka “Black Widow” or “The Hot

Photo: Michael Kovac/WireImage

“It’s exhausting and an honor. It’s an exhausting honor,” said “The Hunger Games” star Jennifer Lawrence while on the red carpet at the Arlington Theater in downtown Santa Barbara this Saturday. Though last week the 22 year-old actress was reportedly suffering from pneumonia, she looked terrific in her off-the-shoulder Stella McCartney pant suit. Behind her was a throng of squealing teenage girls who would periodically shout her name in unison.

A frontrunner for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook,” Lawrence was in town to receive the “Most Outstanding Performer of the Year” award from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival; one more prize to put on her increasingly cluttered trophy rack.

Photo: IFC

Firebrand filmmaker Im Sang-soo's last movie was a remake of the 1960 Korean classic "The Housemaid." While the original is a film noir about middle-age anxiety, Im's version was an extravagant middle finger extended to Korea's 1 percent. In his latest movie, "The Taste of Money," he once again spins a deliriously baroque tale about the sordid lives of the uber-rich.

Rebecca Sapp/WireImage

While being honored on Saturday night at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Daniel Day-Lewis -- who over the course of his career delivered some of cinema’s most memorable performances such as Bill the Butcher in “Gangs of New York” and Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood” – talked about his first exposure to acting. And it seems that his penchant for improbable transformation started from the very beginning.

The normally reserved Day-Lewis, who is currently the front-runner for the Best Actor for his performance in “Lincoln,” sat down with The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg before an audience of hundreds in the Arlington Theater in downtown Santa Barbara and reflected on his career.

'Searching for Sugar Man' (Photo: Everett Collection)The Oscar-nominated documentary "Searching for Sugar Man" tells the strange story of singer-songwriter Rodriguez. Back in the early 1970s, the record company had high hopes for him. With eminently hummable tunes and lyrics that eloquently spoke to life on the mean streets of Detroit, Rodriguez seemed poised to be the next Bob Dylan. But his two albums, "Cold Facts" and "Coming from Reality," never really caught on in the United States. That would seem to be the end of the story, except, for reasons that still aren't entirely clear, Rodriguez's album did, unbeknownst to him, phenomenally well in South Africa. His songs proved to be the anthems of a generation of young South Africans who were increasingly frustrated by their government's apartheid policies. While his albums were selling as well as "Abbey Road" in Cape Town, Rodriguez seemingly disappeared into obscurity.