Lisa Schwarzbaum

TIME Entertainment movies

All About Yves.

Lisa Schwarzbaum

June 19, 2014

Yes Saint Laurent Portrait with Dress Tessa Beaumont — *Saint Laurent fits a costume for dancer Tessa Beaumont at Christian Dior’s Paris atelier in 1959. Saint Laurent was named head designer of the label in late 1957.* Boris Lipnitzki—Roger Viollet/Getty Images

Two biopics of the great French designer approach the runway

A thousand video clips from red-carpet interviews have brought us to this moment: “Who are you wearing?” sounds like a normal question. Translated from anatomically impossible shorthand, the query–typically from a journalist who is prepped with the answer, posed to a movie star coached to respond–means, What is the name of the famous designer whose label is stitched into the rarefied, camera-ready, impossibly expensive garment on loan to you? Whose product have you, upon consultation with your style team, agreed to model, benefiting not only the famous designer in question but your own brand?

These days, no translation is necessary.

This appears in the June 30, 2014 issue of TIME.

TIME Entertainment movies

Alan Partridge Hits the Big Screen

Lisa Schwarzbaum

April 3, 2014

Steve Coogan Portrait British Actor Alan Partridge 24 Hour Party People — *Like Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Coogan’s id-driven fictional broadcaster has never found a social interaction he couldn’t botch* Thomas Laisne—Corbis Outline

British comedian Steve Coogan expands on his greatest creation

Psychological self-improvement is overrated. How else can otherwise evolved adults explain the enduring success of Alan Partridge, the spectacularly self-absorbed, boorish fictional broadcaster created by British comedian Steve Coogan? For some 20 years, Coogan, in the camera-ready coif and wanker wardrobe of his unsinkable character, has foisted Partridge on a grateful, largely British public primed for every one of Alan’s gaffes and pomposities.

Coogan and his writers (including Armando Iannucci, creator of HBO’s Veep) have thus far adapted the Alan Partridge experience to radio and TV (including the template-setting series Knowing Me, Knowing You With Alan Partridge); stripped-down webisodes (Mid Morning Matters With Alan Partridge); book-shaped autobiography (I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan); and faux documentary (Alan Partridge: Welcome to the Places of My Life).

This appears in the April 14, 2014 issue of TIME.

TIME Entertainment

My Lars Von Trier Problem

Lisa Schwarzbaum

March 6, 2014

A search for light in the great Dane’s darkness

Lars von Trier calls his new movie Nymphomaniac. In print advertisements for the two-part project and sometimes in editorial publications willing to play along, a pair of parentheses substitutes typographically for the o in the word. This winky flourish gives the title an emoticonically dirty look. In some posters, individual photographs of the actors starring in the Danish filmmaker’s relentlessly graphic film–including Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Uma Thurman, Shia LaBeouf, Jamie Bell, Christian Slater and Willem Dafoe–purport to show each player in sexual ecstasy, making what slangsters these days like to call an O-face.

Nymphomaniac: Volume I will be released theatrically in the U.S. on March 21, with Volume II following on April 4.

This appears in the March 17, 2014 issue of TIME.

TIME Entertainment

Lupita Nyong’o: The Front Runner

Lisa Schwarzbaum

Feb. 20, 2014

Her harrowing turn in 12 Years a Slave brings Lupita Nyong'o accolades she couldn't prepare for

Lupita Nyong’o doesn’t appear onscreen until nearly an hour into 12 Years a Slave. And when she does–as Patsey, a slave whose curse it is to be both industrious and beautiful, desired by the man who claims to own her and jealously hated by his wife–she is indistinguishable, at first, from a long line of black men and women waiting in fear while the cotton they have picked for hours in the brutal sun is weighed by white men with ungodly power over their lives.

It takes barely a minute, though, for Nyong’o to shape Patsey into a full person.

This appears in the March 3, 2014 issue of TIME.

Two biopics of the great French designer approach the runway

British comedian Steve Coogan expands on his greatest creation

A search for light in the great Dane’s darkness

Her harrowing turn in 12 Years a Slave brings Lupita Nyong'o accolades she couldn't prepare for

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