Casey Affleck

Awards season, that glorious time of year when works of moving art are made to fight for our amusement and betting-pool glory, lurched into gear last night with the Gotham Independent Awards. A sort of east coast counterpart to Los Angeles’ Independent Spirit Awards, the program recognizes the finest achievements in indie film over the previous year, as selected by the members of the Independent Filmmaker Project. For the past two years, the IFP’s Best Feature designation has effectively predicted the film that will receive the Best Picture Academy Award a couple months later. If that happens to be the case again this year, the Oscar future looks bright — and refreshingly black.

One of the greatest breakouts of the past five years was David Lowery’s Texan crime-romance Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which starred Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. It got Lowery on Disney’s radar to helm this summer’s Pete’s Dragon (which is fantastic), but the trio hasn’t worked together since that first 2013 film. Or so we thought — it appears that Affleck, Mara, and Lowery secretly got together over the summer to make a mysterious new film.

If you tried to describe Manchester by the Sea to someone else it would sound an awful lot like many other indie dramas. Trouble white guy returns to his hometown to care for a relative. But that does not do justice to Kenneth Lonergan’s third feature, only his third in 16 years...

It looks like Hollywood wants to be in the Casey Affleck business. A few weeks ago, news broke that Casey Affleck would write, direct, and star in Light of My Life, a survival thriller about a man and his young daughter who get lost during a hike in the woods. And that’s not the only Affleck project they have in the pipeline: yesterday, Variety announced that Affleck would also be writing and starring in Villain, a vigilante thriller with a supernatural twist.

People do strange things when they’re bored. One of my favorite ways to entertain myself is to try and puzzle out which Affleck will have the better legacy in fifty years. Ben Affleck is the obvious answer, of course, but he also possesses the more uneven career; it started off strong with Good Will Hunting and bottomed out in the early 2000s. For a few years there, it looked like Casey Affleck  —  with supporting roles in well-received movies like Ocean’s Eleven and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford  —  might have pulled permanently ahead of his brother.

While 2016 may look like a crappy year for movies so far, don’t worry. I assure you one of the best films of the year is on its way, and now it finally has a trailer.

It may only be March, but 2017 Oscar buzz is already in the air. Amazon’s ‘Manchester By the Sea,’ which debuted at Sundance earlier this year, finally has a release date and it’s right in the middle of awards season.

There are several big mysteries in the neo-noir thriller Triple 9 but none bigger than this one: How the hell did they get a cast this great to show up for a movie this mediocre?

For decades, there’s been a clear delineation of roles in the Affleck clan: Ben’s the leading man, Casey’s the character actor. Ben has the perfect chin and lustrous hair, not to mention the major height advantage. (He’s almost half a foot taller than Casey, according to IMDb.) Even when Casey Affleck takes a central role in a film, it’s almost always in material that explores the unlikelihood of a guy like him becoming a hero (think The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford or Gone Baby Gone). But that’s not the case with the new historical adventure The Finest Hours. There’s nothing quirky or unconventional about Affleck’s charisma here. Even with a more traditional leading man co-anchoring the story and serving as its de facto protagonist, Affleck commands the screen with quiet, steely resolve and intense eyes. At 40 years old, he’s blossomed into a full-fledged movie star.

I don’t think I’ve ever not recognized Kate Winslet in a movie before. But I did not recognize her in the latest trailer for Triple 9. It wasn’t until her name flashed onscreen that I even realized it was her — and even then I had to rewind to see for myself. According to Wikipedia, which is never wrong, she plays “a Russian-Israeli Mafia moll.” My favorite kind of Mafia moll!