Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
At Flavorwire, Jason Bailey on when a critics group dares to break with critical consensus:
Over the weekend, the National Society of Film Critics — a distinguished organization including some of the most widely respected movie scribes in the game — met in New York to make selections for their 2014 awards. (Side note: hats off to the group for waiting until 2014 was actually over to recognize its films.) They don’t nominate, and they don’t have a fancy dinner; they just get together, argue about the movies, cast votes via a weighted ballot system, and that’s that. And this year, their Best Picture selection was Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language. They didn’t choose Boyhood, like most of the other critics’ groups, or any of the rest of the Oscar faves. And, accordingly, the Oscar Watchers™ lost their damn minds.
Watch Alan Cumming talk about his experiences working with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut:
At Slate, David Ehrlich on why the gender politics of Gone Girl are more complicated than you think:
For me, Gone Girl is a Walmart-noir riff on Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy that doesn’t reassert archaic gender roles so much as it affirms their insidious power over people and how we perceive them. It’s fascinating to watch Nick and Amy regress into the broad roles they cast for themselves and each other, and thrilling to see the giddy extremes to which Amy goes in order to rescue their marriage from the inertia of those performances. Gender is certainly relevant to Gone Girl, but I felt that Flynn and Fincher use it primarily as the discomfitingly relatable shorthand of a discomfitingly relatable love story.
Watch the great end credits for The Boxtrolls:
At Badass Digest, Jacob Knight on the broken-nosed machismo of a Mann’s world:
Michael Mann deals in hard men. Much how Martin Scorsese cinematically channels the goodfellas of his Little Italy childhood, Mann distills the pockmarked, blue-collar spirit of his Windy City stomping grounds into every frame he shoots. The various detectives, jewel thieves, bank robbers and murderers who take center stage in his trademark crime dramas are rough-handed riders who live by rigid codes, existing in self-made universes of blood and metal and fluorescent neon. Theirs is an existence of disconcertingly indifferent violence. Betrayal of their principles means an elevator to the already inevitable gallows. Bones are meant to be broken. Women are dutiful trophies. $150 slacks, $800 suits, D-flawless three-carat rings and respect: their only rewards.