The Felliniesque Century
Consistently regarded as one of the world’s very greatest filmmakers, Federico Fellini is a daunting subject. Developing a bombastic and playful style, he is one of the few who can […]
The Class of 2020: My Favorite Movies
The Distracted Boyfriend meme is nowhere more applicable than in the life of a cinephile. Whatever movie I plan on seeing next, the thought will always occur to me before […]
An Enterprise of Great Pitch and Moment: My 10 Favorite Hamlet Movies
Probably the main reason that Hamlet has been such a popular subject for cinema from its very beginning — besides representing a grasp for artistic legitimacy in those early days, and […]
My Favorite Movies of the 2010s
This past decade was an important transitional time for me. It began with me entering my final semester of college, and it ended with me finally moving out of my […]
My Most Anticipated 2020 Movies
Scanning the horizon for next year’s crop of movies yields the usual mix of excitement and despair. Some things haven’t changed much; franchise sequels continue to suck most of the […]
The Manson Movies of 2019
The formula could be expressed thusly, matching up with the chronology of the three films’ premiere dates: Mary Harron’s Charlie Says (Venice Film Festival, September 2, 2018) intends to demythologize the […]
My 25 Favorite Montages & Cross-cutting Sequences
What’s the opposite of a long take? The first four top 25 lists I put together for this blog were matching pairs: scariest scenes and funniest scenes, endings and beginnings. […]
My Most Anticipated 2021 Movies
A lot can change in a year, I believe it’s safe to say. At this point last December, I was thinking about the end of a decade of movies, in […]
Announcing My 2021 Movie Retrospective: The Films of Frank Capra
The director of my current choice for “favorite movie of all time” was a paradigmatic American success story: a Sicilian immigrant who rose through the ranks of a booming industry […]
Double Feature: For Sama and A Diary for Timothy
The shot lasts only about seventeen seconds, a simple downward tilt. First we see Sama, the young daughter of journalist and filmmaker Waad al-Kateab, being held by her father, Hamza, […]
Overdue: A City of Sadness
Here begins a new blog series, in which I pick at a list of movies that I’ve never seen before but really should have by now. The parameters are just […]
Double Feature: Memento and Irreversible
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”–Kierkegaard “He destroyed my ability to live.”–Leonard Shelby, Memento “Paranoiacs need everything explained. Some things can’t be explained.”–Alex, Irreversible […]
Sullivan’s Travels by Preston Sturges
A message movie disguised as a frothy comedy when it isn’t a frothy comedy disguised as a message movie, Sullivan’s Travels (1941) is an inside-baseball satire on Hollywood’s self-importance and […]
Double Feature: Murder by Death and Clue
Detective stories were among Hollywood’s very first franchises, offering durable structures and just enough variation to keep people wanting more. For the most part, these films were based on popular […]
“He Doesn’t Need You; He’s Got His Memories” — Selznick’s and Hitchcock’s Rebecca
David O. Selznick brought Alfred Hitchcock to Hollywood in 1939 and promptly got the British master his first and only Best Picture win at the Academy Awards. That film, Rebecca (1940) […]
Double Feature: Zora Neale Hurston’s Ethnographic Films and Daughters of the Dust
Zora Neale Hurston, a prominent novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, was also something of an amateur filmmaker, documenting everyday life and work in the American South as part of anthropological […]
