In times like these, it may sound redundant — to say nothing of that old bugbear, “escapist” — to retreat to the heightened artifice of the studio-bound Hollywood musical. Globetrotting […]
As it turns out, two things can be true at once. First, with the aid of a couple different subscription services, I’ve been able to see more movies from the […]
Welcome to Hollywood: where art goes to die, or so the story goes. Of all cinematic craftspeople, the writer is typically the most prone to cynicism, because the average screenwriter […]
Among the current decade’s crop of movie neo-musicals, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land stands apart for tapping into traditions uniquely native to film. That is to say, it’s a song-and-dance extravaganza […]
William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives is fondly remembered as an honest and heartfelt look at the struggles of returning veterans. More than seventy years later, not only have […]
I always loved their names. To me, they matched each character and the actor playing him to perfection — maybe too well. This may have been a case in which the […]
For the final entry in my “Both Versions” blog series, I’ll be breaking one of my major rules. For every preceding film, the competing versions were each released theatrically at […]
