Celebrating Community
Caleb and Frank like movies. Caleb and Frank are also snobs who think they’ve seen everything. Of course, they have not seen everything, and there exist a great number of movies that they have absolutely no intention of sitting through. But, trapped indoors and bored to tears, Caleb and Frank forced each other to watch the movies they’d otherwise avoid […]
On November 13, 1854, Alfred Lord Tennyson opened his morning newspaper, eager for word from far-off Crimea. He read about the Light Brigade, the six hundred cavalry troopers ordered to charge a heavily defended fort, and about their subsequent slaughter. Moved by their courage and sacrifice, Tennyson wrote a poem. Tennyson was, of course, an abominable poet. A Victorian to […]
The new year brings new hope- hope for better jobs, better workouts, and better relationships. Not so in Hollywood. With awards-season submission deadlines now in the past, major studios traditionally treat January as a dumping ground for their weirdest and most troublesome films, hoping a surprise hit materializes from thin air. That said, there are a few signs of life […]
Werner Herzog, the German filmmaker and Baby Yoda enthusiast, doesn’t much like chickens. In his view, chickens embody “a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic, nightmarish creatures in the world.” Mr. Herzog is not alone in this estimation. Showmen and grifters train these birds to dance, play checkers, and perform tricks not because […]
December here in film town is just November, but more. Like last month, the major studios will drop awards contenders just before their submission deadlines. Aging auteurs will release overlong reflections on their encroaching mortality. When the holiday season hits, Disney IP will capture the imagination of every living child and man-child, and hopefully entertain the rest of us enough […]
American Dharma Documentarian Errol Morris interviews former Trump advisor and generally repugnant pit-stain Steve Bannon. In The Fog of War and Known Unknowns (films Bannon cites as personal favorites), Morris walked through Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeldt’s personal biographies to examine the personal and structural failings of American empire. Bannon, who prefers bloviating about his favorite films and his own […]
Diego Maradonna, the new film from Academy Award-winning documentarian Asif Kapadia, opens with a car chase. Two sedans speed through the winding streets of Naples, enclosed on both sides by throngs of football fans. As they holler and push against police barricades,adoration becomes indistinguishable from aggression. The sedans accelerate to escape this mass of suffocating love, and they nearly collide. […]
Welcome to October, the third-best month of the film release calendar! It’s not quite Oscar season, but the major film festivals have concluded, and the word-of-mouth awards campaigns are roaring to life. So, after a long summer of comic book blockbusters, Disney IP, low-budget horror flicks, and the occasional indie darling, October promises a cineplex packed with…comic book blockbusters, Disney […]
“Space,” goes the old cliche, “is the final frontier.” With terrestrial limits all but explored, it comes as no great shock that filmmakers from Kubrick to Christopher Nolan to Claire Denis have time and again tested the limits of their storytelling prowess in the stars. Implicit in the infinite vacuum is the promise of better and more interesting worlds, […]