#25 — Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, 2013) Nearly twenty years after a boyishly cute traveling American named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) met a young French woman named Céline (Julie Delpy) on a train traveling from Budapest to Vienna, all is not … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Twenty-Five
Journey Into Fear (Norman Foster, 1943). Shortly after Orson Welles recruited his troupe’s leading man, Joseph Cotten, to pitch in on the script for The Magnificent Ambersons, he handed him primary writing duties on another adaptation. RKO had already taken … Continue reading Then Playing — Journey Into Fear; Nights of Cabiria; The Marrying Kind
In its fundamental premise, the comic book series The Old Guard was made for modern movies. The mighty Marvel machine has fundamentally changed expectation for how big and booming action needs to be on screen in order to hold an … Continue reading Now Playing — The Old Guard
#26 — Columbus (Kogonada, 2017) Intently studying great films, it turns out, is a solid strategy for someday making your own great film. Before crafting his debut feature, Columbus, Kogonada was surely best known for his exemplary video essays detailing … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Twenty-Six
485. Jerry Harrison: Casual Gods, Casual Gods (1988) Thanks to his membership in Talking Heads, Jerry Harrison could claim a central part in creating some of the best and most influential rock music of the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties. As the … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #485 to #483
Warning: ‘Jaws’ Is Still Devouring Us by Manohla Dargis Writing for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis looks back at Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster with acute insight and inspired wit. The opening paragraph alone is a little masterpiece. There’s so … Continue reading Outside Reading — The Head, the Tail, the Whole Damn Thing edition
Years ago, I received a piece of advice that I assumed was worldly wise: Whatever other professionals you might work with in management of your day-to-day affairs, make sure you have a mechanic you can trust. I suppose there’s truth … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Bully, “Every Tradition”
If there’s a better pure songwriter than Phoebe Bridgers at this moment, I don’t know who it is. Punisher, Bridgers’s sophomore release under her own name, comes after some productive moonlighting with pals in the groups boygenius and Better Oblivion … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Punisher
#27 — Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018) It’s not uncommon for a filmmaker to reckon with their own past through their chosen medium, but the end result rarely carries as much grace as Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. Drawing on his own history … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Twenty-Seven
Realistically, only Bob Dylan could rhyme “Indiana Jones” with “those British bad boys the Rolling Stones” and make it sound profound. The unlikely lyrical couplet containing those pop culture references on “I Contain Multitudes,” the lead track of the new … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Rough and Rowdy Ways
