Past Lives, the feature directorial debut of Celine Song, has a unshakeable emotional elegance about it. Clearly autobiographical, the film meets the simple yet surprisingly elusive goal of speaking to universal through focusing on a highly specific story. The plot … Continue reading Now Playing — Past Lives
#56 — Matthew McConaughey as Dallas in Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh, 2012) Employing a freshly coined portmanteau that was immediately tiresome, the entertainment press relentlessly invoked the McConaissance all throughout the awards season run that provided a lot of shiny hardware for … Continue reading Greatish Performances #56
Conceding upfront that the sanctity of the film series that chronicles the adventures of an archeology professor who has some especially bustling sabbaticals took a significant hit with a comeback installment centered on a crystal skull, I think it’s still … Continue reading Now Playing — Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Pink Floyd, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and Me by Charlie Savage Charlie Savage, who’s now a well-regarded political journalist with a Pulitzer Prize on his shelf, recounts his experience a cub reporter when a human interest piece about stoners syncing … Continue reading Outside Reading — The Dark Side of the Trousers edition
Wes Anderson knows who he is. it’s not as if he’s oblivious to his own artistic peculiarities: the mix of bone-dry humor and cartoonish tomfoolery, the characterizations so broad they actually feel more authentic than more restrained renderings, and, above … Continue reading Now Playing — Asteroid City
Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975). As nineteen-seventies New Hollywood was peaking, Robert Mitchum returned to his natural habitat. Mitchum stars as Philip Marlowe in an adaption of Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel, Farewell, My Lovely, which had gotten a couple … Continue reading Then Playing — Farewell, My Lovely; Carefree; Yes, God, Yes
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. Sometimes I think every movie trailer should introduce close-ups of all the actors introducing themselves in character. … Continue reading The Art of the Sell — Magnolia teaser trailer
TCM Fans Are Right to Worry by Josef Adalian It was probably inevitable that the rampage of the wrecking ball serving as Warner Bros. Discovery CEO would eventually reach Turner Classic Movies, the one network that deserves to be part … Continue reading Outside Reading — Louis, I Think This Is the End of a Beautiful Friendship edition
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. Although there’s also an art to cutting together an effective trailer using footage taken from the movie … Continue reading The Art of the Sell — Parenthood teaser trailer
If the largely shared enhanced abilities of the majority of the characters populating the film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse can be tidily summed up as allowing them to do whatever a spider can, the film itself has its own startling … Continue reading Now Playing — Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Coffee for Two 