For the First Time Ever, I’m Optimistic About Women in the Movie World by Manohla Dargis Writing for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis surveys the state of the entertainment industry’s openness to women filmmakers and, for maybe the first … Continue reading Outside Reading — Women Helming
Understandable as the broadly adopted choice might be, it’s been strange to settle in with movies set in contemporary times and places and see how little the COVID-19 pandemic weighs on them. The fantasy of film fiction has rarely felt … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2022 — Number Nine
In her summary piece on this year’s Sundance Film Festival, The New York Times‘s Manohla Dargis lauded the documentary line-up, noting a greater consistency of quality this year and most years, also allowing that the films “were more intellectually engaging … Continue reading Sundance 2023 — Part 3
D. Smith’s documentary Kokomo City flouts all sorts of rules of nonfiction filmmaking. The primary mission of the film is to point the lens at several different Black trans women who make their living as sex workers and allow them … Continue reading Sundance 2023 — Part 2
My most reliable of reliable sources on the ground in Park City, Utah reports that the first in-person staging of the Sundance Film Festival since 2020 was a full return to the halcyon days of old in at least one … Continue reading Sundance 2023 — Part 1
In Fire of Love, director Sara Dosa traces the collaborative career of Katia and Maurice Krafft, who gained renown in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties for their daring pursuit of volcanic eruptions. The married couple exhaustively filmed and photographed their exploits, … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2022 — Number Ten
As I alluded to yesterday, 2022 struck me a topsy-turvy year in film. In certain respects, that’s understandable. Collectively, we are easing into a new understanding of how to operate in public spaces now that loads of people have decided … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2022 — An Introduction
Befitting a year in which Hollywood reeled in continuous confusion trying to adjust to the new reality of the post-COVID version of moviegoing, the Oscar nominations feel all over the place. There’s this wild convergence of old and new strewn … Continue reading All at Once — Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations
Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987). It’s amusing now to see that Kathryn Bigelow filled her solo directorial debut with actors imported from Aliens, the action sequel made the previous years by her future husband, James Cameron. Especially since Cameron has … Continue reading Then Playing — Near Dark; Elvis; Amsterdam
White Noise (Noah Baumbach, 2022). The only way this film can reasonable be deemed a success is by subscribing to the wholly unsupported premise that writer-director Noah Baumbach set out to prove that Don DeLillo’s landmark 1985 novel was accurately … Continue reading Then Playing — White Noise; Resurrection; The Eternal Daughter
