Directors Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas distinguish themselves as masterful storytellers with the documentary Writing with Fire. Like other crafters of nonfiction cinema, they had the good fortune to come upon a story worth telling. According to the filmmakers, it … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2021 — Number Seven
The defining achievement of Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story is that it is inadequate to the point of flat-out inaccuracy to term the film an adaptation or a remake. Yes, the work is taken directly from the enduring … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2021 — Number Eight
In Kimi, the new film from director Steven Soderbergh, Zoë Kravitz plays Angela Childs, a quality control worker for a fledging tech company. Her employer’s main product is a virtual personal assistant device called Kimi, and its distinctive attribute is … Continue reading Now Playing — Kimi
Director Todd Haynes adheres to many of the standard practices of musical documentaries in The Velvet Underground. In tracking the history of the monumental band that toiled in Andy Warhol’s Factory, transformed rock music, and inspired countless descendants who sometimes … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2021 — Number Nine
Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021). Director Guillermo del Toro brings characteristic visual panache and gleeful excitement over the most lurid doings to this adaptation of a 1946 William Lindsay Gresham novel that was previously brought to the screen not … Continue reading Then Playing — Nightmare Alley; Moonstruck; Greenland
Flee is both an animated film and a documentary. That simple statement of fact is integral to understanding the unique power of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s film. The story told is that of Amin Nawabi, and he tells it himself. Interviewed … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2021 — Number Ten
Another year passes with the movies simultaneously feeling more distant and yet more accessible than ever before. When I tapped out a similar introductory missive just about a year ago, a whole calendar had been flipped through and tossed in … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2021 — An Introduction
Another dizzying, pandemic-buffeted year for movies leads to another set of largely happy surprises with the Academy Award nominations. The Academy’s efforts to diversify the voting body continue to have interesting, rewarding results. Drive My Car took its flurry of … Continue reading Jane’s Getting Serious — Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations
Gas Food Lodging (Allison Anders, 1992). Here is early nineteen-nineties independent U.S. filmmaking in all its charm and shortcoming. Gas Food Lodging is a small story rendered with intimate emotional detail and acted with wildly varying ability. Simultaneously endearing and … Continue reading Then Playing — Gas Food Lodging; The Tragedy of Macbeth; C’mon C’mon
Respect (Liesl Tommy, 2021). In her feature directorial debut, Liesl Tommy brings a lot of panache to the familiar form of a music icon’s biopic. Tracing the youth and professional ascendance of Aretha Franklin (played in childhood by Skye Dakota … Continue reading Then Playing — Respect; Red Rocket; Belfast
Coffee for Two 