In this upside-down movie year that sprawled beyond the boundaries actually set by the calendar, it makes sense that the Oscar nominations would bring their own unique set of surprises. What makes the morning especially discombobulating for this long-time Oscar … Continue reading Promising Young Directors — Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations
Garrett Bradley’s documentary Time is awash in the uncommon power that comes from a moral outrage expressed with tough simplicity. The film spends most of its time with Sibil Fox Richardson, who carries her family through the reverberating pain of … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Six
I think it’s beautifully fitting that the year’s most poignant, insightful film about living in the U.S. is largely in a language other than English. Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung draws on his own history for Minari, the story of a … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Seven
When siblings Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross rolled their camera inside the dive bar The Roaring 20s, the story was fiction and the drinks were real. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets was introduced to film festival attendees as a documentary, … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Eight
There isn’t much dispute about which showbiz bigwig inspired the largely unseen and unheard boss that hangs like a black cloud over writer-director Kitty Green’s The Assistant. It’s a credit to Green’s film that spotting the parallels to salacious, anger-inducing … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Nine
Mabel’s Strange Predicament (Mabel Normand, 1914). In the third film of his career, Charles Chaplin tried on a new costume. Mabel’s Strange Predicament is the first appearance of Chaplin in his famed guise as the Tramp, and it’s almost jarring … Continue reading Then Playing — Mabel’s Strange Predicament; Wanda; The Professional
Birds Of Prey’s costumes changed the game for female superheroes by Caroline Siede Although I remain devoted to the Academy Awards as an important and reasonably effective — if hardly infallible — measure of what should be added to the ongoing … Continue reading Outside Reading — The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn’s Wardrobe
Spike Lee had a template to work from when he agreed to direct a film version of David Byrne’s Broadway sensation, American Utopia. Even if there’s arguably too much theatrical staging to the more recent work to call a screen … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Ten
As I type this, it’s been over a year since I set foot in a movie theater. That’s a strange, discombobulating fact for me to set straight in my noggin. Although I’ve hardly kept up the pace of my college … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — An Introduction
When journalist Jessica Bruder toiled away on her book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, I doubt a big-screen adaptation felt like a probably outcome. Bruder’s reportage was on a modern brand of itinerant living, practiced especially by older … Continue reading Now Playing — Nomadland
Coffee for Two 