I remember being on airplane watching a parent in the seat in front of mine attempt to keep their kid occupied by dialing up the R-rated DC animation adaptation of the seminal nineteen-eighties graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, presumably … Continue reading Sundance 2021 — Part 4
In the festival introduction to his feature I Was a Simple Man, director Christopher Makoto Yogi inviting the audience to visit Hawai‘i for a couple hours. That struck me as an amusing, diversionary way to introduce what looked to be … Continue reading Sundance 2021 — Part 3
Part of experiencing Sundance only vicariously in previous years was having my curiosity piqued about films being positioned as contender in Academy Awards categories for a ceremony over a year out. It’s blissfully odd to instead actually view and assess … Continue reading Sundance 2021 — Part 2
When Steven Soderbergh picked up the first ever Audience Award for a narrative film at the Sundance Film Festival, in 1989, everything changed. Soderbergh’s film, sex, lies, and videotape, went on to be an arthouse sensation, and Sundance was suddenly … Continue reading Sundance 2021 — Part 1
#52 — Haley Lu Richardson as Casey in Columbus (Kogonada, 2017) In Columbus, Haley Lu Richardson plays a young woman waiting for her life to start. Intelligent and engaged in the world around her, Casey is about one year out … Continue reading Greatish Performances #52
Crossing Delancey (Joan Micklin Silver, 1988). This gentle romantic comedy has the wafting charm of a fable. Isabelle (Amy Irving) is an independent New Yorker with a habit of dabbling with the wrong men. When her grandmother (Reizl Bozyk) enlists … Continue reading Then Playing — Crossing Delancey; The Climb; Don’t Let Go
Four men gather at the edge of a nation that simultaneously exalts and oppresses them. They are famous, and at least a couple of them are generously compensated for the actions that earned them notoriety. They also are confined to … Continue reading Now Playing — One Night in Miami
Promising Young Woman is a gleaming arsenic lollipop with a razor blade hidden in the middle. It’s enticing and delicious but it also induces queasy wooziness, and then, with the barest warning, it cuts deep. The film is merciless and … Continue reading Now Playing — Promising Young Woman
Driveways (Andrew Ahn, 2020). There are few stories of bonding more cliched than the sad, lonely child who befriends a crusty elderly fellow, both growing in charming and moving ways because of the relationship. That makes it borderline miraculous that … Continue reading Then Playing — Driveways; Babyteeth; Collective
With Soul, Pete Docter positions himself as Pixar’s official conceptualizer of the elusive inner lives of humanity. That’s a lofty pronouncement, to be sure, and is especially hoity-toity to apply it to films that are, at their cores, family entertainment. … Continue reading Now Playing — Soul
Coffee for Two 