It is a pleasing irony that Marriage Story begins as the legal union of the title is effectively at its endpoint. Theater director Charlie (Adam Driver) and actress Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) have been married for several years, working together on … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Five
Despite protests to the contrary and the little fact that director Martin Scorsese is just a few weeks away from the first shooting day on his next feature film, The Irishman feels like a closing statement. Of course, it is … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Six
I admire Jordan Peele’s sophomore directorial effort for a lot of reasons, chief among them its overstuffed grab bag of fierce, pointed ideas. In Us, Peele heaves weighty social commentary concepts like chunks of glistening coal into an already well-stoked … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Seven
Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell, 2019). No one quite knew what to do with writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to the indie horror hit It Follows. A shaggy modern detective story, Under the Silver Lake plays like Robert … Continue reading Then Playing — Under the Silver Lake; Apollo 11; Joker
With a level of specificity that should be the aspiration of all filmmakers, directors Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego tells the long, complicated story of a crime family in Birds of Passage. Beginning in the late-nineteen-sixties and spanning a generation, … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Eight
With a graceful intensity, writer-director Joanna Hogg traces the rough surface of a romance in The Souvenir. Resolutely autobiographical (Hogg doesn’t take the usual director’s tack of downplaying the personal nature of her storytelling, noting she meticulously recreated her own … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Nine
What hath Alfonso Cuarón wrought? When the director peppered his masterful film Children of Men with action sequences that unfolded in long, unbroken takes (or at least appeared to so), he was hardly the first director to employ the technique. … Continue reading Now Playing — 1917
With a rare and gratifying exuberance for the abundant possibilities found in genre-based storytelling, writer-director Rian Johnson proved anew his mighty abilities to slyly invert tropes with Knives Out. A modern polish on the twisty mysteries tapped out by Agatha … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Ten
Now that the Academy has weighed in on the top achievements in the cinema for the 2019 calendar — with some suspect choices, I’d say — it’s time for me to do the same. As I usually do, I’ll tick … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — An Introduction
“Congratulations to those men,” Issa Rae said pointedly and gracefully this morning, immediately after listing the five contenders in the directing category for this year’s Academy Awards. The annual announcement of new nominations is always going to be a hash … Continue reading Women Belittled — Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations
Coffee for Two 