Any documentarian depicting a current, ongoing social hardship has an inherent added challenge in the filmmaking process. Simply put, reality doesn’t always play along. The desire to wrap up stories with some level of finality — not necessarily tidily, but … Continue reading Now Playing — Crime + Punishment
Director Crystal Moselle’s debut feature was a documentary, the acclaimed depiction of isolated, movie-obsessed brothers called The Wolfpack. It is fitting, then, that Moselle’s first full-length fiction offering is reliant on the foundational skills of observation and spinning a compelling narrative out of the distinctive individuals she meets when traversing the big world with a keen eye. Skate Kitchen takes its name from a crew of young women skateboarders in New York City who Moselle first encountered by chance, recruiting them for the short film That One Day before fleshing out the material to cover the requite ninety-plus minutes. The … Continue reading Now Playing — Skate Kitchen
The following should be an obvious point: The setting of a movie is important. By this, I don’t mean that only films settled into certain locales can have value. It’s that the setting — whatever the setting — should inform … Continue reading Now Playing — Support the Girls
Sometimes I simply get sad that there won’t be any more Jonathan Demme movies. This was written for my former online space. One of things I most admire about Jonathan Demme as a director is his ability to take on … Continue reading From the Archive — Rachel Getting Married
The Deadly Affair (Sidney Lumet, 1967). Only the second film adaptation of a John le Carré work (it’s based on his novel Call for the Dead, although rights reasons prevented the studio from using its main character George Smiley), this … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — The Deadly Affair; Dear Ruth; Breathless
In The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Chloë Grace Moretz plays the title character, a high school girl who is caught outside the homecoming dance making out with one of her female friends (Quinn Shephard) in a parked car. Cameron’s aunt … Continue reading Now Playing — The Miseducation of Cameron Post
As we are about to slip from the boom-boom-boom of the summer movie season into a fall stocked with awards hopefuls, allow me to offer a gentle reminder that sometimes even sterling source material, a skilled filmmaker, a cast stocked … Continue reading From the Archive — All the King’s Men
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. Let’s be very plain and direct about this. It’s entirely possible that this, created to promote (sort … Continue reading The Art of the Sell — “Real Life” trailer
Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953). Drawn from stories in the eighteenth century collection Ugetsu Monogatari, by Ueda Akinari, Kenji Mizoguchi’s film proceeds like a hazy dream that’s periodically jarred into wakefulness by jolts of pointed pragmatism. Set in the time when earning … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — Ugetsu; Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind; Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
There are times in the process of seeing, writing about, and, yes, ranking films, when the best feature of the year is immediately evident upon first viewing of it. For me, that was the case with Children of Men. That’s … Continue reading From the Archive — Children of Men
Coffee for Two 