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
Across thirty-plus years of commercially released feature films, director Spike Lee has rarely lacked for ambition. Near-perfect or fatally flawed, his efforts are routinely packed with ideas, manifesting as narrative deconstruction, wildly inventive manipulations of cinematic technique, or heated social … Continue reading Now Playing — BlacKkKlansman
The arrival of the tenth anniversary of the release of Pineapple Express has led to a small batch of articles reflecting on the comedy-action film as if it’s some significant artifact. I guess. For me, it’s just another entry in … Continue reading From the Archive — Pineapple Express
#38 — Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988) Bob Hoskins had to invent an entirely new style of acting when he was recruited to play the lead in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The … Continue reading Greatish Performances #38
Not that long ago, the Academy Awards spent one of their annual ceremonies giving practically every trophy they could to The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Directed by Peter Jackson, the film was the concluding feature in a trilogy of films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s magnum opus. It won in every category in which it was nominated, including Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Directing, and — the top prize — Best Picture. It became one of three films in Academy Awards history to tally eleven total wins. It was also the highest grossing film of the year, by … Continue reading Bait Taken — The Academy Awards Shake-Up
If the main problem with modern studio comedies is a tendency towards unwieldy narrative sprawl in the name of cramming in every mildly amusing aside captured on set, director Susanna Fogel should first be credited for her uncommon discipline with … Continue reading Now Playing — The Spy Who Dumped Me
