In the early nineteen-eighties, a 17-year-old named Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is, by many measures, enjoying a charmed life. He spends summers in a family house in Italy, where his professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) goes to be closer to a recent … Continue reading Now Playing — Call Me By Your Name
There are, of course, a multitude of ways to commemorate the ending of a calendar year, from earnest list-making to drunken revelry in the frigid public square. In our household, we decided to revive a beloved practice to finish off … Continue reading Bad Movie Night — Geostorm/The Snowman
Unless I strike a new vein of dusty old words as I mine through my hoarded papers, I will soon reach the end of writing from my college radio days that can be transferred to this site for digital preservation. … Continue reading From the Archive — Regarding Henry
Storm Warning (Stuart Heisler, 1951). This drama about the power of the Ku Klux Klan in a small U.S. town plays as a odd hybrid of courtroom potboiler and lurid thriller. A woman named Marsha Mitchell (Ginger Rogers) is passing … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — Storm Warning; Pickpocket; Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl is a small marvel of gracious, empathetic filmmaking. Centered on a lonely, withdrawn man who engages in a tender love affair with a life-size doll, the film is primed for harsh mockery. Instead, … Continue reading Now Playing — I, Tonya
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. At his very best, Spike Lee is a helluva filmmaker: daring, uncompromising, and astute. He’s precisely the … Continue reading The Art of the Sell — Spike’s Joint
It’s been a little more than forty years since simple letters in a crystal blue font first informed audiences they were about to see a story that happened in a distant galaxy quite some time earlier. Conceived and directed by … Continue reading Now Playing — Star Wars: The Last Jedi
There is a lot to Guillermo del Toro’s filmmaking that I admire. But the prime feat may be the way he can bend just about any story to his jovially macabre sensibilities. There are times when the manipulation of the narrative … Continue reading Now Playing — The Shape of Water
Look, I’m well aware that the only movie anyone cares about this weekend is set quite some time ago in a galaxy that’s a significant distance from ours. Ideally, I’d devote this weekly exercise in excavation to an relevant piece … Continue reading From the Archive — Pan’s Labyrinth
The Disaster Artist would have been easy to structure as a prolonged dumb joke. It would have been simpler to structure it as a mean joke, delivering judgmental comic blows against the misguided dreamers that move through it’s lifted-from-real-life plot. … Continue reading Now Playing — The Disaster Artist
Coffee for Two 