This review originally appeared at my former online home. To the best of my determination, this was the last full-length piece on a new film that only appeared there without also transferring over to this little corner of the digital … Continue reading From the Archive: Doubt
This is one of those films from my last year at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point for which I’m fairly certain I wrote full reviews for each of the outlets kind enough to allot space to my opinions, the student-run … Continue reading From the Archive: Wayne’s World
An old friend of mine has recently been moving heaven, earth, and government agencies to get his hands on as much material from the early years of the college radio trade journal CMJ as he can. Among his bounty is a batch of photocopies of a issue from September of 1989, collecting some of the first reports of stations after the start of the school year. The main album chart has Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Mother’s Milk at the top and includes such left of the dial luminaries as the Sugarcubes, the Cure, and the Pixies. Of greater immediate interest to … Continue reading From the Archive: 90FM’s Top 35, Early September 1989
The Academy Awards ceremony that took place ten years ago was a mess of mixed emotions. It anointed Crash as Best Picture, which many consider to be one of the worst choices for the Academy’s top prize in recent decades (I maintain the real worst choice in my lifetime is A Beautiful Mind, though The Revenant seems primed to become my new choice for that dubious category) and strained to honor a couple movie stars in the acting categories by awarding George Clooney and Reese Witherspoon Oscars for mediocre work. But then, Ange Lee won his first directing Oscar, entirely … Continue reading From the Archive: Capote
Usually I’d fill this space with some collection of observations about the film or the review, but I’m highly distracted today. So I’ll stick with just the older words. More than any other current director I can think of, Wes Anderson … Continue reading From the Archive: The Darjeeling Limited
When I raid the old blog for material, I tend to recycle film reviews. It’s part of my ongoing effort to get the bulk of my digital film writing swept into this corner of the internet. This week, though, the … Continue reading From the Archive: Flashback Friday — 1996
And here we are at the top of my list of the best films of 1992, at least at the time of our broadcast. As I note in the write-up, my on air cohort and I agreed on the title that deserved to be called the top cinematic offering of that year. In fact, that was remarkably commonplace through the years. Basically every time we talked about top films of any given year on the radio, we were in complete agreement about the #1 position, a trends that persisted at least a couple years past the end of the show. … Continue reading From the Archive: The Player
As we continue to trek through the favored films I wrote about for the special year-end edition of The Reel Thing, I will now note that we also carved out a few minutes in the episode to discuss the worst films of 1992. Currently blessed with the selectivity of a part-time film critic, I’m decidedly ill-equipped to come up with such a list, but we had no shortage of contenders back then, especially with small-town screens serving as our main source of cinema. So, straight from the script, here’s my list of the worst films of 1992: Look, there’s a … Continue reading From the Archive: Unforgiven
Continuing my trek through the films I wrote about for the episode of The Reel Thing that recapped the best and worst films of 1992, we come to the #6 entry on my list. The directorial debut of Tim Robbins … Continue reading From the Archive: Bob Roberts
As you can see, getting to my yearly top ten list a little later that most has been a longtime problem. Back when the radio movie review program was a going concern, the program went on hiatus during the college’s winter break. Upon our return, we reintroduced ourselves with our respective top ten lists of the prior film year, which could be a challenge even at this late date, since there were plenty of Oscar hopefuls still dragging their feet when it came to claiming a screen in our humble Midwestern town (the nominations announcement and the ceremony itself both … Continue reading From the Archive: Reservoir Dogs
Coffee for Two 