My Favorite Movies: The Original Star Wars Trilogy (1977-1983)
It is nearly impossible to see this as [...]
Oscar 2025: A Not-So-Wicked Evening as ‘Anora’ wins five awards
The Oscars proved a lot of things Sunday night, among them, sometimes you can never tell which way the voting will go, and Adam Sandler should never be allowed anywhere near this show again!His screaming bit during host Conan O’Brien’s opening monologue was the low point of an otherwise very satisfying evening. Amid a chaotic […]
The Gold Rush (1925): A Year at the Movies Day 1
In a rather strange effort not to lose my writing chops, I have decided to give the year 2025 to writing some capsule reviews of a random assortment of films that I like; not the greatest films ever made, but movies I like on one level or another. And it is fitting that here, on […]
Nosferatu (2024)
So, yes, I spent part of my Christmas Day 2024 watching a 10th century vampire wreak havoc and disease on the people of a rising metro area of Germany circa 1836. In that, I reflected that I was thankful for the little things that I have here in the good old 21st century, you know, […]
My Favorite Movies: A Ghost Story (2017)
If I were to sit down and write an analysis of David Lowery’s A GHOST STORY, it might very well be in the works for at least at year. As much as I love it’s strange, challenging, bizarre narrative, I am nowhere near being able to totally understand it. It is so aloof and strange […]
My Favorite Movies: The Godfather (1972)
Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo’s masterpiece is, like me, now a half a century old and its hermetically-sealed world of mobster values feels even more disturbingly inviting. We are invited into a private world of skewed morals in which mob families – the five New York mob families – position themselves and their power […]
My Favorite Movies: Superman (1978)
I was privileged to have been a child in the late 70s for a lot of reasons, but for one I remember a time when superhero movies were rare, almost non-existent. But through a miracle of good timing, Richard Donner’s original SUPERMAN was not the washed-out kiddie matinee nonsense that had been the cinematic journey […]
My Favorite Movies: City Lights (1931)
Charlie Chaplin held onto the to the art of silent films long after everyone else had abandoned it. This was not out of pure stubbornness, but out of a firm belief that silent film was an artform unto itself. The acting, the writing and the filmmaking have a different set of values, a different texture, […]
My Favorite Movies: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
If we are ever, in fact, visited by beings from another planet, I have a strong sense that the event will not look or sound like it does in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. First of all, mankind is too panicky, too suspicious, too paranoid to go as gently in connecting with creatures from […]
