Jailhouse to Milhouse (2024)
I had a minor resistance walking into Buddy [...]
Author Archive: Jerry Roberts
Jerry Roberts is a film critic and operator of two websites, Armchair Cinema and Armchair Oscars.
Jailhouse to Milhouse (2024)
I had a minor resistance walking into Buddy Farmer’s Jailhouse to Milhouse. So many documentaries about celebrities working through hard times to their career glory tend to be so flattering and clean that one can feel the lawyers in the room – for examples, witness the recent docs on Disney+ about Jim Henson and Stan […]
Public Defender (2024)
It is not a job that anyone would be angling for. Who wants to be the public defender fighting for those going to trial for their involvement in the January 6th riots. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. And, in Andrea Kalin’s documentary Public Defender that person is Heather Shaner, a […]
The Herricanes (2024)
Did you know there was a women’s football league in the laye 70s that played for four seasons? Neither did I, but given the tow-hold that women have been struggling to gain in every male-dominated field since the women’s movement of the early 1970s, it didn’t surprise me. But yes, just like A League of their […]
My Name is Alfred Hitchcock (2024)
Safe to say that no filmmaker in the history of the medium had a better understanding of his audience than Sir Alfred Hitchcock. Hitch had us by the throat. He famously said that he played his audience like a piano, and mercifully, he played tunes worth listening to. His films were approachable perhaps in the […]
Micro Budget (2024)
Micro Budget is a rambunctious comedy with the same absurdist flow as something like “Parks and Rec” or “The Office” or about 90% of what is currently on “Saturday Night Live” if you shave off the persistent political stuff. It’s a very funny movie that feels like a modern TV sitcom, which is both a […]
Starring Jerry as Himself
When you find something that you love, you tend to given in to the temptation to want to become a connoisseur. That’s kind of how I feel about documentaries, possibly my favorite genre. I could watch an entire marathon of documentaries and, in fact, at this year’s Sidewalk Film Festival, I gave an entire day […]
A Song for Imogene (2024)
Sometimes you can just feel a movie before it really gets underway. You can feel the tone that its going for and the world that its characters inhabit. It reminds me how generic most movies are, taking place in drab, non-descript locations where hardly any life is taking place outside of the characters central problems. […]
Lady Parts (2024)
As Nancy Boyd’s Lady Parts was getting under way, I felt more than a bit uncomfortable. I’m a 52 year-old man and this is a comedy that begins with the information that the film’s protagonist is experiencing severe vaginal pain. And, because this is a comedy, there is a boatload of jokes that come at […]
