Author Archive: Jerry Roberts
Jerry Roberts is a film critic and operator of two websites, Armchair Cinema and Armchair Oscars.

Chasing Chasing Amy (2023)
This review was part of my coverage of the 25th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival When Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy came out in 1996, I remember priding myself on loving it as a movie and for my own self-important progressiveness. A proudly converted homophobic, I embraced the film’s openness about gays and lesbians even though I came […]

Hello, Dankness (2023)
The value of experimental filmmaking is in challenging you to consider what they are trying to say, to challenge your cinematic comfort zones. What is great about the work of the filmmaking duo known as “Soda Jerk” is that they not only challenge you but also play off of the contemporary notions of pirating images […]

Art for Everybody (2023)
This review is part of my coverage of the 25th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival. I never really gave much credence to the work of the late artist Thomas Kinkade. Perhaps because of the volume of his work, I’ve always thought of him more as a brand name than an individual artist. This, in spite of […]

Blog: Killing Connie Casserole: How Stonewall Vilified ‘The Boys in the Band’
Between 1968, when playwright Mart Crowley wrote his off-Broadway hit “The Boys and the Band” and 1970, when William Friedkin turned it into a movie, there were the Stonewall riots. For the health and well-being of the movie version, this was the worst thing that could have happened. In June of 1969, decades of abuse, […]

BLOG: William Friedkin’s legacy of gamechangers: “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist”
In most cases, when a great director passes, the news outlets focus only on their most notable works while slighting the best work in their canon. The case was rare with William Friedkin who died yesterday at the age of 87 and whose two heralded films were The French Connection and The Exorcist – not […]

A Compassionate Spy (2023)
Released at virtually any other time on the calendar, Hoop Dreams director Steve James’ new documentary A Compassionate Spy might have flown through the critical circuits and gone unnoticed. But here, just two weeks after the release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film that effectively be paired along with his three-hour brobdingnagian epic. Both […]

After the Bite (2023)
At the same moment when Discovery is blowing its over-inflated horn about Shark Week (bolstered slightly out of familiarity by the presents of Jason Mamoa) it is nice that HBO offers an alternative that the channel’s decades-long theme week wouldn’t touch. After the Bite is a little more thoughtful, a little more meaningful then almost […]

Cobweb (2023)
I come to you now, dear reader with a confession. I am reviewing Sam Bodin’s new horror thriller Cobweb without having finished it. Yes, I bailed on it, probably about the point where the father started barfing and retching gallons of blood all over the kitchen table. This was not a flippant decision. I had […]