My Favorite Movies: The Original Star Wars Trilogy (1977-1983)
It is nearly impossible to see this as [...]
Documentary
Vishniac (2024)
It is a little hard to walk into a documentary about The Holocaust anymore and not wonder what the latest entry is bringing to the conversation. Holocaust documentaries are a crowded field; essential but crowded. For me, the most successful are those that don’t cover the same ground. The focus on the individual is not […]
A Disturbance in the Force (2023)
This review is part of my coverage of The 25th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival It has been said that “The Star Wars Holiday Special” is the holy grail of bad television.I’ve seen it many times and, personally, I consider it closer to The Ark of the Covenant. Amid the most rabid fans of Star Wars […]
Lynch/Oz (2023)
It is reasonable to assume that you could take just about any popular director and apply some connection to The Wizard of Oz, particularly if they are known as a stylist. But no one would better fit that motif than David Lynch whose films are surreal fantasies packed in with disturbing imagery and an Oz-like […]
Birth\Rebirth (2023)
About halfway through the horror-thriller Birth/Rebirth, I knew that I wanted to shake the hand of writer/director Laura Moss and her co-screenwriter Brenden O’Brien, not because I thought that I was seeing any kind of a masterpiece, but because it was nice to finally see at least one new horror movie that wasn’t lazy or […]
Nathan-ism (2023)
Nathan Hilu is an artist in his early 90s who sits hunched over his drawing pad switching between markers and crayons like a child with busy mind. He talks incessantly, but what he has to say is fascinating. Nathan was, in his youth, given a specific task by the United States Army, to act as […]
Maestra (2023)
This review is part of my coverage of the 25th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival Maggie Contreras’ Maestra came to me as a happy accident. At Birmingham Alabama’s Sidewalk Film Festival, I marked on my schedule in the 1pm slot to see Celine Song’s Past Lives, but I got in the wrong line. I didn’t realize that […]
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 […]
