When Greta Gerwig first announced that her next project would be an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women", it seemed like an odd choice. After the success of the vibrant and wonderful Lady Bird and with the world seemingly at her feet, it was unclear why she would want to choose a project that had been …
Knives Out begins by getting straight to the point: the morning after his 85th birthday party with his larger family the successful crime novelist Harlan Thrombey is found dead in his study, and everyone is a suspect. Step up the private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who from the moment he shows up is obviously the …
"Money is an iron, it smoothes out all the creases." Parasite, the Cannes Film Festival winner and the latest by the visionary Korean director Bong Joon-Ho (The Host, Snowpiercer, Okja) starts with a classic premise: a tale of two families. One of them, the Kims, lives literally below street-level in a back-alley apartment crawling with …
One thing that becomes increasingly clear to anyone who has spent any time watching anime is that our Western understanding of animation is severely limited. While in the West, animation is usually confined to being a genre strictly for the kids and no one else, in Japan (and much of Asia) it is treated merely as …
Let us get one thing clear before we dive into this "review" of sorts: Many, many much more intelligent people have examined and exegeted 2001: A Space Odyssey in much more insightful and elegant ways than I will ever be able to muster (and if you are looking for such insight, I always find the late …
The title of this post explains itself right? Let's dive in: PADDINGTON 2 (dir. Paul King) "If you're kind and polite, the world will turn out right." This is the motto that Paddington Brown lives by (taught to him by his Aunt Lucy of course) and it is also the ethos that drives this entire …
Ten years ago I was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is a lovely enough city but at the time boasted only a handful of cineplexes with all of them playing very-much the same thing. I had only just discovered Netflix DVDs (remember those) owing to the fact that I had only recently come out …
Continuing my never-ending quest of diving through all my Criterion movies, this month I decided to tackle a bunch of my screwball comedies. Of course given the enormous magnitude of my collection, I was only able to get through maybe half of my Criterion screwball comedies at best. To be fair, as the high number …
Continue reading Adventures in Criterion Vol. 2: Screwball Comedies
Agnès Varda is nothing short of a living legend. She will turn ninety next month and has been making films for seven decades which is remarkable considering in those seven decades very little has necessarily changed to make it easier for women directors to have a long career. She is one of the key filmmakers …
Continue reading Directed By Women: Agnès Varda Edition (April 2018)
It may come as a surprise to some of you that I am a Christian (and a seminary-trained one to boot). It shouldn't because I explicitly state this in my bio, but I understand if that is potentially shocking given the fact that (a) I haven't reviewed any explicit Christian films (and haven't intentionally watched …
Homebody Movies 