The Felliniesque Century
Consistently regarded as one of the world’s very greatest filmmakers, Federico Fellini is a daunting subject. Developing a bombastic and playful style, he is one of the few who can […]
Consistently regarded as one of the world’s very greatest filmmakers, Federico Fellini is a daunting subject. Developing a bombastic and playful style, he is one of the few who can […]
The Distracted Boyfriend meme is nowhere more applicable than in the life of a cinephile. Whatever movie I plan on seeing next, the thought will always occur to me before […]
Probably the main reason that Hamlet has been such a popular subject for cinema from its very beginning — besides representing a grasp for artistic legitimacy in those early days, and […]
This past decade was an important transitional time for me. It began with me entering my final semester of college, and it ended with me finally moving out of my […]
Scanning the horizon for next year’s crop of movies yields the usual mix of excitement and despair. Some things haven’t changed much; franchise sequels continue to suck most of the […]
The formula could be expressed thusly, matching up with the chronology of the three films’ premiere dates: Mary Harron’s Charlie Says (Venice Film Festival, September 2, 2018) intends to demythologize the […]
What’s the opposite of a long take? The first four top 25 lists I put together for this blog were matching pairs: scariest scenes and funniest scenes, endings and beginnings. […]
I kicked off this “academic year” (the period of time since my last update to the tally of my favorite films) with a literally once-in-a-lifetime movie-watching experience. Thai slow cinema […]
The question of how to define a neorealist film, much on my mind for the first five months of this year, received unexpected clarification just under two weeks ago. For […]
The more I’ve read about the movement — or oeuvre — or feeling, labeled “Italian neorealism,” particularly in recent months, the less of a grasp I feel I have on […]
It occurs to me that, in the ten years that I’ve been sharing updates to my list of favorite movies on here, I’ve never really explained why I do it […]
I look back fondly at my Letterboxd review of the late Chor Yuen’s The Lizard (1972), which kicked off my Yuen Woo-ping action retrospective in January. Specifically, I have to […]
A central figure in the history of Hong Kong action films, Yuen Woo-ping has enjoyed a fifty-year career putting together some of the most enthusiastically kinetic cinema in existence. Carrying […]
A short story about breath: Having become fully vaccinated against COVID-19 a month ago, I’ve begun taking regular trips to the movie theater again. Few topics are as perennially popular […]
There’s no denying that the year 2020 was a fallow period for my blogging efforts. A set of new routines brought on by both personal and global events made it […]
A lot can change in a year, I believe it’s safe to say. At this point last December, I was thinking about the end of a decade of movies, in […]
The director of my current choice for “favorite movie of all time” was a paradigmatic American success story: a Sicilian immigrant who rose through the ranks of a booming industry […]