Bye Bye Birdie — Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Here to Stay
Bye Bye Birdie, George Sidney’s candy-colored adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, arrived in theaters on the eve of pivotal moments in the histories of both the musical genre in […]
Bye Bye Birdie, George Sidney’s candy-colored adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, arrived in theaters on the eve of pivotal moments in the histories of both the musical genre in […]
From the beginning, rock music was pitched toward the young. The generational schisms opened early and often, with teenagers eager to assert cultural power like never before. Rock may have […]
Here’s a reminder that I’ve been writing capsule reviews for my latest movie retrospective over on Letterboxd. Below are five of them, selected for movies that are either distinctive or […]
The Introduction The first of three films in which Sidney Poitier starred in 1967, To Sir, With Love is a modest, workaday film that quickly withdrew before the trumpeted ambitions of In […]
The Introduction Around the beginning of this decade, there were a few young American filmmakers whom I followed with great interest. One of them was Jason Reitman, whose Juno and Up in […]
This movie’s entrée into the world preceded my own by about two months (the U.S. premiere happened 28 years ago today). But since it didn’t really hit its stride as […]
Cinema: The Art of Time. From the very beginning, before the grammar of visual storytelling had been codified, before anyone even tried to tell a complete story on film, the […]
The Introduction I didn’t see this movie from start to finish until March 2008, on a Netflix DVD. At the time, that felt like a major oversight. Jon Heder’s Napoleon […]
Each film begins with a speech — a declaration of intent right from the top. This is not as preachy or boring as it sounds, though. First of all, one […]
I’ll never know what it’s like to grow up as a girl. That’s what movies are for, right? To give us a clue what it’s like to be someone else. […]