My feed

Gigi

“The 1950s began and ended with Vincente Minnelli films triumphant at the Academy Awards. An American in Paris won for Best Picture, even if Minnelli was overlooked that year, and launched the acting career of star Leslie Caron. Several year later they reunited for Gigi, the musical adaptation of the” read more

Brigadoon

“Is it controversial to share that you were enchanted by Vincente Minnelli’s film version of Brigadoon? A quick look at the critical reception shows a mixed/positive reception, and I can understand that. Buying into Brigadoon requires you to accept the complete unreality of the world, and a camera ” read more

Lili

“This is a weird one. Not quite a musical but really a melodrama either, Lili exists somewhere in the netherworld between those twin points. Lili (Leslie Caron) is a young girl, roughly sixteen, recently orphaned who runs off to the carnival. Here she meets a magician (Jean-Pierre Aumont), his jealou” read more

I Love Melvin

“This is clearly B-level, churn out product to keep the stars in the public consciousness movie from the MGM musical department. Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor are appropriately spunky and adorable in this inconsequential love story. I’ll be damned if I can remember anything from the score, ” read more

Give a Girl a Break

“A pleasing if forgettable minor musical that provides Bob Fosse with one of his few major roles, Give a Girl a Break is just one of many MGM musicals released during the 50s that is more of a trial run for up-and-coming talent than anything else. After all, there’s a precocious Debbie Reynolds fre” read more

The Barkleys of Broadway

“Originally conceived as a reunion of Fred Astaire and Judy Garland after the success of Easter Parade, The Barkleys of Broadway instead ended up being the coda for the Astaire and Ginger Rogers duo. Garland was amid a breakdown due to her addictions and Rogers was a last-minute replacement. This als” read more

The Broadway Melody of 1940

“The fourth and final entry in the Broadway Melody franchise, The Broadway Melody of 1940 follows a familiar pattern of ‘star is born,’ mistaken identities, and romance. It’s our lone chance to watch Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell dance together, and that accounts for a lot of the pleasures of” read more

The Star

“I suppose even Sunday school needs chum to keep the tots occupied, so here’s The Star to take up that space. I’m not opposed to films with religious themes, The Last Temptation of Christ is one of my favorites, but this doesn’t explore anything interesting, wondrous, magical, or enchanting abo” read more

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

“Cuter and more imaginative than I imagined, even if it does feel a little bit like microwaved wonder and imagination, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a minor delight. Geeky wunderkind grows up (Bill Hader) to invent a machine that transforms water into food so that it rains down hamburgers, for” read more

We’re Back! A Dinosaur Story

“Sometimes things that are clouded with the nostalgia of childhood are best left in that hazy rearview mirror. Case in point, my recent reacquaintance with We’re Back! A Dinosaur Story, a film I used to watch relentlessly as a sickly youth. Upon rewatch, thing I had never noticed before (inconsiste” read more

Little Women

“There’s more than a little bit of Louisa May Alcott in Jo March, and there’s also a bit of Jo March in Greta Gerwig. Not only does Gerwig prove that there’s still life in Little Women, Alcott’s oft filmed novel of four daughters coming of age in the Civil War, but that there’s still nuance” read more

Daughters of the Dust

“Julie Dash’s directorial debut, Daughters of the Dust, explores a legacy of slavery never given resonance or thought in American history, fiction, or cinema. Here is the Gullah island culture writ large and given a chance to reveal itself to a wider audience. Dash’s camera is less of a coherent ” read more

A Dry White Season

“Movies about racism with a white protagonist often exhibit a milquetoast exploration of the subject matter as they inevitability treat systemic modes of oppression as the actions of a bad few. There are the good white people, the bad ones, and the patient, dignified oppressed class on the sidelines ” read more

The Queen of Spain

“Is this supposed to be a comedy or a melodrama about the behind-the-scenes machinations of filmmaking? Is there a political satire going on here or dishy tell all about Spain’s movie industry with proxies for its major stars? It’s difficult to say as The Queen of Spain wants to be all these thin” read more

Zoom

“Essentially a puzzle box film that’s too in love with its own conceit to bother with things like character, Zoom is all structure and no payoff. Three stories, three disparate visuals, and a thread connecting all three of them, which I will be openly discussing so turn away if you don’t want to ” read more

The Love Witch

“The melodrama of 50s and 60s cinema gets shoved through Anna Biller’s unhinged prism in the delightful The Love Witch. There’s a little bit of Jacques Demy’s candy-colored musicals here, the repressed sexuality of Vincente Minnelli there, and all of it is run through her distinctly feminist an” read more

Viva

“All hail Anna Biller, a one-woman film studio who wears her influences with all the mash-note love of a dyed in the wool fangirl, and her riotous debut, Viva. A film destined for cult-like devotion, Viva finds Biller writing, directing, producing, starring, designing, and editing her story of a bore” read more

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I suppose the interiority of Shirley Jackson’s prose proves a problem to visualize as several adaptations of her work jettison the slow creeping dread for other bells and whistles. Sure, Robert Wise got the balance right with The Haunting, but Jan De Bont absolutely did not. Do you remember the 19” read more

Burn After Reading

“A complete tonal mess that finds the Coen Brothers swinging wildly from wry farce to blood-soaked slapstick to harebrained lampoonery, Burn After Reading is muddled but entertaining enough. It seems that every time the Coens obtain some level of respectability they immediately follow it up with a co” read more

The Punisher

“You can almost see the film that Jonathan Hensleigh was trying to make if you squint and turn your face at just the right angle during any scene of The Punisher. It’s one built upon the rough, gritty cinema of Don Siegel, John Frankenheimer, and Sam Peckinpah, but without their eye for composition” read more

Gothika

“Too muddled to be taken seriously, too campy to be scary, Gothika exists in some cinematic neverwhere that finds its various actors seemingly performing in completely different movies that coexist from in a filmic multiverse. Stylish to a fault, it’s always a red flag when a film has too much goin” read more

The Man in the White Suit

“The friction between commerce (read: capitalism) and scientific progress is the through line for The Man in the White Suit, a gentle ‘comedy’ from Ealing that’s more mildly charming than funny. If there’s another staple of the Ealing formula that emerged in watching these films back-to-back-” read more

The Lavender Hill Mob

“Alec Guinness’ first Oscar nomination came thanks to this Ealing Studios caper-gone-wrong comedy. Like The Killing played as grand farce, The Lavender Hill Mob is an enjoyable little glimpse of two workaday schlubs trying for something extraordinary, if criminal. Hey, we all need our hobbies.   ” read more

Kind Hearts and Coronets

“The Brits are already known for their stiff-lipped humor, and Kind Hearts and Coronets adds to that by giving the entire proceedings a moribund flavor. It isn’t just that the film is politely sarcastic, even by the already rigid standards of the Brits, but it is decidedly dark and twisted in its w” read more

Christmas Portrait

“The undisputed masters of soft rock feel like a natural for so white bread a genre as holiday music, but there’s still something curiously devoid of pizzazz here. Nary a hint of darkness or an unexpected guitar solo like their greatest singles, Christmas Portrait is nearly oppressive in its demand” read more

Just Can’t Get Enough: New Wave Christmas

“As any compilation threatens to do, Rhino’s yuletide entry for Just Can’t Get Enough is all peaks and valleys. For all of the genuinely fun, oddball glories like XTC’s “Thanks for Christmas” and Mono Puff’s “Careless Santa,” there’s the dreariness of Root Boy Slim’s “Xmas at K-” read more

IT: Chapter Two

“There’s a multitude of problems in adapting any of Stephen King’s sprawling novels into a film, or in this case series of films. The sheer scope of the material means that any adaptation that is not a multi-episode miniseries is a mere scratch of the surface in comparison, his inability to satis” read more

The Cell

“Tarsem Singh’s directorial debut is a solid case study for his larger film career: a series of alluring, hypnotic surrealistic images that are awash in painterly light and composition in search of a coherent narrative to contain them. His films characters fluctuate depending on how strong an actor” read more

The Wicker Man

“The Wicker Man unspools so slowly and subliminally that you know something is “off” and sinister is about to happen, but you don’t see the trap engulfing you until its too late. Everything is so strange that it becomes like a hallucination that feels so tangible you don’t notice it’s a lie” read more

Tales of Beatrix Potter

“One of the strangest, most hypnotic films I’ve ever seen, Tales of Beatrix Potter is a charming little highbrow detour in children’s entertainment. Told entirely through pantomime, dance, and classical music, even in wraparound segments of Potter as a youth sketching her eventual creations, Beat” read more