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Monday, June 26, 2023

The Prodigal Daughter

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One of the first questions I asked myself about Monica (2022, directed by Andrea Pallaoro) as the projectionist closed the curtains to na...
Sunday, June 18, 2023

The Grant Mystique: To Catch A Thief (1955)

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Of the films Cary Grant made with Alfred Hitchcock, To Catch A Thief (1955) is the one that has been dismissed most often by the director...
Wednesday, June 07, 2023

Art School Blues

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Kelly Reichardt's new film, Showing Up (2022), strikes me as a film with a verrrrry specific audience, and unless you're either a...
Tuesday, May 09, 2023

Eat the Rich

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The billionaire class really ought to pay closer attention to what's bubbling through the collective unconscious of the current era. T...
1 comment:
Sunday, April 30, 2023

Matchstick Women

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Hollywood history is filled with bad takes. The most famous is probably the assessment of Fred Astaire after his first screen test at RKO:...
Friday, March 31, 2023

Favorite Stars in B Movies Blogathon: The Narrow Margin (1952)

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The Narrow Margin (1952, directed by Richard Fleischer) was completed in 1950, but wasn't released by RKO Pictures for another two ye...
9 comments:
Sunday, March 12, 2023

True/False 2023: Fathers and Mothers

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Red Herring (2023, directed by Kit Vincent) starts with an image of a man swimming at twilight. This man is the director's father, ...
Monday, March 06, 2023

True/False 2023: Knocked Up

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How To Have an American Baby (2023, directed by Leslie Tai) takes a long look at the practice of Chinese tourism to the United States in ...
Saturday, March 04, 2023

True/False 2023: Masculine and Feminine

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Here's another dispatch from True/False. The festival's programmers don't set out to rhyme the films on the schedule with one ...
Thursday, March 02, 2023

True/False 2023: Fire and Myth

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The annual True/False film festival has rolled into my fair city once again. Once again, I'll be offering notes from the interior. T...
Tuesday, January 31, 2023

The Grant Mystique: Suspicion (1941)

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By 1941, Cary Grant was THE movie star. Grant had cultivated a screen image based on charm, charisma, impossible good looks, and a refusa...
Sunday, December 04, 2022

Cops and Robbers

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James Cagney in G-Men (1935) While I was discussing gangster films with my long suffering partner a couple of nights ago, I asked her to...
1 comment:
Monday, October 31, 2022

Phone a Friend

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I wish The Black Phone (2022, directed by Scott Derrickson) had the same ferocity as Sinister , the director's last horror movie. Tha...
Monday, October 24, 2022

When the Autumn Moon is Bright...

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Every time I revisit The Wolf Man (1941, directed by George Waggner), I envision screenwriter Curt Siodmak upon writing the werewolf'...
1 comment:
Friday, October 21, 2022

You Inherit the Flames

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Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame But you inherit the sin...
Friday, October 14, 2022

Bride and Doom

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[•REC]3: Genesis (2012, directed by Paco Plaza) makes the same "mistake" committed by Halloween III: The Season of the Witch a...
Monday, October 10, 2022

Sunglasses at Night

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I told a friend that Dario Argento's new film, Dark Glasses (2022) strikes me as what you might get if you fed his old film, Cat O...
Friday, October 07, 2022

Childhood Trauma

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In retrospect, Tobe Hooper probably should have walked away from Cannon Films and Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus after the debacle of Life...
Tuesday, October 04, 2022

Sins of the Fathers

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"Henry, your sovereign, Is prisoner to the foe; his state usurp'd, His realm a slaughter-house, his subjects slain, His statutes ...
Sunday, October 02, 2022

Double Double Toil and Trouble

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October is upon us again and that means horror movies and the October Horror Movie Challenge. The first film I watched was Underwater, whi...
Monday, September 05, 2022

Wedding Jitters

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The main villain in The Invitation (2022, directed by Jessica M. Thompson) looks like someone crossed Sean Connery and Udo Kier in a gene...
Friday, August 26, 2022

The Grant Mystique: Penny Serenade (1941)

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On the Wikipedia page for Penny Serenade (1941, directed by George Stevens), there's a short section detailing a recent "AI colo...
Monday, July 18, 2022

The Films of Robert Aldrich: The Dirty Dozen (1937)

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When I originally started to write about Robert Aldrich in the early days of this blog, I formulated a list of some of Aldrich's main ...
Monday, June 27, 2022

The Future is Now

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There's a sense of the world moving on in David Cronenberg's new film, Crimes of the Future (2022). A lot of Cronenberg's fil...
1 comment:
Friday, May 27, 2022

A Hymn for the Red Planet

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I bought a copy of The War of the Worlds (1953, directed by Byron Haskins) during a recent Criterion Collection sale. When my long-suffer...
2 comments:
Sunday, May 15, 2022

Free Falling

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There is an unspoken assumption among some connoisseurs of American pre-Code cinema that the shocking freedom these films enjoyed was so...
Saturday, March 19, 2022

True/False 2022: Wayward Daughters and Hot Volcanoes

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All of the films I saw on my second day at True/False were directed by women and were by and large about women and relationships. I didn...
Friday, March 11, 2022

True/False 2022: People Watching and Shoot 'Em Ups

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I took last year off from my city's annual True/False film festival. It was the first time I'd missed the festival in the seventee...
Saturday, February 19, 2022

Carrying on the Family Business

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Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021, directed by Jason Reitman) is two thirds of a good movie. That two thirds of a film are better than any ...
Thursday, February 03, 2022

The Grant Mystique: The Last Outpost (1935)

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I used to think that Cary Grant could do anything. Comedy? Drama? Action? There's a classic film in almost every category to make an a...