How do you solve a problem like Maria? Or, to put it in a less cryptic way, how do you say that the new Netflix Punisher series is probably the best Punisher adaptation, and arguably the best of the streaming service’s Marvel series, while acknowledging that these are both extremely high …
The curious economic logic of streaming services has had a pretty devastating effect on the availability of classic cinema. I’ve written before about how streaming media should have created a situation in which any movie of any kind from any era would be available for anyone to watch any time …
I used to have a little tradition around these parts — by which I mean this blog, which I’ve been maintaining in some form or another for a good fifteen years or more — where every Thanksgiving, I’d talk about the things I was thankful for. It’s not an original …
Noir means, of course, “black”; and it refers not only to the dark moods and bleak tone of American crime dramas of the ’40s and ’50s, but also to the impenetrable slabs of shadow that surround the violence and betrayal on screen. Much of what made noir what it is …
If you’d never seen Sunset Blvd. before — if you knew nothing about it, about its unique place in cinematic history, about the curious effect it had on both the public and the town it opened up like and old and ugly pornographic magazine — you’d be forgiven for wondering why it’s …
Noir is a hard thing to parody, because noir itself is so close to parody even in its purest form. We like to talk about it as a gritty, realistic form of cinema — and it is! At least, sort of. But in other ways, it’s so attenuated and abstracted, …
Before we get too much deeper into Noirvember, I’ve often been asked to provide a list of my all-time favorite noir films. This is painfully hard to do, because it’s like picking my favorite bastard child whose birth I had nothing to do with. It’s a lot of good movies, …
It’s Noirvember again, and I’m once more looking forward to a month of immersing myself into my all-time favorite film genre, with all its grubby shadows and lines that are sharp but never clean. When I was at the Chicago International Film Festival this year, I was intrigued by the …
It may be too soon to talk about forgiveness. The sins of the world are still so great, after all; and we are only now developing the language and the means to articulate our objections to some of its greatest crimes. Why should we now talk about forgiveness, when even …
The previous century was marked by the transformation of horror of the mind and soul to horror of the body and spirit, from childish night fears of ghosts and ghouls to real-life destruction and terror and an abstraction of horror into a genre of culture meant to turn our deepest …
Folks, you know me. You’re the same six people who keep reading this site throughout the years, so I can say with total confidence that I love you one hundred million times more than I love my own family or even a dog. It doesn’t matter which dog, that’s not …
“Welcome to the season premiere of BookTalk. This is our seventeenth season, and of course, we could never have gotten this far without your support. We’ve always aimed to bring you only the very best of in-depth discussions of literature and the fine arts, so of course I’m pleased to welcome …
A lot of factors can contribute to a filmmaker delivering the best work of his career. Circumstances from finding the right cast to discovering the right project to getting the ideal financing can combine to make all the difference in the world. Other times, it’s waiting until exactly the right …
Blade Runner — the original, which is to say whichever of the seemingly endless number of versions that are available thanks to studio meddling and the obsessive recutting of director Ridley Scott — is one of my favorite movies. Ill-received at the time of its release and scorned by some …
Harvey Weinstein is the latest. But he isn’t the last. The news that Weinstein, a prominent movie producer and one of Hollywood’s biggest power players, is at the very least a serial sexual harasser of women and at worst a multiple rapist has been met with varied reactions. It’s not …
