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Hit Me With Your Best Shot!: “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”
This week, Hit Me With Your Best Shot is getting the jumbo treatment with each of the Best Cinematography nominees of 1977 receiving a daily installment. First up is the Spielberg classic Close...
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Hit Me With Your Best Shot!: “Islands in the Stream”
Unfortunately I’ll be following up my favorite of this week’s mega-Hit Me With Your Best Shot with my least favorite. Islands in the Stream is the most forgotten of 1977’s Best Cinematography Oscar...
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Hit Me With Your Best Shot!: “The Turning Point”
The Turning Point beautifully captures a pain I’ve never otherwise seen expressed on film. Certainly not as vividly. Occasionally, I’ll miss performing so much that it aches. There is a pull that will...
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Hit Me With Your Best Shot!: “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”
Had I heard that Looking for Mr. Goodbar wasn’t very good or that it was just dated? For some reason, I remembered it carrying a certain scattered and hokey reputation that the film proved wrong when...
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Hit Me With Your Best Shot!: “Julia”
There is enough distance between the present and claims of author Lillian Hellman’s embellishment and falsifications for the origin story of Julia to see the story for itself. One wonders if a...
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Hit Me With Your Best Shot!: The Best of the 1977 Best Shots
While I agree with Oscar on selecting Zsigmond’s work for Close Encounters as the overall winner, does it have my choice of best Best Shot? Let’s review the Best Shots from the past week… Close...
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In Review!: “Little Men”
Following the lovely and unimposing Love is Strange (and to a lesser extent the isolation of Keep the Lights On), Ira Sachs latest film Little Men proves that the writer/director’s New York City is...
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Updated Oscar Predictions!
Happy Labor Day weekend, I’ve been busy! Now that festival season is in full swing and launching us into the Oscar season, I’ve updated the Oscar predictions pages! Some question marks to be answered...
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In Review!: “Bridget Jones’s Baby”
Returning from a long absence from the screen, Renée Zellweger is back and in her signature role for Bridget Jones’s Baby – and she hasn’t lost any of the magnetism or ability. Anyone cruelly focusing...
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In Review!: “Queen of Katwe”
Without an ounce of the kind of poverty porn cheap sentimentality that has come to define contemporary American cinematic takes on third world struggles, Queen of Katwe is a triumphant piece of...
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In Review!: “Sully”
Occasionally there is a film that can make you want to scream at the screen “People don’t talk like this!” Reality in film is never a necessity; language itself can be absurd, heightened, merely a tool...
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In Review!: “The Girl on The Train”
The Girl on The Train‘s central character Rachel (Emily Blunt) confesses to one of the story’s several red herrings “I’m afraid of myself.” Unfortunately for the character (compellingly frustrating on...
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In Review!: “13th”
Ava DuVernay’s relentless documentary 13th charts the connective tissue between American slavery to our current mass incarceration epidemic, showing the evolution of American degradation of black...
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In Review!: “The Birth of A Nation”
Generic to a fault, Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation falls prey to common pitfalls of both biopics and debut features. The obvious passion for central figure Nat Turner (and his leading of a slave...
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In Review!: “American Honey”
In her first America-set feature American Honey, Andrea Arnold paints the stateside landscape as a soul dying at the end of capitalism’s food chain. It’s fitting that the film is a road movie to...
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In Review!: “Certain Women”
Kelly Reichardt is our chief purveyor of the American western landscape, creating films such as Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff that also bring women to the forefront. Her latest, Certain Women, is a...
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In Review!: “Doctor Strange”
Doctor Strange is about the kookiest, gleefully… well, strange film that Marvel has yet delivered to the masses. But while its dizzying visuals and doofy world-making delight in their abandon, its...
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In Review!: “Almost Christmas”
I saw Almost Christmas on the evening before Election Day. At the time, it cured my anxieties for a fast-paced two hours, absorbing me in its easy charms and stoking my Christmas junkie tendencies. The...
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Oscar Predictions Updated
This week has been a complete nightmare – do what you must in order to exercise self-care. For me, I’ve been engaging in peaceful protest, sending charitable donations, and escaping in the movies....
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In Review!: “The Handmaiden”
In a masterful feat of adaptation and reinvention, South Korean provocateur Park Chan-Wook transports Sarah Waters’s Victorian-era novel Fingersmith to colonial Korea under the Japanese occupation with...
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