Essays and reflections on movies, their impact and influence, and the people who created them.
Boston was in a panic. Thirteen women were murdered from June 1962 to January 1964. All were in their homes; all were alone. There was no evidence of forced entry, and though the cabinets and dressers were ransacked, police couldn’t … Continue reading THE BOSTON STRANGLER
The revolution as seen through the eyes of the those revolved out in Memories of Underdevelopment and Tár The year is 2022, and conductor Lydia Tár is a foot from the top. Her memoir, Tár on Tár, will be published in … Continue reading Sympathy for the Devil
How many times can you watch a movie before you discover its secrets? I’ve probably seen Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane more than any other movie. That’s not something I set out to do; it just sort of happened that way. Ten years ago, … Continue reading Fun with aspects ratios in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI
One of the preeminent film festivals on any calendar, the Telluride Film Festival returns this weekend to southern Colorado’s iconic box canyon. No vaccinations will be required of attendees, no mandatory masking, no daily testing of moviegoers for the COVID-19 … Continue reading The Show Must Go On: Dispatches From the 48th Telluride Film Festival
What does it take to make a masterpiece? Not something merely good, but among the greatest of all time. Meaningful not just to the time and place it was produced, but to the time and place with which it is … Continue reading Top Ten Territory
When the French writers for Cahiers du cinema coined the term “auteur” in the late ’50s, they envisioned an author of motion pictures—a director who exerted their will, their psychology, over every aspect of the films they made. These directors, almost all … Continue reading Robert Bresson
For some, equality is a game of mathematics: Clinical, sterile, and dull. But, high up in the Rocky Mountains at the Telluride Film Festival, equality breathes and moves. Here, women dream film, think film, make film, and talk film. And … Continue reading Women Make Film: Dispatches from the 2019 Telluride Film Festival
If it’s not a labor of love, then it’s a labor of something,” Errol Morris said, drawing a laugh from the Friday morning audience. Morris’s comment referred to his latest work, the four-and-a-half-hour docudrama Wormwood, but was applicable almost every time … Continue reading When I Paint My Masterpiece: Dispatches from the 2017 Telluride Film Festival
Modern politics and media are so intertwined it’s hard to view one without the other. But hasn’t it always been this way? Where would the Framers be without the printing press? Franklin Roosevelt without radio? Trump without Twitter? And though … Continue reading Political documentaries in a partisian world
Michael J. Cinema 
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