Once upon a time, there were five beautiful Turkish sisters whose parents died when they were very young. They were sent to live with their uncle and grandmother, high in the hills above the city of Istanbul. One day, a … Continue reading MUSTANG
It takes an army to make a movie. Behind the writers, directors, producers, and actors, hundreds of unseen hands toil endlessly to set the cinematic stage and deliver the illusion we call “movie magic.” “You bring together what [is] real … Continue reading Courtney Hoffman and Rosemary Brandenburg on THE HATEFUL EIGHT
Two Decembers ago, New Yorker critic Richard Brody wrote, “The year 2013 has been an amazing one for movies, though maybe every year is an amazing year for movies if one is ready to be amazed by movies.” True in 2013, and … Continue reading 2015: Come and See
On some level, every work of art is a reflection of the human condition. Who we are and how we relate to others and the world around us is the concern of every artist, but for some, that concern is … Continue reading ANOMALISA
America in the 1970s was not exactly abundant with optimism. The tragic death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert on Dec. 6, 1969, cast a dark shadow over the free love and hippy counterculture of the ’60s. Then … Continue reading STAR WARS IV: A NEW HOPE
Images hold a very special place in the mind of the viewer. Simultaneously of a time and timeless, objective and subjective, images bring forth textures and dimensions often lost in memory that can reduce the complex into simplistic categories of … Continue reading Arielle Nóbile on Legacy Connection Films
I want to tell you a story about a story,” writer/director/performance artist Laurie Anderson tells the audience. She recounts the time she spent in the hospital as a child after breaking her back. Anderson tells it in a rather typical … Continue reading HEART OF A DOG
By its very nature, cinema is a collaborative art. As Orson Welles said, “A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.” To whom then does a movie belong? In his 1954 essay, … Continue reading HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT
Spike Lee is many things; subtle is not one of them. In 1989—with three movies under his belt—the Brooklyn-based producer/director exploded on to a grand stage with Do the Right Thing. The movie stirred the pot and caused a fair amount of … Continue reading CHI-RAQ
Michael J. Cinema 
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