Any filmmaker’s visit to CU-Boulder’s International Film Series is cause for celebration, but when the filmmaker in question is writer, director, actor, occasional stuntman, cinema scholar, and genial raconteur Brian Trenchard-Smith, attendance is requisite. Born with celluloid coursing through his … Continue reading Laughs & Gasps: The Cinema of Brian Trenchard-Smith
General Lorens Löwenhielm (Jarl Kulle), a middle-aged man with a lifetime of missed opportunities behind him, has come to dinner. Seated next to his aunt, and two chairs away from an old flame, the general is surrounded by nine others, … Continue reading BABETTE’S FEAST (BABETTES GÆSTEBUD)
July 12, 1917, Bisbee, Arizona: Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler and a deputized posse nearly 2,000 people strong rounded up 1,300 striking miners—many of them immigrants—and sympathetic residents, loaded them into cattle cars at gunpoint and shipped them 200 miles … Continue reading BISBEE ’17
There seems to be an endless fascination with the famed Saturday Night Live. While the merits of the weekly television show are continually debated online and during office lunch breaks, documentaries about the show’s glory years continue to pop up … Continue reading LOVE, GILDA
Zama—the latest from Argentinean writer/director Lucrecia Martel—opens with a parable: There is a fish, a long-suffering fish, which spends its days in the very waters that try to cast it out. The water, which does not want the fish, tries … Continue reading ZAMA
Politics, cinema, and literature can lie, not sport. —Jean-Luc Godard When one considers the history and scope of cinema, rarely do “how-to” instruction videos come to mind. But there they are, hours upon hours of step-by-step techniques recorded for posterity: … Continue reading JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION (L’EMPIRE DE LA PERFECTION)
Let us raise our cups. Standing as some of us do on opposite ends of the river, and drink together. … To the movies. To good movies. To every possible kind.” —Orson Welles’ AFI Life Achievement Award acceptance speech, Feb. … Continue reading One Last Toast to the Wunkerkind: Dispatches from the 2018 Telluride Film Festival
Let’s go back, let’s go back; let’s go way on, way back when—back when we used to swipe our favorite alternative band’s cassette tapes from the bookstore. Back when denim jackets were in, the country voted a Clinton/Gore ticket, and … Continue reading THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST
CHAPTER IIn WhichWe Discuss The Beatles, The Breeders, Heroin, Meet Winnie-The-Pooh, and Make a Proposal “Form must illuminate content.” — Phil Solomon True for any work of art. Be it a rock ‘n’ roll ballad, an impressionist painting or movie … Continue reading A Matter of Style: Yasujirô Ozu Covers CHRISTOPHER ROBIN
Michael J. Cinema 
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