There is an often-repeated anecdote that Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest and came in second. It’s a popular story, one that illustrates the emptiness behind celebrity and fame, but it is just a story. No hard … Continue reading ELVIS & NIXON
Few arguments are rehashed ad nauseam quite like the debate over what is art and what is not art. In the right corner, wearing the red trunks, the Fine Arts: ars gratia artis. In the left corner, wearing the blue … Continue reading THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY
Although America did not invent animation, it certainly has dominated it for over a century. Japan has tried and very nearly succeeded to take the crown, but the one-two punch of Disney/Pixar is too much to contest, and many times … Continue reading APRIL AND THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD
For the godfather of narrative cinema, D.W. Griffith, moving pictures “moved.” As he said in 1944, “What the modern movie lacks is beauty, the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.” For Griffith—and the vast majority of storytellers who … Continue reading NO HOME MOVIE
Somewhere in northern Tehran, a young couple rides a motorbike into town. They laugh, they play, she teases him, and then, her chador gets stuck in the gears of the motorbike. “Whom are you hiding from?” he asks her, pointing … Continue reading FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY
Before you can fix something, you must first take it apart. Before you can be reborn, you must first be destroyed. That line of thinking motivates director Jean-Marc Vallée’s film, Demolition, a movie that focuses on the self-destruction required to survive … Continue reading DEMOLITION
Leo Tolstoy opened Anna Karenina with a doozy: “All happy familiars are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” An aphorism that holds true on any day, but for Ryder and his family, that day is today. Ryder (Logan … Continue reading TAKE ME TO THE RIVER
In the conventional sense, Doris (Sally Field) is a spinster. She lives in the same Staten Island house she grew up in—with her cat and 60 years of an accumulated past—and has more or less shut herself off to the … Continue reading HELLO, MY NAME IS DORIS
It’s been said many times before—probably every four years—but rarely has it been said with such vitriol or rung as true: “Americans are going to get the president they deserve.” Gone are the days of 2008’s campaign of hope and … Continue reading BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE
Michael J. Cinema 
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