You may overlook the anachronisms at first, but a few things ought to tip you off that Women Talking, the latest from writer-director Sarah Polley, does not take place when you think it does. A slow-moving traffic sign here, a manufactured … Continue reading Daydream Believer: Dispatches from the 49th Telluride Film Festival
Reporting from the 2022 Telluride Film Festival. He’s a nice gentleman, always properly dressed, prompt to work and other engagements, and he takes pride in his work—even if that means “holding on” to applications stuck in the Sisyphean circles of … Continue reading LIVING
You know something’s amiss from the start. There’s something benign about the secondary school classroom setting, something pedestrian about the participants that makes your antenna immediately go up. The presence of the actor Alan Cumming is the second indication. Everyone … Continue reading MY OLD SCHOOL
Three Thousand Years of Longing is about stories. Myths and fairy tales, to be precise, but the movie is about how stories once were, and will always be, like breath to us. The narrator, Alithea (Tilda Swinton), tells us as much … Continue reading THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING
It opens like any other western: Sepia soaked still photographs of settlers in wagons traversing a wild frontier while title cards credit the actors, the filmmakers, and the dedication. Then the pictures begin to move. In the background, a lone rider … Continue reading BUCK AND THE PREACHER
A jitterbug contest. Hot rods drag race on a mountain road. A violent car crash. A woman wanders the Hollywood Hills with a head injury. A man recounts a dream of meeting a monster living behind a diner dumpster. A film … Continue reading MULHOLLAND DRIVE
A gay painter in Pittsburgh, Devan Shimoyama (above), talks about the travails of finding a barber capable of cutting his Black hair. “We don’t cut hair with texture,” a stylist tells him. This leads Shimoyama to begin frequenting Black barbershops, … Continue reading MANSCAPING
A lizard is photographed from 360 degrees. The lizard will soon become part of a computer archive that is recreating digital simulations of every animal on the planet, starting with the ones most likely to become extinct. For whom is … Continue reading OUR ARK
Trinity, New Mexico. The site where the American military tested the atomic bomb before dropping two on Japan. Today the site is an army base and tourist attraction. Despite some green glass where the blast fused sand and rocks and … Continue reading WHAT TRAVELERS ARE SAYING ABOUT JORNADA DEL MUERTO
Michael J. Cinema 
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