For more than a decade, cinema’s faithful have flocked to the promised land every spring for the TCM Classic Film Festival: One long weekend on Hollywood Boulevard in the movie palaces of yore under the flickering images of the familiar … Continue reading Let’s Movie: 2021 TCM Classic Film Festival
Molly (Mila Kunis) was 17 when she sprained her knee waterskiing. Later that day, she walked out of the doctor’s office with a fistful of oxy. Now Molly’s 31, toothless, and strung out on her mother’s front porch. I just … Continue reading FOUR GOOD DAYS
Some folks call it the simple life. Maybe it is compared to the big city, but farm living sure ain’t easy. And simple isn’t the best way to describe it anymore—with robotic arms milking cows every morning and oversized rumbas … Continue reading THE COUNTY
There’s plenty of cultural baggage in Roy Andersson’s About Endlessness, the latest from the Swedish filmmaker, not to mention stasis. Andersson is the king of static shot tableau filmmaking, and About Endlessness comprises 32 immobile shots, most of them non sequiturs of varying … Continue reading ABOUT ENDLESSNESS
Sometimes a coincidence is too good to ignore, and this weekend we’ve got two new movies, alike in style and substance, ripe for a good old-fashioned double feature. First up, Limbo from Scottish writer/director Ben Sharrock. Set on an unnamed Scottish isle, Limbo centers … Continue reading LIMBO and ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (OM DET OÄNDLIGA)
Much like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz yoked the novel from the 19th century into the 20th. But unlike Ulysses and The Magic Mountain, Berlin Alexanderplatz has lent itself favorably to the screen. First in 1931, with director Phil Jutzi parring the … Continue reading BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ
Born April 23, 1894, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Frank Borzage wanted to be in entertainment since he was a kid. That takes money, so Borzage worked odd jobs in mines and on cooking lines to pay his way. Work … Continue reading Frank Borzage
Nowadays we call them noir, but back in the 1940s and ’50s they didn’t have a name. Born out of 1930s hard-boiled novels and an influx of European filmmakers fleeing fascism, films noir (as French film critics later coined them) were … Continue reading THE FURIES
When Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club hit shelves in 1989, more than one reviewer interpreted the narrative’s central tension between mothers and daughters as autobiography. And when the movie adaptation came out in 1993—cowritten by Tan—those assumptions multiplied. That happens with … Continue reading AMY TAN: UNINTENDED MEMOIR
Michael J. Cinema 
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