I guess you could say the low point arrived on March 27, 2022, with the broadcast of the 94th Academy Awards. No, the “slap heard ’round the world” wasn’t it—though that cast a pall over the proceedings, didn’t it?—but the … Continue reading Cinema 101
On Sept. 1, TCM launched a 14-week series, Women Make Film: A road trip through 100 films across 44 countries and 12 decades of cinema. One of the delights of TCM’s line-up is how certain movies bump up against each … Continue reading Women Make Film: Jacqueline Audry and Chantal Akerman
The shadow of Alfred Hitchcock looms large in cinema. So much so that it’s hard to divorce his stylistic innovations from movies that may or may not have been influenced by him. Take Blow the Man Down, a recent release currently … Continue reading Two for the Master
When François Truffaut penned his revolutionary essay, “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” the up-and-coming critic laid waste to what he saw as a national tradition of quality: A stultifying funeral procession of moviemaking that could barely keep up with … Continue reading MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA
Silent pictures are the purest form of cinema. —Alfred Hitchcock For many, he was the Master of Suspense. The eyes and hands behind Rear Window, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. The droll voice and the rotund figure behind the popular TV show, Alfred … Continue reading Hitchcock: British International Pictures Collection
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
I dream for a living. For me, it’s someone—a protagonist—who is no longer in control of his life, who loses control and then has to somehow regain it. That’s good drama. —Steven Spielberg Continue reading Born On This Day – December 18, 1946
Build your film on white, on silence and on stillness. The CINEMA did not start from zero. Everything to be called into question. The truth is inimitable, the false untransformable. Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The … Continue reading Born On This Day — September 25, 1901
1959: Fourteen years after the war ended and five years before The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show, the cinema started to go democratic. Cameras were smaller, weighed less, and were cheaper, thereby allowing independent directors to make movies they wanted to … Continue reading Film/STILL 1959
Michael J. Cinema 
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