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
Above all, cinema is a style. Movies are a glorious and exciting exploration of the human condition, but without style, the images hang to the screen, failing to be anything more than a light flickering on a blank canvas. That’s … Continue reading PICKPOCKET
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
Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke, in one of his best performances) is having a crisis of faith. The parish pastor of New York’s 250-year-old First Reformed church—once a stopover on the Underground Railroad, now jokingly called a gift shop—watches with detachment … Continue reading FIRST REFORMED
When the French writers for Cahiers du cinema coined the term “auteur” in the late ’50s, they envisioned an author of motion pictures—a director who exerted their will, their psychology, over every aspect of the films they made. These directors, almost all … Continue reading A True Auteur: Robert Bresson
A while back my good friend Pablo Kjølseth — the master behind CU-Boulder’s International Film Series — asked me to guest write a post for TCM’s Movie Morlocks, now retitled Streamline in conjunction with FilmStruck. I chose to write about … Continue reading PICKPOCKET
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
A film is not a spectacle, it is in the first place a style. —Robert Bresson Continue reading Born On This Day — September 25
I would like in my films to be able to render perceptible to an audience a feeling of a man’s soul and also the presence of something superior to man which can be called God. —Robert Bresson Continue reading In Their Words — Sunday, August 11, 2013
Michael J. Cinema 
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