As you read this, members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild of America (SAG) are currently pounding the pavement in New York and Los Angeles, raising signs and rhyming chants to anyone who will … Continue reading National Film Registry 2023 Nominations Ballot
A lonely man drifts into town. So begins countless westerns written for the page and made for the screen. But this one’s a little different. This time that lone soul isn’t a gunslinger making his bones, a mysterious man trying … Continue reading THE WESTERNER
It ain’t like it used to be. But it’ll do.” So says one grizzled old timer to another at the end of 1969’s The Wild Bunch—one of the few movies that can truly claim to have changed the trajectory of … Continue reading “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” Dispatches from the 2023 TCM Classic Film Festival
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
Every year, the Australian-based online quarterly, Senses of Cinema, invites writers from all over the globe to submit their selections for the best movies of the year—including those seen for the first time regardless of the year of release. As I … Continue reading SENSES OF CINEMA: 2021 World Cinema Poll
It should have been a classic. Major Dundee, a new kind of western with Charlton Heston as the titular major. This was the 1960s, and Heston had already played Moses and Judah Ben-Hur (he won an Oscar for that one). Box … Continue reading MAJOR DUNDEE
You can’t make violence real to audiences today without rubbing their noses in it. We watch our wars and see men die, really die, every day on television, but it doesn’t seem real. We don’t believe those are real people … Continue reading Born On This Day — February 21, 1925
Well, killing a man isn’t clean and quick and simple. It’s bloody and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that shooting somebody isn’t just fun and games, maybe we’ll get somewhere. —Sam Peckinpah Continue reading In Their Words — Thursday, February 21, 2013
Michael J. Cinema 