The Post: Nostalgia for Half-Truth

By Christopher Sharrett. I hope that Steven Spielberg’s The Post ignites more interest in the standard media, at a time when blogs and rightist websites, and the repugnant Fox News, are lauded by the Trump Administration and its friends as the only outlets not involved in “fake news.” But that’s […]

Seasonal Pageantry from Philadelphia: Christmas Dreams

By Elias Savada. Christmas comes but once a year, but folks who like the holiday’s sweet joy and heartfelt message might take a look at Christmas Dreams anytime they’re down and weary. It’s a surprisingly simple spiritual picker-upper that takes The Little Drummer Boy and The Nutcracker Princess, two public domain […]

Home Sweet Homicide: Mom & Dad

By Elias Savada. Nicolas Cage, like Bruce Willis, seems to be trying everything and anything to reinvent his career. Or find a wider audience, like the ones that once flocked to the back-to-back-to-back hits (The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off) which followed his Oscar-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas, a distant 23 […]

Utopia Achieved: Call Me by Your Name

By Christopher Sharrett. I’ve kept in mind Luca Guadagnino since his 2009 film I Am Love, which made such good use of both Visconti and Renoir while creating a work wholly Guadagnino’s own. I was less impressed with A Bigger Splash (2015), which seemed to me a work poorly thought-through […]

Beuys: Fame and the Pithy Statement

By John Duncan Talbird. “Everything under the sun is art,” Joseph Beuys famously – or fatuously, depending on your point of view – asserted. He also said “Everyone is an artist.” And: “I nourish myself by wasting energy” and “There’s no such thing as weekends” and “Nothing needs to remain the […]

Not Much Fun: Crazy Famous

By Elias Savada. Little did Elton John realize that the filmmakers behind Crazy Famous, a lame adventure comedy set in an Upstate New York asylum, might actually try to build a script reversing his quote, “Fame Attracts Lunatics,” into a torpid feature about to hit the VOD, Digital HD, and DVD […]

Misapprehension of the Mainstream: Darkest Hour

By Dean Goldberg. Like many a baby-boomer it was television that brought the movies into my life and introduced me to the world of visual storytelling. If I had to pick a film that set the spark that became a full-fledged fire as I got older, it would have to […]