Arts & Culture

Down the dusty trail

In A Life for a Kiss, a 13-minute western made in 1912, a lone bandit with a posse on his trail takes a brief detour to get a drink of water at a small tree-shaded […]


Arts & Culture

Film daze

Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio (Amazon Prime) presents the familiar tale as a highly stylized live-action epic with extravagantly masked and costumed actors in all the roles including the legendary puppet who wants to be a real […]


Arts & Culture

Another last roundup

I’ve been enjoying the peculiar freedoms of “streaming in place,” but I’ve also been finding that, as a movie reviewer, the paths I’ve been following seem increasingly personal and idiosyncratic. Without the regimen of weekly […]


Arts & Culture

Black-and-white season

Some screen-time notes from another very interesting month of streaming in place: At first, I was kinda miffed that the Oscarizers ignored First Cow. But, after throwing a fistful of popcorn at our flatscreen, it […]


Arts & Culture

Perchance to stream

I thought I might review the Super Bowl broadcast back in February, but my interest in all that began to flag even before the usual excesses of the halftime blowout. Curiously, the one thing that […]


Arts & Culture

Deep in the heart

In News of the World, the new Tom Hanks picture, there’s plenty of ferocious action and a good deal of impressive speechifying, but much of what’s best in it occurs in quiet moments in which […]


Arts & Culture

Delivered by cinema

This past year of “streaming in place” provided at least some much-needed respite from the multiple miseries, large and small, of the times in which we find ourselves. There was, however, little that was “normal” […]


Arts & Culture

Land of milk

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, an offbeat western that’s probably slipped under most people’s radar, strikes me as one of the most odd and rewarding American movies of the year. A whole range of peculiarities are […]


Arts & Culture

Small-screen signposts

It almost goes without saying that moviegoing in this highly fraught year continues to be mostly a matter of “streaming in place.” Be that as it may, perhaps a little more could be said, and […]


Arts & Culture

‘We’ll give it our best shot’

In these many weeks of sheltering in place, with movie-going and -viewing being a matter of streaming in place, I’ve found that while “the movies” in general matter a good deal less to me, the […]


Arts & Culture

Streaming cinema

Even before the shelter-in-place shutdown, I hadn’t been inside a movie theater much at all in 2020. Part of the reason for that was simply that I was seeing quite a lot of really good […]