Arts & Culture
Bite-size cinema
With all due respect to major films with marathon running times—e.g. Oppenheimer (180 minutes), or Killers of the Flower Moon (206 minutes), quite a lot of recent viewing pleasure at the Stream & Dream Lounge […]
Film
Arts & Culture
West by midwest
What new films have made their way through the Stream & Dream Lounge recently? War Pony In generally lively fashion, War Pony functions variously—as an offbeat modern western, as a fractured and darkly picaresque coming-of-age […]
Arts & Culture
Return of the blockbuster
The “Barbieheimer” phenomenon—the dual runaway success of the films Barbie and Oppenheimer—is a tribute to their movie magnificence as well as their lavish production and marketing and their social and cultural traction amid the traumas […]
Arts & Culture
Armchair time and space travel
As I was watching live coverage of the Tour de France in mid-July, something reminded me of the phrase “armchair traveler.” I’ve previously said a thing or two in this space about the streaming of […]
Arts & Culture
Self parody?
This story was originally published in the Reno News & Review. With Asteroid City, writer-director Wes Anderson continues to show he’s lost his way after his first misfire, 2021’s The French Dispatch. He’s suddenly become […]
Arts & Culture
Works of women and private eye tales
The Super 8 Years: With her son David Ernaux-Briot as co-director, the Nobel Prize-winning French novelist Annie Ernaux has fashioned an unflinching, remarkably fresh filmed memoir out of her family’s home movies from 1972-1981, the […]
Arts & Culture
Tutti Frutti and a Cannes nominee
France In this Palme d’Or-nominated French production from 2021, offbeat auteur Bruno Dumont constructs a puzzling, ironically attractive portrait of a TV star, a celebrity newscaster named France de Meurs (strikingly played here by French […]
Arts & Culture
Filmspring
Women Talking—A major critic claims that Sarah Polley’s Oscar-winning screenplay “improves” the esteemed Miriam Toews novel on which it is based. Writer-director Polley and her engagingly devoted cast do generate an incisive and moving portrayal […]
Arts & Culture
Oscar season
I’m always interested in learning who and what wins the Oscars, but I probably won’t be watching much of the televised ceremony, again, this year (March 12). That’s a reflection of my indifference toward the […]
Arts & Culture
‘Fundamental cinema’
A few weeks back, I walked out of a Portland movie house feeling I’d just witnessed something truly extraordinary—Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO. This beautifully unhurried account of a donkey’s epic journey through bits and pieces of […]
Arts & Culture
The year on screens
As the world crumbles, and us with it, there may be little consolation in hearing that there was much, maybe too much, to be grateful for in the year’s movies. But consolation—whether large or small—is […]
Arts & Culture
White Lotus, westerns, windmills
I was late getting fully started on The White Lotus (HBO Max), but upon hearing that the start of Season 2 had a reference to Chico State in it, I went directly into that season […]
Arts & Culture
‘If he kills you, I’ll kill him’
Dead for a Dollar is the new western (now streaming on Amazon and Apple TV) from veteran action director Walter Hill (Hard Times, The Driver, Streets of Fire, Southern Comfort, as well as noteworthy westerns […]
Arts & Culture
Earthly delights
A question: The very best movies of the 21st Century, so far, are mostly TV series—The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Top of the Lake, Longmire, Better Call Saul, Bosch, 1883, etc. Yes, no, […]
Arts & Culture
Infinity mirrors
In 1996, French auteur Olivier Assayas made a feature film called Irma Vep with a cat-suited Maggie Cheung starring in the title role. It was a comic drama about the making of a “remake” of […]