Arts & Culture
In the Oscar zone
The extraordinary German actress Sandra Hüller is featured in two films that are Oscar nominees for Best Picture—The Zone of Interest, which plays at the Pageant Theatre March 3, and Anatomy of a Fall, which […]
Film
Arts & Culture
Film overflow
In the first weeks of 2023 (“Fundamental Cinema“), I wrote that EO, Jerzy Skolimowski’s poetic masterpiece with a donkey as its central character, was already on my Top Ten list for the year that had […]
Arts & Culture
The year in cinema and streaming
Stream & Dream Lounge highlights, flash points and turn-ons for another difficult year, 2023. An abundance of cinematic pleasures, magic moments, and roving correspondences in these challenging times calls for an abundance of year-end best-ofs. […]
Arts & Culture
Season’s streaming
Some recent highlights from the Stream & Dream Lounge: The Killer (Netflix) David Fincher’s new film, with Michael Fassbender playing a high-priced professional assassin, strikes me as one of the very best films of the […]
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 […]
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 […]