Category: Film
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Kiss Me Deadly review
The early-to-mid 1970’s in American movies is justly remembered as the time of the New Hollywood movement (or Hollywood New Wave), where directors wanted to depict a different kind of America than what had been put on screen during the studio era, and also combine a love for that studio era with a love of…
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Lone Star and Mystic River: Written Reviews
In our latest episode, Claude and I talk about two movies where characters must confront their past; Lone Star (1996) and Mystic River (2003). Here’s what I wrote about each of them when writing on Facebook about my favorite movies released in the U.S. in 1996 and 2003, respectively. I own a book called Legends, Lies and…
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Short Subject: Recent Changes at Turner Classic Movies
In this mini-episode recorded on June 27, Sean and Claude talk about the recent staffing changes over at Turner Classic Movies and the impact it’s having on people, not only the viewers but the people who are so intimately involved with the medium, such as Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Listen in, and worry along…
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Reel 52: South American Way
¡Hola, amigos! Welcome to Reel 52, wherein we take our tour Around the World in 20 films down to South America! In Part 1, we’re in an unnamed South American country that’s totally not Uruguay, in the 1972 film State of Siege, directed by Costa-Gavras. It’s a film where you (mostly) know the ending right…
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Short Subject: Around the World in 20 Films
The next ten episodes are going to cover a variety of foreign films from all over the world. Sean went through a very meticulous process to curate this particular list, and in this mini-episode, we’re going to chat a little bit about what first got us interested in foreign films, and the criteria that he…
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Michelle Yeoh: An Appreciation
We’ve talked on our show about a handful of movies from Hong Kong, as well as how Hong Kong movies became popular (at least on a cult level) in America in the 1980’s and 1990’s. That popularity led to Hollywood recruiting some of Hong Kong’s stars (Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat) and filmmakers (Tsui Hark,…
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SHORT SUBJECT: The BFI/Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films Ever (2022)
Not long ago, Sight and Sound, the magazine dedicated to film that’s run by the British Film Institute (BFI) published it’s eighth decennial list of the 100 Greatest Films Ever, as voted on by hundreds of film critics worldwide. It’s fun to contrast this with the American Film Institute’s list, especially inasmuch as they’re so…
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Reel 43: Dublin Calling
It’s the Lost Episode! Sean and I went back and re-recorded this episode. Fortunately I store hardcopies of the film synopses, and Sean takes a ton of notes, and I do my usual blundering in between, and I’m pretty positive that we covered literally everything that we covered the first time around, with the exception…
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R.I.P., Jean-Luc Godard
As I’ve said before, my father always told us Dickens A Christmas Carol must be understood first and foremost as a ghost story – after all, the first line of the novella is, “Marley was dead, to begin with”, and Marley later appears as a ghost to warn main character Ebenezer Scrooge of three ghosts…
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Reel 40: You Can Like Both, Part 5
War movies make for some pretty good drama, even when there’s a clear “right” side and a “wrong” side. Nazis are bad (they’re still bad, right? Recent politics gives me a headache); non-Nazis are good. That sort of thing. In fact, we’d argue that the drama ramps up a little bit more when there’s a…