Your must not see films of 2023
As a lifelong fan and even, dare I say, a student of movies, at this time of year I like to peruse the ‘best of’ lists from movie critics, looking…
movies
Top 10 Films of 2022
February, I suppose, is a bit late for a “Best of the Year” list. Getting through every single must-see movie in a timely fashion is no small task. Indeed, there…
Musing on Universal Monsters
I can’t recall exactly when I watched each of the great original monster films (the classic “Universal Monster” films) — Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, The Mummy, and the rest — some…
World’s top movie not what you might think
It may come as a surprise to Canadian film fans, but the top box office movie in 2021 is not James Bond’s No Time to Die or the legendary sci-fi…
Musings of a B-Film Junkie
I put a DVD of the 1939 film, The Gorilla, into the player and sat back to watch. Bela Lugosi (above, centre) starred beside the Ritz Brothers (trio above), a…
News From Home – a film by Chantal Akerman
How long is a long take? That’s the question I was asking myself as I began watching this mesmerizing film which is basically a lot of long takes in New…
I Yam What I Yam
A film by Bryan Konefsky TRT 16.5 minutes, Bryan Konefsky 2005 In 1929 monocular vision was not limited to the gaze of telescopes (Edwin Hubble) or movie cameras (Dziga Vertov).…
Top 10 Films of the 2010s
I don’t really write about movies in this blog (lately I haven’t written much of anything), but with the decade coming to a close, I figure why not take a…
Top 10 Films of the 2010s
I don’t really write about movies on this blog (lately I haven’t written much of anything), but with the decade coming to a close, I figure why not take a…
A Disappointing Crop of Oscar Nominations
The oddsmakers have Roma winning, and I agree that it should – pure cinema, as Hitchcock would say – but Green Book will win because it has all those comfy,…
The Mummy, the remake and the re-imagining
Nineteen thirty-two. The year Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, was published. The Great Depression was at its worst. Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican Pres. Herbert Hoover to become the…
Citizen Trump
Watching the Trump years at the White House is like watching Citizen Kane without knowing how it ends, without even knowing what “rosebud” will mean. We are, however, picking up…
Ford and Trump and Moe Peas In a Rotten Pod
That movie about the incapable political leadership from the future is actually already here, it won’t take 500 more years. Ontario has their Harper-style Fake News now too https://twitter.com/OntarioNew…/status/1026965194243751936 Some…
Why Black Panther’s Wakanda Is the Black Utopia We’ve Been Waiting For
Wakanda, the advanced fictional East African nation in Marvel Studios’ Black Panther film, is the the Black utopia imagined by the African diaspora and its allies since the trans-Atlantic slave…
Legends of Horror
Legends of Horror is the title of one multi-DVD collections of films I own. Fifty films in this package. They’re B-films for the most part (and a few of lesser…
Center Jenny, 2013 – Ryan Trecartin
The avant garde today? More from Ryan Trecartin here
Dunkirk (2017)
Reviewers have been so effusive in their praise for Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk that one suspects that something is very wrong here. The New York Times, for example, called it a…
Wonder Woman
Last Tuesday I went to see Wonder Woman , with Jeri. We tried the reclining seat theatre at the Southland Mall. The chairs were no so great. They had cool…
Wood Mountain: Population 21
When I was ten, my family picked up an exchange student from the Regina airport. It was Winter. As the South American boy rode with me on the van bench,…