Anora
Every time Sean Baker makes a movie, it feels like an event. His 2017 film The Florida Project landed on numerous top 10 lists and earned Willem Dafoe an Oscar nomination….
Latest Podcasts
Conclave
Conclave is what awards season is all about. A prestigious cast at the top of their game with an acclaimed director firing on all cylinders. Edward Berger’s last film, All…
Joker: Folie à Deux
Joker was the surprise hit of 2019. Not only did it crush the box office, it was released to critical acclaim and 11 Oscar nominations. Needless to say, expectations were…
Megalopolis
If you were told the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now has been working on a sci-fi epic for the last 40 years and invested $120 million of his own money…
I Saw the TV Glow
Oscar season is months away, but we may have already seen the best movie of 2024. I Saw the TV Glow is a haunting tour de force from writer/director…
Longlegs
The marketing campaign for Longlegs was perfection. Glowing early reviews, a knockout trailer, and glimpses of Nicolas Cage in the title role as a demonic serial killer. The movie… was not….
Latest Articles
Grace in Chaos: Pulp Fiction Turns 30
In Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction, grace invades an otherwise chaotic, yet legalistic realm in which the gangster’s code of honor apparently governs a world in which coincidental events punctuate…
Oscars 2024 — Who Should Win (Part Two)
Welcome to part two of our Oscar picks! Here’s part one if you missed it: Oscars 2024 – Who Should Win? (Part One) Remember, these aren’t the movies that will…
Oscars 2024 — Who Should Win? (Part One)
Just like that, the 2023 movie season is coming to a close, and what a season it was! 2023 gave us the best slate of releases in recent memory. Over…
You’re Always Welcome At Church: A Home Alone Homily
I plunked down to watch Home Alone with my kids recently as one of them had it playing in the living room. I initially thought to myself, “You guys watch…
The Sins of the Father and the Redemption of Indiana Jones
In anticipation of The Dial of Destiny, I have been rewatching and reconsidering the Indiana Jones franchise films. I’m a little hesitant about the extent to which James Mangold’s addition…
Steven Spielberg Made Me Believe I Could Fly
The final scene of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial remains a memorable and poignant moment for me replete with the distinct John Williams score in which the trumpets and tympanies accentuate…
Black Lives Matter
The Book of Clarence
The opening shot of Jeymes Samuel’s Book of Clarence shows several criminals nailed to crosses per the first century Roman method of capital punishment. In the foreground, a white figure…
Just Mercy
Reproductive justice. Climate justice. Food justice. Social justice. Append the word “justice” to any other word and you’ve got a ready-made brand platform for niche activism. As cultural forces shape…
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
At the end of the day, we’re all just looking for a place to call home. Movies have long wrestled with this sentiment and not just in a physical sense….
A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich
Politicians, journalists and experts rarely agree, but they have all named the current opioid situation a plague. It’s an appropriate word, with historical and biblical connotations; in every generation, our…
If Beale Street Could Talk
Barry Jenkins and Damien Chazelle both directed Oscar-nominated movies this year. The last time that happened was in 2017 when Chazelle’s La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best…
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
My Spider-Man was the 1981 “Spider-Friends” version, complete with invented sidekicks, incomprehensible Saturday morning subplots, shoddy animation, and a little dog too (spoiler: they were all killed off by a…
Claudine
“I have known this woman all my life,” Diahann Carroll writes in her autobiography.* “We grew up together in the same neighborhood.” Lest someone might interpret that statement as metaphorical,…
Sapphire
“We’re all the children of God,” a black sophisticate remarks to her boyfriend, after he has interacted with the police. “Forget it.” The exchange is brief — the actor isn’t…
Black Panther
I didn’t expect to feel tears stream down my face so shortly into Black Panther, but within the first few minutes of the film, I was already impacted heavily. In…