Turner Classic Movies Turns 25 Today!

To celebrate today’s wonderful milestone, here’s something I wrote back in 2006 honoring the best goddamn cable channel ever created. I’ve long been a fan of Turner Classic Movies, or TCM, for short. If you look back on the maelstrom of cable activity in the early/mid ’90s, it was amazing. You had new cable channels […]

Diving into The Criterion Channel’s “Columbia Noir” collection of films!

“An unemployed London secretary is lured to the Cornish coast for a position as an elderly woman’s live-in assistant. Soon, however, she finds herself a prisoner in an isolated mansion, where she begins to question her own sanity as she gets roped into a murder plot. This low-budget B movie is transformed into a chilling […]

Catching up to this one on Blu-ray…while eating sushi…

Rather thematic, eh? Let’s see what James Wan does with the superhero genre….

Continuing my Ingmar Bergman film festival….

And the dive into the Bergman collection continues! “Taking its title from Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” adapted by Beethoven for his Ninth Symphony, this tragic romance opens with a violinist, Stig (Stig Olin), learning of the sudden death of his wife, Marta (Maj-Britt Nilsson). During a prolonged flashback, Stig remembers the delights and tribulations […]

The cinema screenings continue…

I’m diving back into The Criterion Collection’s incredible “Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema” collection. “Traveling to accept an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg—masterfully played by the veteran filmmaker and actor Victor Sjöström—is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and make peace with the inevitability of his approaching death. Through flashbacks and fantasies, […]

This has been long overdue….

It’s time to finally watch the extended version of this, which features an additional fifty minutes of footage. It’s one of the best films ever made. “Four decades into an already legendary career, Terrence Malick realized his most rapturous vision to date, tracing a story of childhood, wonder, and grief to the outer limits of […]

Currently screening…

The stark black and white cinematography in this by the late Robby Muller is amazing; he also shot “Paris, Texas” for Wim Wenders. And kudos to Jarmusch for the opening titles; it’s a lost art these days, and it shouldn’t be.