What makes Mike Leigh’s movies so beautiful and difficult is the way they resist easy description. If I were to tell you that his Secrets & Lies (1996) is about a young Black optometrist whose adoptive mother dies only for her to seek out her biological mother, who is a bitter, white factory worker with a lay-about daughter who sweeps streets for a living, you might look at me askance. Me proceeding, you might also wonder how a photographer uncle,... Read more
Okay, it’s a modest swing. But Kristoffer Borgli’s new romantic tragicomedy The Drama (2026) actually tries something. Triumph all ye cherubim; sing with us, ye seraphim. It even manages to do topicality without saturating itself in the slime of present outrage. And it ain’t half bad to boot. The Drama is about the drama of a specific couple, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya). Writer-director Borgli takes him time, however, as the beginning settles us into their love story. We’ve... Read more
Isaac and the Broken Enemy It’s an eternal question and a timely one: who is my neighbor? James Dalrymple’s The Good Samaritan (2025), now streaming on Angel, sets out to make this ancient concern legible to our modern moment. How do we relate to others? Whom should we be suspicious of? Should we be suspicious of anyone? Writer-director Dalrymple takes the terse outline of Jesus’ parable and fills in the gaps in character and personal relationships. Here, there is a... Read more
My journey with Project Hail Mary (2026) began when a student asked if we could read the novel on which the film is based. I said “no,” because we were in the middle of The Tempest and had Mrs. Dalloway on the horizon. But color me surprised when I didn’t stop hearing about the movie adaptation only a couple months later. And so, I watched it. The all-ages crowd loved it. Laughs, tears—you name it. I could tell I was... Read more
Todd Solondz’ Happiness (1998) has a reputation. It’s bleak. It’s iconoclastic. It’s perverted. It’s simply “too much.” I couldn’t disagree more. As always, Solondz is offbeat. Philip Seymour Hoffman, for example, plays a heavy-breathing phone harasser who sticks things to his bedroom wall with the results of his telephonic adventures. There are sex offenders, sundae-eating murderers, and Russian cabby sex pests. Dads buy magazines for kids for themselves. This is, again, Todd Solondz. But the movie is, dare I say,... Read more
I finally got back to the theater this week and caught undertone (2025), a Canadian horror film with only two actors on screen. Several others, however, appear as disembodied voices. That’s the shtick here: can you do horror with just sound? Yes and no. Movies like The Haunting (1963) long ago demonstrated that things that go bump in the night could terrify audiences. The trouble is that the scares mean little without an enticing plot. And undertone, which follows a... Read more
Forgive the brevity of this one—my friend and podcast co-host Sam has been visiting for a couple days. Lots of fun means exhaustion on the other side. I did, however, recently get a chance to watch Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). This is not mobster Scorsese, nor is it even him at work in New York or its suburbs. Alice is more like Wanda (1970) or A Woman Under the Influence (1974). The film is quiet, even... Read more
I’m a little late for Black History Month, but it’s never a bad time to watch or write about Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978). I mention Black History Month, because Burnett’s MFA thesis turned first feature is sometimes billed as a neorealistic response to Blaxploitation: Black Americans in the late 70s living as they actually did. On that front, Burnett’s film succeeds. It presents normal, working-class people trying to survive in rubble-filled LA. Children play amidst clods of dirt,... Read more
What more can be said of Chris Marker’s groundbreaking “photo-novel,” La Jetée (1962)? Its subject matter, concerning a man experimentally sent into the past and future after World War III, influenced William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk. Its heartrate-raising editing inspired Terry Gilliam. David Bowie references it in a music video. No brief blogpost from me can hope to add to the vast pile of interpretations it has received nor speak to the influence it has had. I suppose I’m... Read more
Douglas Sirk has been called both the king of the 50s “women’s weepies” and a master of social commentary. The two, in fact, go together. Or at least did in his case. As a fan of R.W. Fassbinder and Todd Haynes, Sirk’s greatest heirs, I’ve made it my mission to explore his lush, technicolor oeuvre. The time has come to plunge into his earlier Hollywood work—the black-and-white melodramas. Thus, I found my way to All I Desire (1953), the story... Read more
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