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Reviews of two absolutely dreadful home video releases this week; but first, a word from Popeye. Popeye the Sailor Man It’s been my privilege to introduce Reader-mate Matthew Lickona’s extended brood to the world of ...
Personal identification was never the turnkey that unlatched my door to cinematic understanding, but this one was unusual. Room for One More (1952) It was sunny in the Valley, but not hot enough to require ...
This should have been my first post when I began working at The Reader over a decade ago. The facts were made known to me by the brilliant Jennifer DeSplinter, a former student who, after ...
The San Diego Jewish Film Festival continues through February 20. For screening information, visit the Festival website: Ronnie’s (2020) Ronnie Scott was a British saxophonist who, in 1959, at the height of his popularity, chose ...
Of special note from this year’s Jewish film festival: a trio of uniquely personal biodocs. The festival runs February 9-20. Visit the SDJFF website for more information. Eddy’s World (2020) What a joy! We open ...
This week finds two new home video releases from Film Movement, and yours truly still stinging from the loss of a funny broad. Joy Womack: the White Swan (2021) Accepted to Russia’s esteemed Bolshoi Ballet ...
It was a marriage made in single-screen heaven, the night Peter Bogdanovich made the acquaintance of Roger Corman in a Los Angeles movie theater. Bogdanovich was quick to pick the low-budget producer-director out of the ...
It has been a year since Erich von Stroheim’s Greed entered the public domain and still the Gods of Cinema remain sound asleep at the switch. More than two-thirds of the legendary 9+ hour epic ...
My first entry for 2022 was originally intended for another trio of last year’s leftovers. But my steed blew a flat before making it to the finish line of The Green Knight. One can only ...
Let’s end the year batting cleanup on three of this year’s oddities and curiosities, starting with a request. Several months ago, Lydia D’moch wrote asking why I never got around to reviewing Lamb. It opened ...
The most challenging component of being my stickling, anal-retentive moviegoing self has been this dumbfounding devotion to logic and historical continuity that rides roughshod inside my skull. The trailer to Sing spoke to me, saying, ...
During an audience Q&A at the Chicago International Film Festival, Robert Wise was asked why he chose to open both West Side Story and The Sound of Music with tapering views from above. “Because I ...
A friend recently linked me to a collection of Sunday newspaper TV ads, and I chanced upon a half-pager from November 1973 pitching a late show airing of The Young Lions, in which Marlon Brando ...
Like most Americans, rather than fortify the pre-feedbag portion of Thanksgiving Day with parades and sporting events, I chose to gorge on 2-D transfers of two dozen or so impeccably restored-to-blu-ray 3-D curios. Why 2-D? ...
Rather than calling this week’s column a homework assignment, look upon it as a chance to reacquaint yourself with one of cinema’s founding fathers, the man who gave editing its pulse, a purveyor in Russian ...
Speaking with Christian McKay was the closest I would ever come to meeting Orson Welles in this lifetime. McKay (pronounced “Mc-KYE”) made his screen debut in Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, a boffo pre-Citizen ...