Category: Film
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James Vanderbilt’s Nuremburg looks at a lesser-known aspect of the famous war crimes trials, focusing on the role of psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), charged with probing the personalities of high-ranking Nazi defendants and keeping them alive, i.e. preventing them from committing suicide. The film probes in particular, Kelley’s relationship with Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe). When Goering’s strong and…
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Wim Wenders’ first narrative feature to be nominated for an Academy Award, Perfect Days is beautifully shot and perfectly edited but is not the perfect film some have dubbed it as it often feels flat in its repetitiveness, too much like Groundhog Day. Despite the benign satisfaction that protagonist Hirayama, so named for the many…
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We were rooting for Conclave to win Best Picture, but dark horse Anora, which we hadn’t yet seen by Oscar night, won instead. On the surface they couldn’t be more different. Staid Cardinals with closely held secrets vying to replace a dead Pope, trapped in a papal conclave until someone wins a two-thirds majority versus…
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On our latest excursion to the Greenfield Garden Cinema we took in Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass’ latest film, which retells the 2009 hijacking of the freighter Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates, its captain’s brave stand against them, and his tense rescue by a Navy Seal team. The film has won much critical acclaim, and…
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My favorite city in Japan made the news a few months ago, following a burst of lava from the side of its volcano, Sakurajima, sited in Kagoshima Bay. Sakurajima has had small eruptions for some time now, which are of concern because a nuclear plant lies only 30 miles away. For me the concern is…
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Spielberg’s West Side Story is a thrill to watch with its gritty realism and wonderfully creative dance numbers set against a decaying New York City in the late 50s. But it is more sociological treatise than Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In the midst of a “slum clearance” project, loser white guys try to thwart the…
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In 2017 I decided to write a book about the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, and I spent the next three years closely analyzing his 33 extant films along with 3 fragments, researching the historical background, and catching up with what other scholars had written. I had been writing about Ozu since 1983, and my…
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The first of at least four films paying tribute to old movie theaters, The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) involves a relationship between a middle-aged woman (Cloris Leachman) and a teenaged boy (Timothy Bottoms). Sam Mendes has updated the story to a tourist town on England’s South Coast in the 1980s. Stephen (Michael Ward),…
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If you haven't read the book but you'd like to see the movie, here is the link: https://youtu.be/lISq-7bID94
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