Of course I saw many a movie while on my hiatus, a lot of which I'll be talking about over the next few days. One I saw while having a bout of insomnia: "Homie Spumoni".You're probably like "wha?". It is the story of some Black dude whose Black parents
The opening minutes of Jacques Rivette's Love on the Ground are as direct an invitation to his audience as this great director has ever extended: a group of people are silently led by a pair of guides to a humble apartment, where the crowd discreetly
^To quote the late, great, Notorious B.I.G.Thank you so very much for my birthday wishes. Between my fasting and prosperity journey with my good pal Sistah C., my job, personal boring responsibilities, my quest to triple my fundage, and my new found
Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler is a small, ragged character piece, modest in its ambitions but often striking in its emotional effects. It is not, as one would expect from the director of Requiem for a Dream, a particularly subtle movie, but in its
Murders in the Rue Morgue, very loosely based on the Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name, is a bizarre film in which its horror arises not so much from a monster or shadowy unnamed terror, but from the scientific lust to experiment. In fact, the source
Agnès Varda's film career began with the quiet, neorealist poeticism of La Pointe-Courte, a loose, contemplative film that's equally about a couple whose marriage is in trouble, and the tiny rural fishing village where they go to vacation and work out
A Game With Stones is essentially a very early trial run for Jan Svankmajer's later pessimist masterpiece Dimensions of Dialogue, rehearsing the themes of human evolution and self-destruction that would be so eloquently and powerfully stated in the later
The opening minutes of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped definitively establish what this film will be about. After the credits and a title card indicating the story's origins in true events, the first image is a tight closeup on a pair of hands turning
Underground is Emir Kusturica's wildly ambitious, relentlessly energetic, tragicomic allegory for the history of his native Yugoslavia from the Nazi invasion of World War II up to the disintegration of the unified country in the bloodshed and genocide
Adapted from one of David Mamet's plays by Mamet himself, Glengarry Glen Ross is severely constrained by the stagebound nature of its material, giving it a claustrophobic, airless quality that director James Foley does nothing to mitigate. The story
Though The Thin Man wound up being a huge hit, triggering an entire series with five more films featuring the same characters, it was not conceived as anything more than a one-off B picture. The film was a cheaply produced quickie for director W.S. Van
Sleepers West is the second installment in the series of Michael Shayne detective flicks in which Lloyd Nolan plays the laidback, wisecracking private eye. In Nolan's hands, Shayne is a very different kind of movie gumshoe; he's no tough-but-romantic
Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat is a remarkable movie that seems entirely aware of the workings of genre within its outrageous, Gothic story. The film is structured as a collision between genre worlds, inserting the romantic young lovers Peter (David
