I started listening to this guy and his band in 1970. They were doing stuff that was magic to my ears, and it still is. I never tire of it and if it is some show that I have never…
Whiplash | Director Damien Chazelle | Score: 8.3 I had a conversation about this film before I got to see it with a friend of mine who couldn’t understand how a movie about a gifted student in a prestigious music…
Summer Hours: Criterion Blu-ray Edition | Director Olivier Assayas | Score: 7.0 In Olivier Assayas’ brooding film, places and things hold the utmost importance and interest. Very specific things. A Degas sculpture. A pair of vases. A writing desk. All…
Stop Making Sense: Blu-ray Edition | Director Jonathan Demme | Score: 7.9 Music famously fixes you in time and place; a song you heard incessantly twenty years ago will always bring you back to that moment, the people you were…
A Place at the Table | Directors Kristi Jacobson & Lori Silverbush | Score: 6.3 If you’re feeling up to it, you could pretty effectively encapsulate the neglect this country heaps on its children via a punishing double-feature of societal…
Every so often, there is a broadcast of a selected Grateful Dead concert at a local movie theater. Tomorrow night, May 11th 2016, at 7pm all across the country theaters will be showing a show from Sullivan Stadium, Foxboro, Massachusetts,…
Midnight Special | Director Jeff Nichols | Score: 5.7 Every parent wants to think of their children as unique and special from everyone else – wants to feel that their child has gifts no one else has. Jeff Nichols’ film…
In the Heart of the Sea | Director Ron Howard | Score: 3.5 The worst thing to ever happen to Ron Howard as a director was winning an Oscar for the dunderheaded A Beautiful Mind. Up until that point, he…
Triple 9 | Director John Hillcoat | Score: 4.4 In John Hillcoat’s bloody, bad-cop thriller, Woody Harrelson plays a carousing, boozy, reckless-driving detective named Jeffery Allen. He’s so twisty and chill he digs out a half-smoked roach out of an…
The year started with a very strong Sundance line-up (which screened three of my top-five films), continued with some exceptional docs unveiled at True/False, rose up again for a strong Cannes bill, and some particularly memorable turns at TIFF. This…