cinema

Martin Scorsese has been producing and directing films for more than sixty years. Several of his best-known feature films established new, grisly standards for urban violence. Mean Streets. Taxi Driver. Raging Bull. Goodfellas. Gangs of New York. When my friend, London-based film maven Roy Chacko, suggested we see Scorsese’s new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, I flinched. Would it be too violent for my taste?

Past Lives is a film that deserves attention. Written and directed by Celine Song, a relative newcomer to filmmaking and playwrighting, she demonstrates great promise and ability with her debut feature film. Past Lives currently is playing in theaters and streaming on Prime Video. Critics are pleased and thrilled. Same for audiences.

With so much talk about the various technologies used in presenting films these days, it’s easy to think that the earliest forms of film appeared in the dark ages. But motion pictures have only been part of our popular culture for about 130 years. Before the turn of the 20th century, moving images on 35mm nitrocellulose film stock were pleasing audiences. Actualities, an early term for documentary films, and all genres of fictional films from comedies to melodramas to explicit stag films to home movies…. They all are part of our visual histories as far back as Victorian times.

Mrs. Sidhu is not Miss Marple and Max Arnold is not Endeavour Morse. The unique personalities of current TV detectives keep viewers intrigued. No spoilers.

Most of us know Miriam Margolyes as Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter movies. Some recognize her as Aunt Prudence Stanley in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries or as Sister Mildred in Call the Midwife. In script-free real life, Margolyes is an octogenarian who refers to herself as a Jewish lesbian.

During the early and mid-years of the 20th Century, movie audiences enjoyed laughing at shenanigans of Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx brothers. They hummed along with musical numbers in Footlight Parade, Forty-Second Street, The Bandwagon and Singin’ in the Rain. They even enjoyed shrieking with fright at Dracula, Frankenstein, and the 1950s horror films of Vincent Price and Christopher Lee.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a debut feature-length animated film by French composer Pierre Foldes, has been released this summer in English to several streaming sources and on disc from Zeitgeist Films and Kino Lorber. The visuals are clean and direct in style, and they never overpower the characters they present nor the stories they tell.

Picture this. The Mohawk Valley a few weeks ago. The bad air from forest fires in Canada had returned. It was hot and muggy. Weather forecasters said stay in the house. I was vexed, I was in a mood I couldn’t break. I tried to end my sulky state by viewing the recent star-studded comedies for the post-menopausal generation… 80 for Brady and Ticket to Paradise.

When Kevin Smith’s low budget black-and-white debut comedy Clerks was released in 1994, a generation of would-be filmmakers and pop culture fans raised their heads upwards to the sky and shouted hallelujah!

Thelma & Louise made quite a splash with female audiences when it first hit big screens in 1991. Imagine… a buddy film in the style of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that featured two women on the lam!