Making a great movie is about more than movies.
It’s about steeping yourself in art, literature, music, history, storytelling, technology, current events, life experience, philosophy, big ideas, little ideas. The odd discovery in the trash. The strange midnight project in the garage.
The songs sung at church. The songs sung at work. The songs sung in houses of ill repute at three am by sailors on leave.
The whole thing.
So every now and then, it makes sense to …
Read More93 minutes. This all-time classic of world cinema is 93 minutes.
In 93 tight, wouldn't cut a thing minutes, Swedish film artist Ingmar Bergman's WILD STRAWBERRIES covers everything. Almost everything.
Life, dreams, fear of death, memories, aging, regret, trauma and dysfunction from parent to child, redemption, love, spiritual questions. . .
The story is simple. The movie is complex…
Read More“I always tell the people that the idea behind the classics and the retrospective screenings is not to show old films. The idea is to show good films.” — Doctor Rainer Rother, Head of Berlinale Retrospectives
I had a few reasons this year to attend the Berlinale. ,the premiere film festival held annually in Berlin, Germany and widely known as one of Europe’s “Big Three” Film Festivals alongside Venice and Cannes.
The first: I’m working in Europe at the moment and shopping two new features I wrote and am attached to direct with the producers of my debut feature at the European Film Market (a meeting place that takes place at Berlinale every year where buyers, studios, and filmmakers intersect in raising financing for feature films and television).
The second: I love watching …
Read MoreThis writer has a frought relationship with moviemaker Peter Bogdanovich. A HUGE fan of 70's freedoms meets John Ford THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. An admirer of PAPER MOON. And a puzzled spectator of much of Bogdanovich's other output.
Peter Bogdanovich is also one THE great writers about movies and a hell of an actor; as evidenced again here where Bogdanovich has a supporting part as a CIA spook. He is also one of American cinema's strange spirits. Wandering between the two worlds like Ethan Edwards and the slain Comanche, Peter Bogdanovich has made classics and he's made a lot of movies that don't work quite as well.
So what a revelation it is to watch…
Read More2024's adventurous feature animation THE WILD ROBOT is almost as hard to write about as explaining the beauty and brutality of nature to your seven year old child.
There are tremendous moments of deep emotion. There are also strange tonal shifts that feel like concessions to the "movie by committee" process almost every filmmaker has to submit to in today's studio system.
Hey kid! You want to make a layered, subtle movie about …
Read MoreOkay. Cinema is gonna be all right. (Writer exhales, wipes beads of sweat from brow).
The animated dialogue-less FLOW tells the mysterious story of a small cat who, along with a Capybara, Golden Retriever, Lemur, and Secretarybird, must stay alive on a sailboat while the entire world seems to experience a second Noah's flood.
While this might sound like a new age MADAGASCAR, it is utterly singular. Nominated for both BEST ANIMATED FEATURE and BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM this year, the movie commits to an idea that becomes an existential journey into the soul of life itself.
The animals DON'T speak or sing. Barring a few heightened moments …
Read MoreThis writer was a few minutes into this movie thinking it would be their least favorite Bergman & Rossellini collaboration. This writer ended the movie feeling it was the best.
Wealthy ex-pat Americans Irene (Bergman) and George Gerard, living in Rome, experience the devastating loss of their only child, Michel. George decides it's best to soldier on as things were. Irene goes on a spiritual journey leading to her eventual institutionalization in a sanitarium.
Make no mistake, EUROPA '51 is as brutal and unrelenting as Lars Von Trier's BREAKING THE WAVES, and just as spiritual.
The first scene…
Read MoreReview of Saturday Night Live’s 50th Anniversary Special which aired on the NBC and Peacock channels live Sunday, February 16, 2025 8p-11p EST.
Nobody asked this writer or the Secret Movie Club website their thoughts on the Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary show. We’re a movie culture community after all. So this is our dive into the pop culture pool unannounced. A big ol’ cannonball…
As a child of divorce, the 1980’s, baby boomers, it was probably inevitable that …
Read MoreSTROMBOLI is a strange film. A strange and beautiful film.
The first collaboration between Italian neorealist master and his new wife, movie star Ingrid Bergman (who scandalized the US by leaving her previous husband at the height of her Hollywood fame for Rossellini), STROMBOLI has many powerful, unexpected rhythms. Like the overwhelming sea that surrounds the island of the movie's name.
The story almost feels like the fourth entry in Rossellini's World War II series …
Read MoreSome movies try to say it all. And some drive their makers mad.
Stop-motion animation master Phil Tippett, responsible for key stop-motion sequences in classics like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, ROBOCOP spent thirty years to bring his dialogue-less nightmare vision MAD GOD to completion.
CHICKEN RUN this ain't.
He finally did in 2021 but had a total breakdown…
Read MoreJoanna Hogg's THE SOUVENIR: PART II complicates THE SOUVENIR: PART I. Often for the good, but not always.
If THE SOUVENIR PART I triumphs because it is a brutal and humane look at a love affair plagued by one partner's drug addiction, THE SOUVENIR PART II continues the story of the partner who survives and must carry on.
But this may not be getting to the heart of it. Both THE SOUVENIR PARTS I & II are …
Read MoreJoanna Hogg's THE SOUVENIR is a beautiful film for the very reasons that it may turn off some.
This semi-autobiograpical story charts the doomed love between affluent British student filmmaker Julie (a beautifully calibrated Honor Swinton Byrne) and self-destructive Anthony (Tom Burke in commendable Bronte protagonist form), an arrogant yet soulful foreign service staffer with a heroin addiction.
Julie's loving if traditionalist mother Rosalind (Byrne's real life mother and international actor supreme Tilda Swinton) observes from afar.
The frustrations of the movie are its triumphs. Hogg …
Read More
