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This past January, I spent ten days in Amsterdam.

When I was walking one foggy afternoon with my fiance down the gorgeous canals, an advertisement for an exhibit at the Eye Filmmuseum caught my gaze — called INNER LANDSCAPES.

Intrigued by a wide and tall image of a rolling green hill with a silhouette, I leaned in closer and saw an ad for an exhibit curating the work of a filmmaker with whom I was not yet familiar — that of renowned, Palme’Dor winning auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

Discovering a new great filmmaker is always …

Some movies you approach with humility.

This writer LOVED this movie. But since it feels so nakedly a satire, a coming of age trans story, a layered comedic takedown of what is "mainstream" and what is "outsider", this writer also feels he has to write with the openness that he most likely missed a lot.

But like Jane Schoenbrun's 2024 trans fable I SAW THE TV GLOW, THE PEOPLE'S JOKER is so intense, so creative, so well made, the moviemakers accomplish one of the essential possibilities in cinema: they communicate a life experience and world view that makes our world a little bigger.

This is a crazy movie and a legal IP nightmare. Basically…

There's a lot going on in Romanian moviemaker Radu Jude's very funny satire Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

Young gig-worker, TV & commercial production assistant Angela (Ilinca Manolache) drives around traffic-riddled Bucharest filming wounded workers so that an Austrian production company can pick their favorite for a safety helmet commercial.

Angela, exhausted, overworked, makes vulgar Tik Tok videos to pass the time. She uses …

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 …

93 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…

“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 …

This 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…

2024'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 …

This 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…

Review 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 …

STROMBOLI 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 …