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It’s always a joy to discover an early work by a director and find all the elements of their mature style are nascent and blooming.

Better yet, it’s an unexpected delight when the moviemaker somehow applies their sensibility to something that shouldn’t work for them but does.

Like when French master moviemaker Jean Renoir makes 1931’s On Purge Bebe (Baby’s Laxative in English).

You might scratch your head to wonder what it’s like to watch 52 minutes of toilet humor Jean Renoir style.

And you would be forgiven if you couldn’t quite wrap your head around how the moviemaker behind Grand Illusion, one of the most profound movies on human nature, class, nations, could also be the moviemaker behind a 52 minute broad comedy about how a bourgeois Mom and Dad fight over who’s going to give their bratty eight year old son a laxative because he hasn’t had a bowel movement all morning.

But when you get right down to it. . .both stories are part of a continuum of societal human behavior.

And we haven’t even gotten to the big reveal that…

Oliver Stone’s 1991 JFK about New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s real life decision to try to prosecute local businessman Clay Shaw for being an accomplice to a vast conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy is ONE of the great American cinematic works of the 1990’s.

The conundrum. . .the “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” (one of the quotable lines from the movie voiced by Joe Pesci’s alleged co-conspirator David Ferrie) is that the movie somehow achieves its aim while itself being as factually flawed and manipulative as the supposed cover-up it rails against.

Maybe put another way: JFK is a consummate work of cinematic art that raises vital, important questions about lies sold to the American public while at the same time itself not playing straight with the facts.

This has often been at the heart of the debate of how narrative fiction moviemaking…

This writer is confounded that he didn’t know about the existence of famed Polish filmmaker Kieslowski’s feature Blind Chance until “chancing” upon it on the Criterion Channel.

Kieslowski is a personal favorite moviemaker. His 1989 masterwork The Decalogue (ten one hour movies each dealing with one of the biblical commandments, taking place in 1980’s Warsaw, made for Polish television) is one of THE great cinematic works. And works like his Three Colors trilogy: Blue, White, Red, and his features The Double Life of Veronique and Camera Buff are all incredible and nourishing.

So how did I have no idea about Blind Chance which serves as a Rosetta Stone for all the thematics of Kieslowski’s final, mature period of moviemaking (he was a documentary moviemaker largely until the 1980’s)?

Do you ever feel sometimes like you ARE…

We’re a few weeks out from Cannes 2024. 85 year old Francis Ford Coppola returns to the festival with his epic, self-financed, decades in the making Megalopolis.

So far the word on the street is that the movie is. . . .a mess. Stories of previews leaving potential studio buyers stunned and confused are making the rounds.

But there’s a deeper story here. Good or bad or somewhere in between or beyond the realm of description, Megalopolis represents the kind of risky director driven picture Hollywood would sometimes make in its past. But almost NEVER makes anymore.

And Coppola has had the epic instinct from…

It’s instructive when you see a movie you don’t get upon first screening but sense is profound.

Such is the case for this writer with Roberto Rossellini’s (and Federico Fellini’s co-scripted) THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS (1950, Italy).

The movie is based on two well-known 14th century Italian novels Fioretti di San Francesco (The Little Flowers of St. Francis) and La Vita di Frate Ginepro (The Life of Brother Juniper) which tell now popular folktales, parables, stories about the beloved humble Italian Christian monk Francis of Assissi and the fellow monks who followed him and likewise took vows of poverty and service to others.

Francis is known to many Christians as the Saint who loved nature, talked to animals as equals, and, like Buddha, gave up a life of wealth to…

Ezra Edelman’s 7 1/2 hour ESPN 30 x 30 doc O.J. Made In America is as one of a kind as the story it tells. Made as a television miniseries for ESPN’s superlative 30 x 30 documentary program, it screened at the Sundance Film Festival before it aired on television. It later went on to win the Best Feature Documentary Academy Award.

The documentary, save for a few bumps and the occasional over-reliance on drone shots of Los Angeles court buildings (the only time you are reminded of its television roots), is superlative. Its core strength comes from its determined commitment give all perspectives and viewpoints their due.

Edelman DOES have a point of view and a thesis. But he also has that rare gift: the ability to let the truth be the truth and speak for itself. And an understanding that…