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As we gather ‘round the cinema family table for Thanksgiving 2024, we find a cinematic family in flux.

Some at the table say the family has disbanded. Some say the family will never die. Some say viva the family! Each feels the truth of what they say in their hearts. Who’s right? Is everyone right? Is everyone wrong?

Will this Cinematic Thanksgiving devolve into tense family squabbling? Will the cinematic Turkey be dry and overcooked? I hate an overcooked cinematic Turkey!

Well, I’m gonna stop the extended allegory train before it crashes and focus it down.

I’d like to offer a little Cinematic Thanksgiving prayer if I could.

Thank you …

DISCLAIMER is a worthy, interesting, pointed work. It is full of committed performances, incredible technique and craft, and important themes. And yet, in some ways, it feels like a missed opportunity.

Alfonso Cuaron is one of the most talented and daring of the current crop of world cinema masters. Each new movie is a cause for celebration. Each new work is an experiment in genre, form, narrative. Yet each movie coheres to a continuum of Cuaron concerns…

No one knows who wrote folk classic, “Wayfaring Stranger.” It emerges from history fully formed as if the wanderer has always been lost, always singing of his journey home. Hundreds of years later and thousands of miles away, the song plays out of a car speaker before a crash… 

Titane opens with …

Some films are like a punch to the face. It’s a good feeling. Rarely does, a project come along that hits all over your body for the entire duration. This is frenzied filmmaking, held together through sustained energy. Tetsuo: The Iron Man is like driving through an hour-long carwash full of fists, an assault on the senses that doesn’t let up. This would be trying if the approach wasn’t so electric. 

Tetsuo: The Iron Man uses…

It's hard to tell where the hilarious satire/dark comedy of BODIES BODIES BODIES ends and the self-conscious drive to be a movie of the moment begins.

The two herk and jerk in awkward dance movements throughout. But still, in the final analysis, the movie is mostly a fun, interesting take on the excesses of current American culture and thinking through the metaphoric lens of black comedy and horror.

A group of ...

MEGALOPOLIS does not work. MEGALOPOLIS does work.

MEGALOPOLIS contains laughably horrible sequences. MEGALOPOLIS contains filmmaking as good as anything Coppola has ever done.

MEGALOPOLIS takes a left turn (among constant left turns) at the start of its final third that lead this writer to think the movie, which had been wobbling the whole time, had totally come off the potter's wheel.

Then it turned out it still had a few more things to say. And it ended with a shot that...

It may be with some cheek that we write a short(ish) piece on the movie epic-one of cinema's most difficult and rewarding genres.

Where do you start? Where do you end?

We are even more perverse as to leave out some of the highest watermarks-2001, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, The Godfathers Pts 1 & 2-get no mention here (as much as we love them). They're so talked about as to risk becoming white noise.

The movie epic is endangered. It runs the risk of extinction. We can not let that happen. 

Because the movie epic is, in some ways, cinema's cathedrals. When you watch a great one, you...

It's funny what movies become comfort foods.

Who would have known thirteen years later that Tomas Alfredson's dense layered adaptation of John Le Carre's famous spy novel TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY starring a re-energized "I'm here to act!" Gary Oldman would become a go-to re-watchable.

The movie follows...

Fellow movie lovers of the world. Here we are. September 2024. Movies have survived world wars, global pandemics, depressions, fear of nuclear annihilation, television, the internet, streaming...

Screwball comedies are characterized by madcap energy and eccentric characters. They act as musical comedic crescendos that climax in a kind of comedic apocalypse of craziness.

If you love 'em, you love 'em. If you're not on their wavelength, they often strike you as unnatural and head scratching.

For this writer though, very few things beat a great screwball comedy. They're as cinematic as any great movie.

Moviemakers Howard Hawks (TWENTIETH CENTURY, HIS GIRL FRIDAY, MONKEY BUSINESS along with BRINGING UP BABY) and Preston Sturges (SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS, THE MIRACLE AT MORGAN'S CREEK, THE LADY EVE, etc) stand as the twin giants of this subgenre. And their movies have influenced Peter Bogdonovich (WHAT'S UP DOC), the Coen Brothers (RAISING ARIZONA, THE BIG LEBOWSKI), and David O Russell (FLIRTING WITH DISASTER).

The heyday of the screwball comedy era was the 1930's. And Hawks' 1938 BRINGING UP BABY starring megawatt megastars Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant along with an ensemble of hilarious character actors is one of the quicksilver zeniths of that period.

Grant plays zoologist David Huxley who needs just one more bone for the brontosaurus skeleton he's been working on for four years. He also needs to close a one million dollar endowment deal before he gets married to his prim fiance Alice Swallow.

But no sooner does...