KEY LARGO: A STORM BREWS INSIDE US
Key Largo doesn't take long to find its hard noir core. The classic Bogie-Bacall picture from 1948 stashes the main characters in a...
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THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES: DISILLUSION AND THE RETURNING VET
The war is over in the Pacific. Three servicemen are returning home. They bum a ride together on an Air Force transport plane, sitting in...
THe INVISIBLE MAN: TRANSPARENT TERROR
Sometimes, when it comes to bad relationships, it is not about the lack of love between two people, or lack of chemistry, fidelity or...
The Lessons of Network in a Post-Modern World
Go ahead, open up the window, stick out your head and say it three times loud: I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!...
THE GRADUATE: THE SOUNDS OF LONELY SILENCE
It is a movie about choices, the wrong ones and the right ones and what do when you're not certain which are which. It is a movie about...
WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD ROCK MOVIES GONE?
What's so funny about peace, love, understanding and making a really good rock movie that's not just another easy biography? The former...
LEAVE NO TRACE: MOVIES OF ISOLATION
This occasional series will look at overlooked films on popular streaming services -- Amazon Prime, Hulu and Netflix -- that are well...
THE FAREWELL: PUT ON A HAPPY FACE
There is delusion that means unnecessarily avoiding confronting a grimmer reality and delusion that is sometimes necessary to survive....
GROWING UP UNLOVED: MOVIES OF REBELLION
Rebel Without a Cause really gets the heart beating when the world is blown to bits. In an iconic scene near the beginning of the movie,...
WINE, ROSES AND WHISKEY
Addiction, in the form of mental illness and recovery, is a powerful reminder of the weakness in all of us and our sometimes-lethal...
Macho Men Night at the Movies
I've just finished watching the 1963 World War II film The Great Escape, a daring, almost three-hour-long account of an attempted...
The Subtle Subversivness of Mister Rogers
As I walked out of a movie theater on a cold winter afternoon after seeing It's a Beautiful Day, I heard a couple remark how the film was...
The Irishman: A Moral Slippery Slope
To paraphrase, Friedrich Nietzsche, morality comes in two flavors. There is the Judeo-Christian-based form that favors moral kindness and...
The Cotton Club Encore: Coppola and the Mob
The backstory behind the making of Francis Ford Coppola's 1984 box office bomb The Cotton Club has all the the plot twists and palace...
Richard Jewell: Bubba the Bomber
There are times when we are so hellbent on justice that we do an injustice instead. Richard Jewell, Clint Eastwood's latest film about a...
The Return of the Anti-Hero
Does American need an anti-hero? We live in a time of partisan bickering, of a deepening divide between rich and poor, of random...
The Sensational Sound of Silence
I recently watched an obscure 1950s Western called Time to Die. Made in Mexico and directed by Arturo Ripstein, a controversial filmmaker...