In-depth reviews of my favorite movies of all time.
Eric Rohmer could easily be my all-time favorite film director. Granted, his movies are mostly just long psuedo-intellectual conversations between hot French twenty-somethings that are filmed without affectation or adornment. But, one could learn just …
I am pretty new to Kung Fu movies--only really diving in after a Covid cult movie watching binge last year. Since then, I've watched many more "classic" kung fu films, and have really grown …
This MFM feature is getting dominated more and more by genre fare, but I've always been a sucker for the delights of genre, all the way back to reading my first Tarzan book in elementary …
Spaghetti Westerns (Italian films from the 1960s and 70s set in the American West) are not my favorite Westerns. Ultraviolent, revisionist, grim affairs with nothing but bad towns and nihilistic worldviews, they are a far …
All-timer classic Hollywood director Howard Hawks LOVED to re-use elements from his movies. Whether it was to mine Bringing up Baby to produce the superior Man's Favorite Sport (yeah, superior, I said it!), or whether …
I’ve never been the biggest Sam Peckinpah fan. He’s just a little too revisionist, a little too obvious, and a little too over-reliant on slow-motion bloodbaths. While nothing will ever compare to peak pre-revisionist …
There are many movies "about" the creative process. Sometimes they can be indulgent ("key word here is 'indulgent'") self-referential films about making a film like Fellini's 8 1/2. Sometimes they can circle right …
The Fast and Furious franchise has evolved over the last two decades from a testosterone-soaked fetishization of small-scale street racing to a testosterone-soaked fetishization of the joys of punching torpedoes into tanks. And, while the …
Frank Capra, for all his talents, is a problematic director. He has directed some of my all-time favorite films, and yet he has also some of my all-time most hated films--and often the differences between …
There is a reason that Buster Keaton's films have aged better than any of his contemporaries. I'm not saying that there is anything remotely at fault with the work of Chaplin or Lloyd--it is just …