Claire Denis is a director I discovered only in the last decade or so.  A name spoken in hushed tones in certain pretentious film circles, her best work reveals that she has more than earned her formidable reputation (and her lesser work is still worth a watch too).  Her films are sometimes called impenetrable, elliptical,…

Westerns have been featured on My Favorite Movies™ many times, so today’s film making the cut despite being a fairly minor John Wayne western should be no real surprise. The fact that it’s about a bunch of Pennsylvania Quakers convincing Duke to give up his guns and go legit is maybe a bit more surprising.…

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 to appreciate the genre as more than just bad wigs and constant swishing sound effects. I quickly realized that Hong Kong’s…

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 school. Yes, if you want to get fancy, you can try to build a narrative from the ground up without…

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 cry from the kind of idealized white hat mythmaking that drew me to the genre in the first place. On…

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 it was to simply write the same ballsy dame that reminded him of his second wife into every single one…

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 classic Hollywood westerns, a large part of my resistance to Peckinpah’s movies is how often his most egregious stylistic excesses are…

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 past indulgent and land at “insightful masterpiece” like Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore. Still others can find something profound in watching…

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 first film, for all its flaws, is probably still the best “film” of the series, it bears very little resemblance…