Equipment: Sony UBp-X800 multi-region 4K player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver. Alligator (Shout Factory 4K Ultra) Back in the early 2000s, my colleagues at Premiere thought it would be a good idea to entrust a feature on the Ten Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema to me and me alone, and since at the time I was still addicted to my own cleverness, such as it was, I put the David Hemmings/Veruschka photo shoot... Continue reading

I was looking through my electronic correspondence with my friend Joseph Failla (see below) and wanted to share some of it here. The first entry is a response to a request; I asked him, after the death of horror maven Forrest J. Ackerman, to contribute something for this blog's own tribute to the man. The last piece of correspondence is following the death of Christopher Lee, and is, like all the other bits of writing,... Continue reading

In 1973. [I learned yesterday that Joseph Failla, who I’ve mentioned on this blog and who contributed to Premiere’s Home Guide when I was running it in the 1990s and 2000s, died in hospital after experiencing shortness of breath. Like me, he was 62.) I remember in seeing Night of the Living Dead with Joseph Failla on the night before Halloween, known in our town of Dumont as “Cabbage Night.” I remember Joseph’s father picking... Continue reading

The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson (Recommended by a friend. Enjoyed it quite a bit, as Churchill worship goes; I think Larson's writing here is a substantial improvement on The Devil in the White City, which I found clunky in parts.) The Nolan Variations, Tom Shone (A good way to look at Nolan, I think. I'm in it, too.) A Fairly Honorable Defeat, Iris Murdoch (There's a lot of Murdoch to be read and... Continue reading

Stalin wasn't stallin': Loznitsa's State Funeral 2021 wasn't an entirely heartening year for cinema. It wasn't an entirely heartening year for anything, really. So this year's notable films list is shorter than in the past. It's not ranked; the list goes in roughly the order I watched them, or in some cases the order in which I came to like them. The titles with links have reviews attached so you can follow my argumentation. The... Continue reading

So I’m still maintaining this blog, but obviously haven’t posted on it too much. Like Dick Cheney vis a vis Vietnam, I have other priorities. There’s also the fact (not that I pay too much heed to it) that blogs really aren’t a thing anymore; they feel almost archaic. Yet here we are. Some of the aforementioned priorities have diminished recently. I’m not going to get into detail but some of my readers at other... Continue reading

John Goodman and Tommy Lee Jones, In The Electric Mist, Tavernier, 2009. Bertrand Tavernier, who died today at age 79 ("So young," gasped this 61-year-old) had a long, distinguished, and honorable career, one difficult to sum up quickly, in no small part because a good deal of his substantial filmography is unjustly obscure in the States. I met and interviewed him in 2011, when he was in New York promoting his exceptional, vivid historical film... Continue reading

Zero Mostel in The Front (Bernstein and Ritt, 1976) I never met Walter Bernstein, the legendary screenwriter who died last night at the age of 101 —and while his passing is of course an occasion for mourning, good for him to reaching that age — but at times, with mutual friends, I could sense his presence. Those people I knew who did know Bernstein, and brought him up in conversation, carried his wisdom and humor... Continue reading

“Real talk:” Like so many of you, I had looked forward to the PlayStation 5 for several months prior to its late fall release, and upon its late fall release, I followed a Twitter account that kept track of the stores that had it in stock (where it would stay in stock for nanosecond), I kept open tabs at Target, Best Buy, B&H, and the Sony store, and then made it a point not to... Continue reading

In more or less the order I heard them. Horace Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Orchestra: Ancestral Echoes: The Covina Sessions 1976 (Dark Tree) Tapscott was an inspired pianist and a staggering composer and bandleader. It's both amazing and not at all amazing that he's not better known, but if you yearn for 100-proof spiritual jazz this will be your bag. Brandon Seabrook with Gerard Cleaver and Cooper-Moore: Exultations (Astral Spirits) Guitarist Seabrook's prior... Continue reading

Writing a book and having it published by a prominent house is a generally pleasant experience, to put it mildly. Having your book get a warm reception from reviewers and readers, which my book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas mostly has, is also nice. Selling well is…well I don’t want to repeat myself. My first Author’s Statement comes in January and since my editor has already told me that the book “exceeded expectations” I’m... Continue reading

The four best novels I read in 2020. It could hardly have been predicted that the author I would read the most of in 2020 would be Erle Stanley Gardner, followed closely by John Dickson Carr. And yet in retrospect it makes total sense. Below are all the books I finished in 2020, in the order I read them. Cocktail Time, P.G. Wodehouse Nothing like a little Wodehouse to dispel the New Year's blues. Right... Continue reading

I started this in late March 2020. And then I stopped work on it because I realized it (“it” meaning staying inside) WOULD NEVER END, maybe. Some time in summer I spruced up the notes. But not a whole lot. From March on, too, I had book stuff to do, I was teaching, and to be honest I was sufficiently dispirited in a particular way that I also did not feel much like doing any... Continue reading

Ten, in order of preference, that are tops: Vitalina Varena (Pedro Costa) First Cow (Kelly Reichardt) Lyrical, radical, fond, funny, tragic. She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz) The pandemic movie that wasn't necessarily meant as a pandemic movie, this remarkable existential horror movie was not professionally reviewed by me, because I'm friendly with the director and my wife is friendlier still. Mrs. Kenny is the proud owner of a baseball cap quoting one of the movie's... Continue reading

The rock critic Robert Christgau was, and remains, a skeptic of art rock, which was one of the things I took slight issue with as one of his teen readers in the 1970s. But his discernment in this area also meant that when he came across an art rock band he enjoyed, attention to it would be well-rewarded. One of such bands was an outfit called Tin Huey, out of Akron, where Christgau traveled in... Continue reading

In 2011 I was commissioned by a home video label to contribute a booklet essay to its edition of Rouben Mamoulian's City Streets. The release was cancelled after it proved impossible to create a viable disc. I thought, since today Turner Classic Movies is showing the picture as part of its 24-hour tribute to Sylvia Sidney, it might not be the worst idea to take the essay out of mothballs, so to speak. “Film critics... Continue reading

Dulle Greit, Pieter Brughel the Elder, 1563 Those fleeing Spanish fascism were greeted by the fascism taking hold in France. Brecht saw that what was now taking shape no longer fit the shape of a chamber play, but rather in the landscape of Dulle Griet, or of the Triumph of Death, as Brueghel had painted them. He had the open, wide-format book brought over from a table. For a while it seemed the only thing... Continue reading

Hello there. Customarily I point to my PayPal widget whenever I post one of these monoliths, but in this case I’ll instead ask you to consider donating to the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund. Thanks. Equipment: PlayStation 4, OPPO Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver. And Hope To Die (Kino Lorber) A remarkable curio. One of Rene Clement’s last pictures, it’s leagues removed from the focus and discipline of Purple Noon. The droll Leone pastiche... Continue reading

"Let's take a subject of great simplicity, some phase of life in this great country and make it screamingly funny to an amazed and happily unsettled world." Orson Welles wrote to his schoolmaster and mentor, Roger Hill, in the summer of 1932. "Even as I write this an idea for a half-opera/half-revue pops on the horizon. A history of America in, let's say, ten scenes! Discovery, Revolution, Pioneering, Abolition, Civil War, Suffrage, Prohibition, Bootlegging, Advertising,... Continue reading

A particularly Murnau-esque image from Scorsese's film. A lot of people don’t like Shutter Island. I get that. It’s excessive, lurid, and even those who’d argue the excess is part of the point will perhaps admit it does duty above and beyond in that respect. Mystery mavens will tell you the film’s plot is laughably obvious. It’s arguable that the film conjures up tropes of the atrocities of 20th century history far too glibly. I... Continue reading

Sofia Boutella and company, Climax, directed by Gaspar Noe I have never found ranked lists of anything entirely credible, because after all what could be the really credible meteric by which a critic could take a group of films, or books, or restaurants even, that they admired during a discrete time period and break down their various levels of quality to the extent that the distinctions between one and ten were so argumentatively substantial that... Continue reading

People in the U.S. are really into hating jazz. Remember when a bunch of us got really cranky about that Buzzfeed “What’s the deal with jazz?” thing? (Yeah, no, I’m not gonna link to it.) Then just a couple of weeks ago on the Twitter a high-profile profile writer recounted how Billy Bob Thornton once told her that jazz was a long con and that anyone who said they liked it was just doing a... Continue reading

Kirk and Kirk On May 25th I had the honor of presenting, at the great NY moviehouse The Metrograph, Elia Kazan's 1969 The Arrangement. These are the program notes for the show: “Plastic people! Oh baby now you’re such a drag!” So bellowed The Mothers of Invention in 1967. That same year Elia Kazan issued a not dissimilar cri de coeur in his doorstop-size novel “The Arrangement,” which he adapted into a film two years... Continue reading

I teach two recitation sections for a “Language of Film” class at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and this week the main lecturer was screening Charles Burnett’s landmark 1977 debut feature Killer of Sheep, which he was using as an example of personal storytelling. For my 75-minute recitation section I thought I’d extrapolate on another aspect of Burnett’s work by screening sections of his third feature, To Sleep With Anger (just now available in... Continue reading

Sometimes when my buddy Bruce Lee Gallanter, proprietor of my favorite extant NYC record store, Downtown Music Gallery, is compiling an annual best-of feature for his newsletter, he asks me to kick in a top ten. And because I’m undisciplined this way, I give him a top thirty or thirty one. After drafting the list, I thought I’d do some re-listening, to make sure, and also draft some notes, a bunch detailed, others not, and... Continue reading