The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, Milton Rokeach JR, William Gaddis Nobody Grew But the Business, Joseph Tabbi Pretty useful treatment of Gaddis here. The Madness of Crowds, Louise Penny The Gamache books are a family thing and having become acclimated to how they work, I found this one unusually okay. Have A Bleedin’ Guess: The Story of 'Hex Induction Hour', Paul Hanley The Silentiary, Antonio di Benedetto As good as Zama. Felix Holt, The Radical,... Continue reading

I noticed something while going over the 10-best lists of other critics I know, something arguably not too extraordinary on the face of it maybe. That is, the presence of films that I had not only not seen but that I had not even heard of. From the very beginning of my year-end movie list making days, which were only ever in a professional context, I had a sense that my colleagues and I more... Continue reading

Quentin Tarantino is above all else an entertainer, so one expects his “first work of non-fiction,” per the jacket copy, to be entertaining. And so it is. Brash and uninhibitedly opinionated, written in a conversational style that’s hard to pull off successfully (and indeed he often doesn’t do that, but he does do it often enough that you stay with him through the awkwardness), Cinema Speculation, which mostly focuses on Hollywood pictures (and picture-makers) Tarantino... Continue reading

So. Here I present something of an Experiment in Blogging. (And it looks like blogging is going to make a comeback, thanks to, um, Elon Musk sorta? Or maybe not?) Back in late March of this year I started work on another one of my SCR high-def disc Consumer Guides, because I heard the call, or something. And I took notes on the discs I wanted to include and then...other things started happening. The header... Continue reading

Equipment: Sony UBp-X800 multi-region 4K player, Sony KD50X690E display, Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver. Army of Darkness (Shout Factory 4K Ultra) One has to give Sam Raimi credit: after the editorial mangling and critical drubbing he endured with Crimewave, in 1992 he invested the commercial credibility he’d regained with 1990’s Darkman into making another live-action cartoon, placing it in the context of his popular not-quite franchise (at the time) as a form of insurance. Army of... Continue reading

Gérard Philipe and Maria Félix in Fievre. Myself and others have not infrequently had the occasion to quote Luis Buñuel’s reflection on his career as a filmmaker, to the effect that, while he’d often been obliged to work with scanty budgets and subjects that he didn’t find aesthetically congenial, he’d never put on film something that contradicted his morality. For instance, in my New York Times’ review of Ingmar Bergman’s rarely seen This Can’t Happen... Continue reading

I remember my campus friend Bob in 1978 or so expressing fake annoyance when telling me of drummer Anton Fier's imminent move from Cleveland to New York, where he would join the Haledon, N.J. band The Feelies. "I guess he heard somewhere that I had a pool at my house," Bob said. By which, I believe, Bob meant his parents' house. "And he said 'Well I'm going to be spending a lot of time at... Continue reading

So I guess it was in the middle of autumn in 1979 that my friend Bob told me that he had a date with this pretty interesting freshman girl at New York University, and that I ought to take her out some time myself. I didn’t quite understand why, if this girl was so interesting, that Bob wanted to fob her off on me, but eventually I figured it out. It had nothing to do... Continue reading

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