CLAIRE [KENNY]: Here we are again, and reuniting with so many of our old friends from Adam’s Rib! That would be, to remind everyone, screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, director George Cukor, and of course, KH/ST. This is all a little bit unfair, especially when the two films are viewed back-to-back, as we have done here, because the current selection does (somewhat) suffer by comparison to the prior. I do think we both had... Continue reading

For Ebert, the possibly controversial, but maybe who cares, Mile 22. (At left, star Mark Wahlberg, with firearm. Like I need to tell you.) For the Times, woofing it up with Alpha, and waiting out the war with Memoir of War. In Streaming there, Michael Peña in Extinction and Lily James in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Continue reading

Bruno Cremer, Manuel Zarzo, and Jacques Perrin in The 317th Platoon. For the Times: The excellent The 317th Platoon and Skate Kitchen; the less than excellent Dog Days; the bad Slender Man. In Streaming, How It Ends and the sentimental favorite No Blade of Grass. For Ebert, A Prayer Before Dawn. Continue reading

GLENN [KENNY]: Was my sigh of relief audible worldwide as we pushed “play” on the DVD remote? My secure knowledge that, after the ordeal of State of the Union, we were actually going to watch a GOOD movie, a certified classic, even? 1949’s Adam’s Rib, directed by George Cukor from a screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, is rightly the rock upon which the church of Hepburn and Tracy is built. And indeed, unlike... Continue reading

In Streaming, a new cut of A Star Is Born, and a Josh Brolin Netflix jam. For the Times, Hot Summer Nights and Prairie Trilogy. For Ebert, The Captain. Continue reading

Florian Hamm in Generation Wealth, ©Lauren Greenfield. In Streaming, Calibre and the wild world of Damon Packard. For the Times, Blindspotting and Unfriended: Dark Web. For Ebert, Generation Wealth and Far From the Tree. Continue reading

"Mais c'est Godard!" When the man comes around, in Grandeur et Decadence. For the Times, in Streaming: The misbegotten Zoe, a good group of indies on Filmatique, and a "lost" Taxi Driver commentary. Times reviews: Godard's Grandeur et Decadence, a spectacular documentary on Milford Graves, and an experiment with child-authored film reviews. For Ebert, three kinds of grim: The ill-starred Keanu Reeves romance Siberia, the infuriating culture clash family drama What Will People Say?, and... Continue reading

For Ebert, a tribute to Claude Lanzmann; the image at left is from Shoah. Also for Ebert, reviews of The First Purge (ugh) and Under the Tree (not bad). For the Times, in Streaming, a roundup of documentaries, hopefully not too TMI. There, in reviews, Bleeding Steel, Constructing Albert, and The Citizen. Continue reading

In Streaming: Four international offerings on Netflix. For the Times: Uncle Drew (pictured), Rock Rubber 45s, and Love, Cecil. For Ebert: Hover and Three Identical Strangers. Continue reading

"Hey guys, you seen Mike? I'm looking for Mike." For Ebert, my surprisingly not terribly controversial review of Jurassic Fallen World; also Never Steady, Never Still, with a real stunner of a performance from Shirley Henderson; and the less-than-industrial-strength doc Spiral. For the Times, the somber Araby, and The Catcher Was A Spy, which, to be honest, I thought would have made a first-rate Spielberg picture. The approach of the actual filmmakers is, as it... Continue reading

For the New York Times, Superfly, Straight into a Storm, and the unspeakable Gotti. For Ebert, the unspeakable Tag. For the Times again, three Netflix movies, one of which is good. For my troubles I am sitting here at seven in the evening in a nightshirt with a nasty upper respiratory infection of unknown origin. It's a hard knock life people. Continue reading

Who is the hunter, and who is the hunted? You'll have to watch the movie to find out. The filmmaker and photographer Jamie Stuart’s first feature, A Motion Selfie, hit the on-demand market the other day. It’s a funny, creepy, meticulous movie that’s a clear landmark in that it’s an entirely one-person show. Jamie, besides portraying the lead character, a fictionalized version of himself, handled every single aspect of behind-the-camera production himself. He shot it,... Continue reading

A busy week. In Streaming, I write about Pride Month commemorative programming on different platforms, providing an opportunity to think on Derek Jarman and Chery Dunye. In reviews, for Ebert there's the pretty extraordinary Nancy, and the atrocious 211. For the Times, three diverting movies that aren't QUITE outstanding, and such is life, and art: Bernard and Huey, The Quest of Alain Ducasse, and Hotel Artemis. Continue reading

For "Streaming," three Netflix films—two, actually, but the third is close enough for the headline—about female friendships: Ibiza, Dude, and The Kissing Booth (pictured). In individual reviews, the documentary Nossa Chappe, the socially pertinent drama A Kid Like Jake, and Upgrade, which I must insist is inadvertently hilarious. Continue reading

GLENN (KENNY): So, not to be all “I’d never thought it’d come to this” or any such thing, but do you realize that the last installment of this project was posted six years and change ago? And that it ended with a promise that we would not let eight months elapse between installments, as had happened prior to our getting around to Sea of Grass? How crazy is that? We have no excuse except the... Continue reading

For RogerEbert.com: The Misandrists, In Darkness, and Feral. Feral was the movie that actually inspired me to say out loud "Why am I doing this?" about halfway through. The feeling did pass. For The New York Times, the involving Who We Are Now, the indelible Les Parents Terribles, and the ineffable Future World (pictured left). Continue reading

This month marks the tenth anniversary of this stupid blog, and I was thinking of what I could do to commemorate this landmark, and the main thing that occurred to me was that I could just pull the plug on the whole thing. My work load really doesn’t allow me the time to contribute much to it, and my temperament has improved over the past few years to the extent that I don’t feel the... Continue reading

After a college search that can most charitably be described as haphazard, I matriculated at William Paterson College in Wayne, New Jersey and began attending, and also not attending, classes there in the fall of 1977. I was excited to try out at the college newspaper, The Beacon, winner of multiple awards and stuff. I convinced the arts editor, Michael Reardon, a gangly Joyce nut from North Bergen, to let me interview The Ramones, who... Continue reading

In chronological order. The Plague, Albert Camus I'm not generally one for useful literature, but in late 2016, while lunching with a friend, the question of material that could be sustaining during the then-impending Trump administration arose, and my friend recommended this and the Erich Fromm title below. Both were highly satisfactory in different ways. Camus' rats are still swarming as I write. Genius Jack, Thomas Wiseman The screenwriter of The Romantic Englishwoman serves up... Continue reading

Let's get right to it. Equipment: Playstation 3 for domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV amplifier/receiver. I can’t believe I actually carved out the time to do this, although if you check out the release date of the very first disc reviewed (I’ll save you the trouble, it’s August of last year) you’ll see it’s been indeed over a year in the making. Whew!... Continue reading

The ten are in preferential order, although you could interpret a four-way tie for first therein. The honorables are in alphabetical order. Links to reviews and essays are there when they exist. Personal Shopper (Assayas) Taipei Story (Yang [1985 film; first US release 2017]) Phantom Thread (Anderson) Dawson City: Frozen Time (Morrison) A Quiet Passion (Davies) The Death of Louis XIV (Serra) Baby Driver (Wright) A seemingly widely misunderstood tour-de-force of cinematic contrivance. mother! (Aronofsky)... Continue reading

“The great irony of Belle de Jour is that a sixty-seven year old Spanish surrealist has set out to liberate humanity of its bourgeois sentimentality only to collide with the most sentimental generation of flowery feelings in human history,” Andrew Sarris wrote in the Village Voice in the early May 1968. His filing deadline was probably right before the events in France of, you know, May 1968, but even so you could say his overall... Continue reading

The July 1998 Premiere article "Flirting With Disaster," which was referenced the other day in an incredibly brave and true piece for Indiewire by Liz Manne, can be found here. Thank you to Stephen Saito for saving me the trouble of abusing my own scanner. Below is a small account of how that piece, and another, came to be. I guess it was some time in the summer of 1997 when Jim Meigs, the then-editor-in-chief... Continue reading

1) I didn't see 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre until 1977 or '78, when I was a projectionist at my college student center and had to screen it. I say "had to" but I had always wanted to see it. Particularly since having seen Johnny Rotten wear a "I Survived The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" t-shirt in some pictures of a Sex Pistols gig. The movie's lurid rep scared me a little so I, like a... Continue reading

In "The Ladies Man," 1961 In late 2008 or early 2009 I began writing for the MSN editorial website, specifically MSN Movies, and the first thing my editor asked me to draft was a Jerry Lewis obituary. Word on the street, or some street, was that Lewis' various ailments were about to bring him down for good. As MSN then aspired to a print-style editorial standard, it was thought that having an obit on file... Continue reading