Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Outside Story, writer-director Casimir Nozkowskis agreeable feature debut, shapes up as a fairly typical indie shaggy-dog story: a mildly dissolute creative type finds himself in a mildly humorous jam that resolves itself over the course of the film in a mildly heartwarming way, preferably […]
Contributed by Paul D’Agostino / A few foragers gathered in a middle-grounded clearing in a forest, conversing casually as their dogs sniff and shuffle excitedly at their feet. A man in a tub in a cream-of-pink tiled bathroom scrubbing his soap-cloaked pup as he bathes himself. A lone walker in […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / These times demand both mordant humor and serious contemplation, which helps explain the prevalence of meticulously packaged black comedies in cinema. Two prominent and very good ones that come to mind are Emerald Fennells Promising Young Woman, a diamond-hard dissection of the extended kill-chain of […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / By the most salient political parameters governance, public health, the rule of law 2020 was one of the worst years in living memory. Hobbled by Covid-19, art overall seemed commensurately downbeat, but also pensively defiant. In cinema, if a dominant theme emerged, it may have […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Charles Willeford — Guthrie-esque hobo, World War II hero, pulp-fiction genius — was one of the best crime writers of his generation, influential yet under-appreciated. Among his many books, Cockfighter became a cult-classic film starring Warren Oates, Miami Blues a quirky eighties jaunt with Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Fred Ward. His slender memoir, I Was Looking for a Street, wistfully encapsulated both the promise and the strange loneliness of mid-century America, much as Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald did in their detective fiction. The Pick-Up was a brutal, uniquely incisive parable about race in America. Thirty-two years after his death and almost 50 years after its initial publication, The Burnt Orange Heresy — arguably his best novel — has made it to the screen, courtesy of director Giuseppe Capotondi and screenwriter Scott Smith, who prove its timelessness.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Even deprived of movie houses, cinephiles abhor a vacuum. Criterion may be their readiest source for a themed set of noteworthy films or the center-cut of an auteur�s oeuvre. Another option is to pan the metaphorical stream of mostly indifferent content for nuggets of gold. […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In 1959, at the height of the Cold War, Rod Serling trademarked the creeping alteration of reality as a feature of post-Golden Age television with the advent of The Twilight Zone. Introducing the series premier in his intense nasal baritone � unique yet perpetually mimicked […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / People in lockdown on account of a pervasive but invisible biological enemy might be perversely drawn to movies broadly about pandemics, like Steven Soderbergh�s coolly wise Contagion (2011), Alfonso Cuar�n�s elegantly melancholy Children of Men (2006), or the rather silly but occasionally unnerving Outbreak (1995). […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In the 1820s, not long after Lewis and Clark blazed the Oregon Trail, Otis �Cookie� Figowitz, a white orphan from Maryland who had been indentured to a Boston baker and is now a cook, and King-Lu, an itinerant Chinese dreamer on the run, are en […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Martin Scorsese directed what was probably the best American movie of the year ��The Irishman�� and it garnered not a single Academy Award despite ten nominations. The film�s Netflix backing and correspondingly enervated theater release annoyed key players in the Academy and appeared to doom […]
