In what will come as a surprise to nobody, Blake and I are talking about The Godfather again. In celebration of the film’s fiftieth anniversary, we gush once more about the pinnacle of American studio filmmaking and how if made today it would probably be a crummy Netflix series. We also goof on that trailer for The Offer and pitch our own Enzo The Baker spinoff. – One Heat Minute, 02/07/2022
“Writer-director Louis Malle’s semi-autobiographical 1971 masterpiece looks affectionately askance at a waning aristocracy and a way of life without consequences as a young man comes of age. It’s an enormously entertaining picture, presumably the gentlest and most endearing movie ever made about a boy who has sex with his mother.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/04/2022
“The most gloriously indecorous entertainment I’ve seen in ages and the hardest I’ve laughed in a movie theater since lord knows when. It’s a non-stop barrage of elementally idiotic behavior, daredevil foolishness and a marvel of ingenuity in the realm of genital trauma. If nothing else, this film is visual testament to the astonishing durability of the male scrotum.” – North Shore Movies, 02/04/2022
“Alastair has a habit of quoting Hamlet, which can’t help but recall Gibson’s own celebrated take on the melancholy Dane, here filtered through the regrets of a character fallen far from the heights of his profession due to demons and drink, working on a hacky project he can’t stand, reciting the gravedigger speech to a classroom of confused preschoolers.” – North Shore Movies, 02/04/2022
“Where Antonioni asked us to embrace the mystery, Franco’s film is about getting answers. Eventually, annoyingly and anticlimactically as possible. We discover that Roth’s relationship with Gainsbourg is not what we’d at first assumed, though the revelation carries next to no weight whatsoever. In fact, the more we learn, the less interesting Sundown becomes.” – North Shore Movies, 02/04/2022
“I suppose you could stream it. But you know how some movies need to be seen on a big screen? The Conversation needs to be heard in an auditorium on the kind of equipment you don’t have at home. It’s an intricately constructed aural experience about the act of listening, and how sometimes our perceptions of sounds are shaped by what we want to hear.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/02/2022
My fifth dispatch from the 2022 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of John Patton Ford’s Emily The Criminal, Juan Pablo González‘s Dos Estaciones, Jamie Dack’s Palm Trees And Power Lines and Tig Notaro & Stephanie Allynne’s Am I OK?
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My fourth dispatch from the 2022 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth, Rachel Lears’ To The End, Reid Davenport’s I Didn’t See You There and Nina Menkes’ Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power.
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“The early films presented in the HFA series betray little of the bitter gorehound Mou would become. 1969’s I Didn’t Dare Tell You and 1970’s The End Of The Track are gentle, humanist portraits of young people struggling to get by in an uneasy time of economic inequality, reminiscent of the Italian neorealists in their depiction of everyday life.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/26/2022
My third dispatch from the 2022 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Phyllis Nagy’s Call Jane, Lena Dunham’s Sharp Stick, Monia Chokri’s Babysitter and Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck To You, Leo Grande.
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