Movie Reviews, Old and New
2021 was a big year for movies. We returned to theaters (at least I did, after a full 14 month absence), and a number of films held over from 2020 finally saw the light of day. That’s not to say that things are back to what we used to know as normal, but as they’ve […]
Read More Best Movies of 2021I don’t think I realized just how much I enjoyed “Licorice Pizza” until the final frame of the end credits dissolved, and I remembered that I had spent the last two hours or so sitting in a movie theater in 2021, not running carelessly around the San Fernando Valley in the early 1970s. Writer/director Paul […]
Read More Review: “Licorice Pizza”“The Matrix Resurrections” opens with a moment of déjà vu: familiar music cues accompany rows of green code scrolling across the screen, followed by a phone call, and then a confrontation. If these scenes feel overly familiar, it’s because they are almost an exact recreation of the opening of Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s visionary 1999 […]
Read More Review: “The Matrix Resurrections”“The Silent Partner” was a sleeper hit when it was released in the United States in 1978, but it seems like it has gained more recognition in recent years, and rightly so. The Canadian production- which won three Canadian Film Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and was one of the first movies produced under Canada’s […]
Read More Holiday Classics: “The Silent Partner” (1978)Believe it or not, 1941’s “Penny Serenade” was not the only movie Cary Grant starred in in which he plays a husband overcome with the care of an orphan or two. But while in “Penny Serenade” he played a new husband averse to the idea of having children, in 1952’s “Room for One More,” he […]
Read More Holiday Classics: “Room for One More” (1952)When I first became interested in classic film, I’d stalk the forums on tcm.com in an attempt to seek out movies to watch. Anytime the subject of tearjerkers came up, it seemed like the first and most discussed movie was a film that would likely have otherwise flown under my radar: the 1941 drama “Penny Serenade,” directed […]
Read More Holiday Classics: “Penny Serenade” (1941)“The Holly and the Ivy” centers around a dysfunctional family gathering for the holidays, but while many movies play this concept for laughs, this 1952 British film directed by George More O’Ferrall from a play by Wynyard Browne is a melancholy drama. But that doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t end with the requisite dose […]
Read More Holiday Classics: “The Holly and the Ivy” (1952)I wasn’t sure, especially in light of a pandemic that it seems we’ll never pull out of, if I’d ever have another theatrical experience quite on the level of “Avengers: Endgame.” I’m not a particular fan of that movie, or even the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, but there’s no denying that the conversion […]
Read More Review: “Spider-Man: No Way Home”If Guillermo Del Toro’s previous feature film, “The Shape of Water,” was about the perseverance of love and humanizing monsters, his latest movie, “Nightmare Alley,” is about as opposite to that as one can get. Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, which was also adapted into a 1947 film of the same name, “Nightmare […]
Read More Review: “Nightmare Alley” (2021)“On Moonlight Bay” has often been written off as a less-impressive copy-cat of another holiday staple, 1944’s “Meet Me in St. Louis.” The reasons for this are obvious, because the two films share some remarkable similarities. Both are musicals set over the course of one year in a turn-of-the-century Midwestern family’s life, divided into chapters […]
Read More Holiday Classics: ”On Moonlight Bay” (1951)
Katie at the Movies 