Best Movies of 2024

I wasn’t so sure that this year ended up being such a great one for movies, at least for me. Some of 2024’s most acclaimed mainstream hits like Challengers, Dune Part 2, and Anora that have been sweeping the awards circuit were mostly misses for me. But when I started combing back through my Letterboxd […]

Holiday Classics: “The Curse of the Cat People” (1944)

Cat People was a big box office hit for RKO Pictures when it was released in 1942. The horror film, stylishly directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton (the mind behind the studio’s successful run of B genre films), has been hugely influential in the decades since its release, from its dive into […]

Review: “A Complete Unknown”

You can’t fully know Bob Dylan. Thats’s something that Todd Haynes understood when he made I’m Not There, his radical 2007 biopic that crafts an image of the legendarily enigmatic musician’s life in fragments portrayed by six different actors, ranging from a young Black boy to Cate Blanchett. Perhaps that’s also something that director James […]

Holiday Classics: “I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes” (1948)

You should never throw your shoes at a cat, no matter how much their midnight meowing keeps you up at night. You especially shouldn’t do it if you’re Tom Quinn (Don Castle), a struggling tap dancer who sits at home anxiously awaiting the return of his taxi dancer wife Ann (Elyse Knox) from work, where […]

Holiday Classics: “Mr. Soft Touch”

Mr. Soft Touch is technically a film noir— it opens with a stunningly tense car chase shot on location in the streets of San Francisco following a robbery committed by the protagonist to even the score after he returns home from fighting in World War II to find his partner missing and his nightclub overtaken […]

Review: “Nocturnes”

You likely won’t walk out of Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes with a lot of newfound facts and figures about moths knocking about in your brain. What their film accomplishes, however, is much more impressive than many nature documentaries: an inherent love for and understanding of the need to protect these creatures, achieved not […]

Review: “Sugarcane”

In 2021, numerous unmarked graves were discovered on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Mission, a former Canadian residential school situated near the Sugarcane Indian Reserve near Williams Lake in British Columbia. This wasn’t the only school where such a discovery was made. It is, however, where directors Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie choose to […]

Holiday Classics: “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” (1953)

1953’s By the Light of the Silvery Moon, a sequel to Warner Brothers’ hit 1951 nostalgic musical On Moonlight Bay (which I wrote about for this column three years ago), isn’t quite as winsome as its predecessor, but with the same cast reprising their roles, and a story set largely between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it […]