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 […]

Holiday Classics: “Miracle on Main Street” (1939)

There’s something inherently comforting about returning to the same old favorites every holiday season. But it’s just as exciting to discover new films to add to your rotation. That’s how I felt last year, when Turner Classic Movies aired Miracle on Main Street in primetime— a film I had never even heard of before they […]

Review: “Wicked”

Jon M. Chu’s 2021 film adaptation of the Broadway musical In the Heights made me suspect that he wasn’t a particularly skilled director of musicals. His long-gestating film adaptation of Wicked confirmed it. It’s a shame, because even more so than Heights, there’s a legitimately great movie musical rocking around inside that two hour and […]

Review: “The Room Next Door”

A red door, whose eventual closure will mark a turning point in the lives and relationship between Martha (Tilda Swinton) and Ingrid (Julianne Moore), is just one of many simple yet strong visual markers placed throughout director Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door. Martha is dying of cancer and— unwilling to spend the rest of […]

Review: “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat— Johan Grimonprez’s documentary tracking the events leading up to the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba that’s comprised entirely of archival footage and audio and text excerpts from a wide range of sources and first-hand accounts— opens at the close. Text rippling across the screen illustrate the dialogue between […]

Review: “Anora”

Who is Anora, and what does she want? It’s a question I found repeatedly popping up in the back of my mind as I watched writer and director Sean Baker’s film, the title of which shares his protagonist’s name but not much interest in answering those queries. There are a few points I can confirm. […]