I will be honest- I knew I wanted to cover the Atlanta Film Festival again this year, but I wasn’t quite sure what that would look like. You see, with my job and its fluid schedule, 2024 was a bit trickier than I anticipated, but I made it work. There was another potential wrinkle in this year, as well; in early March, I found out that my mother was at […]
When I first covered the Renegade Film Festival in 2020, I did not anticipate it being my last communal experience theatrically until six months later, during our brief reopening at Regal during the pandemic. I also did not anticipate it being a film festival I would find myself looking to return to over the years. But the high of Renegade is not just in its programming; it’s in the community […]
It’s interesting how this episode lined up with events around it. My guest and I had been planning for this episode for months, and we happened to have time for it shortly after one of its stars passed away. My guest is a first-timer to the podcast, my dear friend Dawn Echols, and the subject is George P. Costamos’s 1993 film, “Tombstone”, starring the late Val Kilmer. In addition to […]
As I began to prepare for my recent episode with Jason from Binge Movies on Fascism in Cinema, it occurred to me that this would be a fascinating ongoing series in the next year or two in American history. For the next episode of the series, we are looking at authoritarian violence and the idea of due process in our society, and how it can be reflected in films. Joining […]
If you love film, you likely have been to a repertory screening at some point in your life. The chance to watch an older movie, on the big screen, with a crowd as in love with the opportunity to watch a movie in theatres, maybe for the first time, or maybe to recapture that sense of wonder of when you first saw it. The idea of repertory showings of movies […]
I need to get this series back on track. When I changed up this series in 2020, I was not anticipating the pandemic, and not working for most of the year. Now that I have changed jobs, I’m finding maintaining two movies a month to be a tricky business. Part of that is because of how varied my work schedule can be, but it’s also because I find myself working […]
One of my favorite things in movies is when they show why a piece of music matters to a character. While a great soundtrack can help us figure out who a character is, when we see characters actively engage with music onscreen, that is a special thing for me. There are plenty of great examples of this- Max Cherry discovering The Delfonics in “Jackie Brown”; “As Time Goes By” being […]
**Author’s Note: The following essay includes scenes from “Touch of Evil” to illustrate my words. These scenes not only include spoilers to the film, but one involves implied sexual assault. Orson Welles never stopped pushing cinema form forward after “Citizen Kane”– the problem was his resources got more and more scant, and his freedom more and more bowled over by studio interference as he went along. But watch films like […]
Sonic Cinema Quick Thoughts
