Sonic Cinema

Sounds, Visions and Insights by Brian Skutle

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 […]

This is the fourth year of “Repertory Revues,” and the 15th year since I started to watch older films over the month in an attempt to both broaden my cinematic horizons, as well as rewatching older favorites I wanted to write about, and it’s been increasingly difficult to keep up in the way I originally […]

The title, “Repertory Revues,” just fits for this series. In a way, it feels like I’m operating my own, personal repertory series each year. One of the things you realize when you work at a theatre for as long as I have is how little autonomy one has when it comes to scheduling and booking. […]

Sometimes, the best laid plans can go awry. Even when it’s continuing a project you’ve been working on for years. When I choose a “bookend” filmmaker for the year, the expectation I hold for myself is that I will watch one of their films every year after their initial inclusion as a bookend, thereby making […]

To paraphrase one of the film’s I reviewed in this space in 2020, I picked a Hell of a year to stop reviewing older films once a week. It makes all the sense in the world that, in a year where I resolved to review fewer older movies a month than I had under the […]

As we close the 11th year of this series, I’m doing more to write more about movies, and older movies, than ever before. I also have more going on with regards to modern movies than I previous have. That’s why, in this space, I will be closing the “Movie a Week” series, in its current […]

It’s ironic that, in my 10th year of doing the “Movie a Week” column, not only was I on point with regards to keeping up with the stated idea of reviewing an older movie a week more often than not, but that I also feel like, moving forward, it might be in my best interest […]

Ok, so I’m going to be blunt about this- 2017 was a fucking disaster for my “Movie a Week” series. This is not a reflection on the films that were watched and reviewed, but in how chaotic my life got, and how it got in the way of doing this series on a regular basis. […]

One of the fundamental challenges of this “Movie a Week” series continues to be that it’s, well, a movie a week. And because I’ve basically planned out the next year during the current one, that means film availability is of the utmost importance in order for this to work. That, and time. Life and work […]

If I remember correctly, my 2015 list of “Movies a Week” began sometime in mid-January, due to 2014 being considerably late thanks to technical issues with my Blu-Ray player, an aggressive work schedule at the end of the year, as well as busy personal schedule. For most of this year, however, I’ve been relatively on […]