Sonic Cinema

Typically with this section of my retrospective, I’ve tried to reflect on what the year gave us, and what it means for Hollywood moving forward. This year, I’m going to go in a different direction, and look at some of the people we lost over the year. I’ll never forget the first time I watched a David Lynch film. It was 1997’s “Lost Highway”, and boy was I not prepared […]

It’s that time of year again when the winners of the Georgia Film Critics Association awards are announced. I still had catching up to do before the final ballot was in, but that was the way of 2025. Here are the nominees, what won, and my thoughts as a voting member. I hope you enjoy! 2025 Georgia Film Critics Association Awards Best Picture “Black Bag” “Hamnet” “It Was Just An […]

As I started to look to 2026, I knew there was still more to cover in this series beyond what we hit upon in the five episodes last year in discussing authoritarianism in cinema. One of the richest genres doing that was science fiction which, coincidentally, is what led to my emphasis on the genre this year. With such a vast subject, there was only one choice to join me […]

In this mini-episode of the podcast, I thought I’d talk briefly about my favorite genre of all-time- science fiction. My history with the genre, why my love has only deepened, and why it’s being covered so heavily this year on Sonic Cinema. I hope you enjoy! The end piece is “Weightless Waltz in F,” from my 2010 album, “Beyond the Infinite: A Musical Odyssey”. You can read my paper on […]

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 […]

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 intended when I started in 2009. This year, I made a fairly big dent in […]

Every October since 2002, I’ve spent the month delving into horror films. Some years have leaned more into familiar choices that I have come to love over the years, often by virtue of what else I had going on that month. In its earlier incarnations, however, I leaned into films I was not familiar with in the genre, from classic offerings to modern movies I’ve missed. Each year, I find […]

When I first scored “The Case” short films for my friend, Chris Dufresne, I had one keyboard synthesizer, and no recording software with which to truly sync picture and music. That meant figuring out the timings for each cue by figuring out where music should be, when it should change, and basically hoping it would work out. It did, and I’m still quite pleased with those musical efforts. “Player, PhD.” […]