Monthly Archives: March 2026

Review: Chain Reactions

Documentary filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe has made a tidy living out of studying scary movies, having already put The Exorcist, Psycho, and Alien under the microscope. This 2024 feature takes on what many believe to be the Rosetta Stone of … Continue reading

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Young Mothers

The Belgian filmmaking brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, extend their usually focused attention on a single troubled individual in their realistic style to take in a quartet of teenage mothers who are in the early stages of coping with their … Continue reading

Posted in Movies | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Review: The Thing With Feathers

It’s been difficult to take the famous title epigram, adapted from a poem by Emily Dickinson, seriously ever since Woody Allen had fun with it in one of his New Yorker humor pieces. For Dickinson, the thing with feathers was … Continue reading

Posted in Movies | Tagged | Leave a comment

Review: What Does That Nature Say to You

One of the most common figures of romantic stories down through the ages is the unreliable artist-lover. Extrapolated into narratives, such characters often end up being secondary to the protagonist, who is usually a woman and falls for the artist … Continue reading

Posted in Movies | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Review: Project Hail Mary and Jules

According to reports, Andy Weir, the author of the novel Project Hail Mary, did deep research into the science behind the story’s science fiction, in particular the viability of the sun-consuming microbes called astrophage that trigger the titular extraterrestrial mission. … Continue reading

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Review: Small Things Like These and Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

According to Tim Mielant’s drama Small Things Like These, based on a novel by Claire Keegan, Ireland in the mid-1980s was stuck in a time warp. By the end of the decade the country would be enjoying an economic boom, … Continue reading

Posted in Movies | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Review: Marty Supreme

It feels more like providence than serendipity to note that the recently sundered Safdie Brothers filmmaking team has now produced two movies about real-life sports figures whose forceful personalities up-end their competitive effectiveness. However, in the case of Benny Safdie’s … Continue reading

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Media watch: Electric buses bought for Expo almost dead on arrival

By pretty much every metric last year’s Osaka Expo was a success, an outcome that surprised a lot of people given the problems leading up to it. However, there was one problem that remains unsolved even six months after the … Continue reading

Posted in Media | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Review: Holding Liat

Since the massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, in Israel, most of the documentaries made about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have been told from the Palestinian perspective. Holding Liat, directed by Benjamin Kramer, centers on an American-Israeli couple whose … Continue reading

Posted in Movies | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Review: No Other Choice

Celebrated for his meticulous, almost stately mise en scene, and noted for his often extreme use of violence, Park Chan-wook is rarely lauded for his visual jokes. In his last movie, the mystery thriller Decision to Leave, I smiled almost … Continue reading

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , | Leave a comment