Bob Ross, Populist Artist
A Netflix documentary and a new film about the beloved American TV painter explore a life marked by popular success and personal betrayal.
Julia Friedman
· 10 min read
Cinema
A collection of 95 posts
“Be Vigilant, America”
Two forgotten films from 1942 about Japanese internment offer a window into the shameful nativism of wartime America.
Thomas Doherty
· 10 min read
A Bore of a Blockbuster
Next time, one hopes, James Cameron will focus as much on the story he tells as the means he uses to tell it.
Allan Stratton
· 7 min read
The Radicalization of the Film Canon
Sight and Sound’s 2022 poll is a sign of the times.
Adrian Nguyen
· 13 min read
Startling Intimations of Greatness
As we await the release of Woody Allen’s 50th feature film, his biographer looks back on the career of one of America’s great cinematic artists.
David Evanier
· 26 min read
Ken Kesey and the Rush to Deinstitutionalization
Whatever the literary strengths of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the book has done much to harm both the mentally ill and their communities.
Stephen Eide
· 11 min read
Getting Fletch Wrong
Jon Hamm’s portrayal is an improvement on Chevy Chase’s goofball routine, but still bears little relation to the amoral cad in Gregory McDonald’s novels.
Kevin Mims
· 16 min read
Adult Fantasy of Youth
A look back at Bertolucci’s 2003 film, The Dreamers.
Marilyn Simon
· 13 min read
“I Believe in America”
Fifty Years of ‘The Godfather‘
Graham Daseler
· 14 min read
Undiminished by Decadence
I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s and I’m happy to report that, for the most part, television and mainstream cinema today are orders of magnitude better than they were in my salad days.
Kevin Mims
· 15 min read
Art Is Not Therapy
Something is flattened when our understanding of art is asked to serve the logic of a medical diagnosis, which sees the messiness of the human condition as a malady to be cured.
Jasmine Hu-Hollingshead
· 11 min read
The Western Reinvented. Again.
It has been 30 years since a Western last won the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards. That was in 1992 and the film was Unforgiven, directed by Clint Eastwood, who also starred in it alongside Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and Richard Harris. On Sunday, Jane Campion’s The
Kevin Mims
· 9 min read
Fatal Vision: Joel Coen’s ‘Macbeth’
In Shakespeare’s play, the Weïrd Sisters undoubtedly spur Macbeth toward evil by tempting him toward his dark ambition.
Marilyn Simon
· 8 min read
In Toronto's Weirdest Cinema, a Portrait of the Artist I'd Never Become
You’ve probably heard of the Toronto International Film Festival, which, before the pandemic, was annually attracting almost 500,000 attendees. But you’ve probably never heard of Toronto’s equally venerable Cineforum, whose weekly attendance has usually been closer to five. The Cineforum is an indie theatre run by
Adam Zivo
· 9 min read
B.S. Moss and the Dawn of the Movie-Palace Era
Although the vaudeville circuits would last through the 1920s, the way was now paved for impressive purpose-built movie houses with proper lighting and sound that would exhibit first-rate popular entertainment to general audiences.
Charles B. Moss Jr. and Jonathan Kay
· 16 min read