Movies

The Ku Klux Klan is active in my part of the U.S., and the film helped me understand its bitter legacy — “The Birth of a Nation” was “the most effective and long-lasting source of racial propaganda in American history,” Timothy Egan rightly argues in his new book about the spread of the Ku Klux Klan beyond the South, A Fever in the Heartland (Viking, 2023). Roger Ebert has written perhaps the…

Nostalgia is Forever. “Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place.” - John Bender

A lot of sopranos tried, but many think a man did the best job! — If you remember The Fifth Element, you probably know immediately the song I’m talking about. It’s a legendary part of the movie. The Fifth Element is a 1997 French-American science fiction action film directed by Luc Besson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Robert Mark Kamen. It stars Bruce Willis, Gary…

No spoilers — 2018’s “Into The Spider-Verse” is one of my favorite comic book films of all time. A stylistically bold and genuinely heartfelt superhero comedy, packed with exhilarating action sequences and jaw-dropping artistic flourishes. As someone who wasn’t expecting much from Sony’s animated Miles Morales project, I was shocked by how quickly…

When our families suck, we turn to fiction. — As someone who falls approximately within the “Elder Millennial” subgroup, I have experienced something that a lot of my cohort has as well: estrangement from their families. …

“Watching movies is the easy part. At a certain point, you have to start watching movies objectively. Or more strategically. Obviously all…

A week-long analysis of the screenplay for the award-winning drama. Download. Read. Discuss. Reading scripts. Absolutely critical to learn the craft of screenwriting. The focus of this bi-weekly series is a deep structural and thematic analysis of each script we read. Our daily schedule: Monday: Scene-By-Scene Breakdown Tuesday: Plot Wednesday: Characters Thursday: Themes Friday…