Screen
Staying human with Michael Franti
It’s Election Day, Nov. 6, 2018, and it feels serendipitous to get the chance to talk with Michael Franti about his new documentary, Stay...
Free Japan!
Movies are a reflection of culture. Be it comedy, survival or everyday angst, Americans find touchstones among the moving pictures we see. Yet looking beyond our own theaters can provide a glimpse of what is special to cultures on other parts of our planet...
The survivor’s tale
Aug. 1, 1966: U.S. Marine and University of Texas at Austin engineering student Charles Whitman entered the UT tower, climbed to the 28th floor,...
White people nearly died
The 2004 tsunami that struck Eastern Asia was the sixth deadliest “act of God” in recorded history and quieted just fewer than 300,000 lives. The first major motion picture to tackle the subject, The Impossible, is about a group of white folks who get injured and ...
A matter of life and death
Everybody clap your hands. Soul, the latest feature film from Disney/Pixar, rolls credits with a new version of the Curtis Mayfield classic, “It’s All...
Fantastic Fungi
For Paul Stamets, it begins and ends with mushrooms. From death, they create life. From fractures, they create connections. And from sickness, they create...
Close to something
In one of the most insightful, clever comments in a movie surprisingly devoid of insightful, clever comments, backup singer Janice Pendarvis notes, “When you think about the history of pop music and all the memorable hooks that most people sing along with, they’re ...
Home viewing: Cheryl Dunye
Sometimes you have to create your own history. —Cheryl Dunye
She calls them “Dunyementaries”: Cinematic blends of fiction and documentary, construction and confession. They’re self-reflexive...
Crisis of context
I believe it’s a lack of context, not empathy. Because if it’s a lack of empathy, we’re screwed — doomed as a country, culture, maybe even species. The dismissal of the poor as bottom-feeding, system-exploiting moochers comes from not having a full perspective of ...
No one goes it alone
In his landmark study, “From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film,” Siegfried Kracauer put forth the theory that cinema is...
Your vice is a locked room and only I have the...
Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) lives for the 1960s. The clothes she wears, the music she listens to, even the movie posters on her bedroom wall...


















