Movie talk

I had run across the trailer for Fatman back in September and said to myself, “Self. You just watched the most bat crap crazy trailer Funny Or Die couldn’t have conceived on a good day. But, hold the phone, this movie has Mel “Hollywood Poison” Gibson as Santa Claus? What, the what?” So, needless to…

Starting in June 1967, Montreux Casino began to host the Montreux Jazz Festival. The annual event and featured legends such as Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, and Ella Fitzgerald. On December 4, 1971, the original Casino building burned down—during a Frank Zappa concert, after a fan set the venue on fire with a flare…

“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one,” purrs a drunk, dawdling Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) in Mank. The same rings true of David Fincher movies. With the arrival of his eleventh feature comes the delightfully deranged process of diving back into…

The Battle of Verdun was a brutal battle that lasted from February 21 to December 18, 1916. Each foot around the city of Verdun was fought over by hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers, and more from the farthest reaches of the European empires. That’s 302 days of bloodshed, and historians still argue…

Leather sofa seats, Mod bubble lights, elderly patrons smoking at the bar, and thick slices of pizza toast: These are the elements of a typical Japanese kissaten, or kissa coffee shop. Part bar, part restaurant, and part community center, these humble, Shōwa-era cafés serve tea, coffee, alcohol, and delightfully hybrid dishes such as pizza toast….

The Russian city of Saint Petersburg was named after its founder, Peter I the Great. So it’s no coincidence that several statues featuring Peter can be found throughout the city, although this one may be the most unique.  Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonDesigned by Russian sculptor Mikhail Chemiakin in the 1980s…

A family navigates a major adjustment in The Father, the debut of co-writer/director Florian Zeller. Anthony knows he’s gotten up there in years, but he and his daughter disagree on how much time has affected him. He thinks he’s doing fine, but she insists that he needs some help, contending that his mental slips are noticeable…

Visitors to this museum will get an up-close look at 17th-century Pilgrim culture. Exhibits are housed inside a grand Greek Revival building, where architecture and artwork reflect successive periods of patriotic fervor in the United States. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonAmong the artifacts on display are William Bradford’s Bible, a 1651…

The Mannings were typical of many families living in Holly Springs, Mississippi during the late 19th-century. Van Manning was a lawyer and former Confederate who arrived in Reconstruction Mississippi in the 1860s. His wife Mary was a local Holly Springs girl from a well-to-do family. Van built a successful legal career and later served in…

Streaming might be the future, but physical media is still the present. It’s also awesome, depending on the title, the label, and the release, so each week we take a look at the new Blu-rays and DVDs making their way into the world. Welcome to this week in Home Video for December 1st, 2020! This week’s…

In the summer of 1846, a party of 89 emigrants was making its way westward along the 2,170-mile-long Oregon Trail. Tired, hungry, and trailing behind schedule, they decided at Fort Bridger, Wyoming to travel to their final destination of California by shortcut. The “Hastings Cutoff” they chose was an alternative route that its namesake, Lansford…

Ho, ho, hand grenade. Fatman – longtime passion project from indie family filmmakers the Nelms Brothers – is not your traditional holiday movie. Sure, a lot of the same pieces are there: a puffy man with a long white beard, his warehouse, and his army of efficient elves. But few Christmas movies have had the…

“Rich or poor, nobody can escape. What a tragedy.” MTV Documentary Films has released an official US trailer for 76 Days, a chilling fly-on-the-wall documentary capturing the first 76 days during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in China. Raw and intimate, this documentary captures the struggles of patients and frontline medical professionals battling the vicious COVID-19…

Crossing the Streams is our monthly look at all the offerings hitting the big streaming services each month, and this time we’re checking out the new Hulu arrivals for December 2020. This month’s titles include Stanley Kubrick’s final film, the latest season of a beloved comedy series, and more! Keep reading to see what’s new…

This piece was originally published in Wired and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration. In 2014, the remaining staff of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or ICARDA, fled their beloved gene bank in Tel Hadia, 20 miles south of Aleppo. Syria’s civil war, which had broken out…

Administrative duties are only one dimension of Musa Hadid’s job as mayor of Ramallah, the de facto capital and cultural center of the Palestinian State. Aside from putting out fires, sometimes literally, in a town with a large Christian population—a fact that may jump at those with reductive views of the fragmented country’s religious demographics—he…

A few years ago, one would have gaffed at the idea of Stephy Tang being labeled as a serious thespian in the Hong Kong entertainment industry. But following her awards-worthy turn in 2017’s judo drama The Empty Hands, Tang punched her way into critical relevance and has now cemented herself with an even stronger performance…

★★★ Written and Directed by: #DavidJStern Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonStarring: #John Healy, #JennaSokolowski, #EmilyClassen, #AndyBrownstein and #JonathanHirsch Film review by: Brian Penn Read moreRobert Stack Finally Solves a Mystery in ‘The Strange and Deadly Occurrence’To lose a loved one is a shock from which we never truly recover. Part of…

Valle Crucis was founded by Prince Madog ap Gruffydd and the “White Monks” of the Cistercian order in 1201. The name Valley Crucis derives from Latin and means Valley of the Cross. The name is thought to refer to the nearby 9th-century Pillar of Eliseg. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonThe Cistercians…

Sometimes it takes a personal attack to turn someone into an activist. Consider J.K. Rowling, the progressive author who took a stand against Cancel Culture when it turned on her … with a vengeance. Woke comic Sarah Silverman decried losing a film role for a problematic gag from her comedy past. Read moreA Guide to…

The woman on a dock. It’s an image used in cinema so much that it’s basically a cliché, the distant figure nearly always gazing out at the water as if contemplating possibilities, perched on the edge of a choice. It’s an image and a cliché used repeatedly in Black Bear, a mystifying little movie that,…