Ray Schmit’s contribution to the Carry On Campaign was in service to seeing a review of one of his favorite childhood movies. Which is, I think, dangerous ground, but in this case I happened to rather like the movie he picked, though it was by no means part of my own childhood. You lucked out […]

“When you’re looking at me, you’re looking at country,” proclaims Sissy Spacek’s Loretta Lynn in 1980’s Coal Miner’s Daughter, a movie that suffers from its share of dramatic problems, but understands every inch of that statement and what drove that woman to make it. “I won’t stay down long, ’cause I’m country strong,” sings Gwyneth […]

Somewhere in all the swampiness of wasted acting talent and artificially-flavored heteronormativity and a terror of sex that masks itself in acres of naked movie star flesh and filty dialogue, No Strings Attached is hiding a deep, dark secret: it’s actually not that bad. It’s not that good either, of course. There’s little hope for […]

The second of two reviews request by Kara Wild with her donations to the Carry On Campaign; the first is here. Well do I remember when The Prince of Egypt opened: for it was 18 December, 1998, which happened to be my 17th birthday,* and I recall my mother asking if I wanted to see […]

Kara Wild’s donations to the Carry On Campaign were in service of a double feature of animated features from a critical point in the commercial history of American animation: two competing studios’ attempts to out-Disney Disney when the Mouse House was just about to topple from the position it at held for over 60 years […]

Being a concerned friend, when Mark Kreutzer donated to the Carry On Campaign, it was with the express intent of filling a terrible gap in my 1980s romantic-comedy education. To which I can only say that I now owe him a debt of gratitude; for quite a gap it was, and glad I am to […]

There’s a line from the Citizen Kane trailer (an exuberantly weird little number, consisting of Orson Welles introducing us to all the cast members) that I like to reference whenever I can: “Dorothy Comingore is a name I’m going to repeat: Dorothy Comingore. I won’t have to repeat it much longer, you’ll be repeating it.” […]

Maybe there’s a cautionary tale in here someplace, though I can’t quite be certain who would benefit from it. Just seven years ago, beloved French-born music video director Michel Gondry wowed the world with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of those movies that seemingly everybody loves, a tragic and funny and whimsical and […]

The story of the McKerrow family is so ludicrously impossible that it could only possibly be true: no writer would dare string together this much contrived drama. In the mid-1960s, Loren and Carol McKerrow, having been told they could not conceived, adopted a baby boy, Marc – and no sooner had he come home than […]

Pixar Animation Studios’ Day & Night played in theaters in front of the beloved Toy Story 3, the highest-grossing feature of 2010. I don’t think I’m being perverse if I say that I distinctly preferred the short, at that; my bona-fides as a Pixar fanatic and a Toy Story 3 partisan are not, or should […]

There is nothing quite like a Mike Leigh film: nobody tells the same stories that he does in the same fashion that he does with the same characters that he does. He is, simply put, one of the handful of truly unique voices working in cinema (though, paradoxically, almost no other writer-director builds his stories […]

The sheep is going on about its business with sheeply detachment, gnawing on a tuft of grass, when it notices the camera. As it must do, for the camera has been watching the sheep from no particularly great distance for many seconds; still, you do not fault a sheep of all creatures for being slow […]