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Last June I went to a sneak preview of The Northman, and signed one million things saying that I would not let a single word regarding this film pass my locked lips until it opened, and now it finally has!

Of course, I am writing this having seen it again, what with the fact that I…

When people discuss the best Japanese film directors, the three names that often come up the most are Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi.

Kurosawa is of course a foundational figure in the world of film, and Ozu is one of the key names in art house circles, but the one that gets overshadowed among the three is Mizoguchi, which is unfortunate, because he’s maybe…

At this years Oscar ceremony, there were many major moments that were discussed, one moment in particular that if you go on the internet that you can’t possibly escape. But there was one moment during the show that has been overlooked, and that was the 50th anniversary tribute to The Godfather.

I’m not talking about the moment…

Writer and director Pedro Almodovar once said, “The characters in my films are assassins, rapists and so on, but I don’t treat them as criminals, I talk about their humanity.” Rarely is this as true than in…

The past two weeks have seen a number of “experience” movies grace the screen here at the Secret Movie Club Theater. Movies like the 1970 documentary Woodstock, the Who’s rock opera Tommy directed by British maximalist Ken Russell, Pink Floyd’s The Wall directed by Alan Parker, and even David Lowery’s A Ghost Story all employ music in service of narratives that are meant to be more like “journeys” or “trips” then straight ahead storytelling.

You know the experience movie even if…

The week after The Batman opened, there wasn’t a lot new coming out: only X, Umma, and The Outfit. I was going with a friend who does not care for horror, so The Outfit, a film I had not heard one solitary word about before going, won out.

Mark Rylance plays an English Saville Row tailor…

What is the collective noun for a group of percussionists? How about a clattering?

In 2001, the writer / directors Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson created a nine-and-a-half-minute short film called Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers in which a clattering of percussionists break into an elderly Swedish couple’s apartment and performs four songs. Each song is entirely instrumental, percussion-based, and played on found objects specific to one of four rooms. The opening number titled Kitchen, for example, incorporates cupboard doors, wooden spoons on juice glasses, an egg beater, dog bowls, and a food processor. One can – and should – find the short in the usual internet places with ease.

Whatever magic makes a short or a sketch work is not necessarily going to be able to support the weight of a ninety minutes plus feature. Rather than attempt to extend the single concept of the short Sound of Noise uses Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers as a seed to create something…

One of the most renowned movies from the animation company Studio Ghibli is the late Isao Takahata’s 1988 masterpiece The Grave of the Fireflies. The movie is almost unbearably emotional in showing the daily struggles of two adolescents in Japan during WWII, but in the end offers us a sense of relief. While it is Takahata’s best known film, perhaps his most underrated is quite the polar opposite of The Grave of the Fireflies in tone and style, and that’s his 1999 film My Neighbors the Yamadas.

Based on…

I’ve heard many directors ultimately say that while cinema is cinema, if it’s close to any other art form it’s most likely music.

This has always been interesting and instructive to me. An initial reaction might be to think cinema is most related to the novel or to the theater or even to opera. And of course, cinema takes from and is inspired by all these art forms and more (radio, painting, sculpture, dance, architecture, design, to name just a few).

But somewhere in my twenties (I think, maybe it was my early thirties, man time moves fast. . .), I came to feel that movies are most like music and dreams.

A great movie often…

When Sally Kellerman died a couple of weeks ago, I chose Last of the Red Hot Lovers as the movie to watch for her, a Neil Simon play that I was very familiar with, but had never seen the movie, and put it on my list. Then, last week, Mitchell Ryan died, and when I was looking for something for him, I found that both he and Sally Kellerman had worked together in A Reflection of Fear, and decided to pay tribute to two birds with one stone, so to speak.

I am going to assume that everyone knows…