Panic in the Year Zero!

It's amazing what a solid script can do for a movie with no production design to speak of and that was filmed in two weeks. Panic in the Year Zero! was one of the first post-apocalyptic movies of the post-war scifi craze. It looks like it was meant to be just the bottom of a…

Casablanca

#1 in my ranking of Best Picture winners at the Oscars. Out of all the movies in my top ten, this is probably the one that pops up most in others. It's been a staple of American cinema pretty much since its release and when it won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1942. It's…

Summer with Monika

#8 in my Ranking of Bergman's Best Films. Now we're hitting greatness. Summer with Monika feels like an extension of the ideas Bergman presented in Summer Interlude. Not only does the seasonal motif and structure remain, but Bergman offers a different ending to the season itself and continues beyond it more linearly. Harry meets Monika…

Oh, yeah. I’m going.

I've grown to love Fathom Events.

In the Heart of the Sea

They should not have included the connection to Moby Dick. I thought it was just a marketing gimmick, but Herman Melville is a character and the impetus for the overall framing device. I imagine that it's true that Melville used the story of the "Essex" as partial inspiration for his grand opus (perhaps the greatest…