Category Archives: Reviews

We watched “Wild Mountain Thyme” twice this weekend. It’s such a good movie,—and getting beat up so badly in reviews—I want to sing its praises. You’ll want to watch the lead-in to the titles repeatedly: camera sailing over Irish coastline, god-carved cliffs, mild surf, turns in to green fields, a long narrow road to aContinue reading “John Patrick Shanley, Wild Mountain Thyme (review)”

Brilliant story-telling/editing, big-time stars in virtually every speaking role, a story about various wrenching and very ugly deaths by a contagious disease, also about the social chaos produced by fear of the novel virus that dispatches millions world-wide in less time than it takes to apply for and get unemployment compensation—but also about the musteringContinue reading “Steven Soderbergh, Contagion (2011)”

Watching Rear Window during the Covid pandemic and the Trump reign of terror helps understand what the movie is about. It’s a political allegory, among other things. The little society of Rear Window (1954) consists of seven different apartment windows that look out onto a rectangular courtyard from the four bordering apartment buildings; each isContinue reading “Watching Rear Window during the Pandemic”

Plagues and pandemics concentrate the mind. Imagine that you have a week or a month before you die rather than the ten, twenty, or fifty years you have been vaguely counting on. Practically speaking your planning gets urgent. But at another level, philosophy comes crashing in on you, and you ask, what have you accomplished?Continue reading “Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal (1957)”