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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…

When famed musical composer and innovator Stephen Sondheim passed away November 26th of last year, I vaguely knew of some of his musicals and his contribution to the theater and the arts.

Three months later, I find myself in awe of an artist who not only created some of the most important American innovations to an art form but also made sure to pass his knowledge on to students and the next generation in a very open, practical way.

I don’t know if you’ve ever done this but sometimes when someone dies, I seek out interviews on YouTube. Every now and then I fall down a rabbit hole of wanting to know everything about that person.

This happened to me with Sondheim.

In December and January, along with…

Everything about The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane screams, “b-movie”. Awkwardly long title? Check. Made in the late seventies? Check. Canadian co-production? Check. And in many (probably most) ways that’s exactly what it is. But then the cast makes one seriously reconsider that first impression. Led by a 13-year-old Jodie Foster…

When the great Sidney Poitier died in January, there was much talk about In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Lilies of the Field, all of his most well-known films, but I also heard about this film for the first time, Buck and the Preacher, a western…

As any great creative artist moves from flesh and blood to myth, the great works tend to get discussed ad nauseum, the minor works forgotten or relegated to footnotes of footnotes.

But sometimes these footnotes…

Near the beginning of this year, I was finally able to see Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s much-acclaimed new film, Drive My Car. The heaps of critical praise it has been given are well deserved and I don’t hesitate to add my own laudatory comments, for whatever they’re worth. One of the key elements of the story that struck me is the relationship between a middle-aged theatrical director and his driver, an adult woman maybe twenty years his junior. Almost uniquely in the history of movies, the scenes…

Robin and the 7 Hoods is the final Rat Pack movie, it is a movie starring Frank Sinatra, it is a musical, it is a comedy updating of Robin Hood, it is all of these things, but can you guess which of these facts is the reason I saw this movie?

If you answered none of the above, you are correct, because the actual reason is…