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NOTE: Beware. A hella ton of spoilers.

When you google Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery , Rian Johnson’s wonderful and entertaining follow up to his 2019 whodunit Knives Out one factoid jumps out:

The movie’s budget was $40million. Its reported box office $15 million. And yet Netflix has greenlit a third in the series: Wake Up Dead Man due in 2025.

The mystery here is not so mysterious. Netflix gave Glass Onion a limited theatrical release then saved most of its marketing mojo for the movie’s debut on its streaming platform. One imagines most of the revenues came from subscriptions generated partially by the movie. Also multi-picture deals like filmmaker Rian Johnson and his team got must help attract other high quality talent to Netflix. And while Netflix now appears to be in a re-calibration phase (no longer giving out hundreds of millions of dollars and final cut to auteur moviemakers), this period certainly brought a lot of moviemakers into the streaming fold.

And who can blame them? When studios are double downing in more and more dispiriting ways on expanded universes, IP properties, sequels, prequels, requels, where’s a poor moviemaker to go but to the streamers? Scorsese has made his last two movies under streamer banners. David Fincher has been with the streamers since MindHunters and Mank. Alfonso Cuaron got Roma made via Netflix and so on.

Glass Onion itself is another supreme…

Sometimes it’s pure joy to come way too late to a movie you should have seen years before. Such was the experience for this writer upon watching Costa-Gavras 1969 political thriller Z .

Has this ever happened to you? Early in your movie love someone mentions a movie or you keep seeing a title pop up but somehow you never get to it? These holes in one’s movie education can be blessings. Beautiful little hidden blessings in the moist earth of cinema.

Because when you do finally see the movie, you can have an ecstatic reaction, just like you had at the very beginning of your cinema crazed youth.

Z is an unlikely propulsive, entertaining masterpiece. Adapted from…

Although released in the UK in late 1963, From Russia With Love, the second movie in the James Bond movie spy series, debuted in the United States in May 1964. . .exactly sixty years ago.

In many ways it’s THIS movie that set the prototype for the modern action-adventure movie. Its influence can be felt in everything from the Indiana Jones series to the Mission Impossible series to countless popcorn entertainments of international intrigue, action set pieces, spy cloak and dagger.

Filmmakers from Steven Spielberg to Quentin Tarantino to James Cameron so wanted to direct a James Bond movie that, when rejected, ultimately found ways to make their own James Bond movies. Spielberg with Indiana Jones. Cameron with his Arnold Schwarzenegger starring True Lies (1994), Tarantino with a bit of satiric winking with his Michael Fassbender storyline in Inglorious Basterds (2009).

And later series like George Miller’s Mad Max series, while completely different in many ways, also share DNA with the James Bond series, in that they are action-adventure movies with practical car, stunt set pieces that center on law and order individuals trying to save the world (Mad Max was after all a police officer when the apocalypse came).

Even Christopher Nolan’s 2010 Inception drew inspiration from James Bond with the fashions, plotlines, and climactic sequence modeled after the snowy Blofeld layer in the Alps from 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

The James Bond formula and template both ignited and reflected…

When technology changes, the form changes. A great example is 1960's epochal documentary PRIMARY.

Lighter cameras, more responsive film stock to low light, better sound equipment allowed the multiple camera people on the shoot (including future doc luminaries D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles) to handhold their cameras and sound gear. This allowed the moviemakers the ability to follow candidates through huge crowds, into hotel rooms, into car caravans, into smoky offices, etc.

Prior, documentaries had to navigate bulky heavy equipment which often lead to choices that were more pre-mediated, designed, stagey, static.

PRIMARY established the documentary form that…

From time to time this 2024 U.S. election year, we’ll write about movies that deal with politics. To the best of our ability, we want to look at how cinema can CONVEY/COMMUNICATE the nature of politics regardless of one’s own political stripes (though we all have them, including this writer).

A great place to start is 1993’s documentary THE WAR ROOM by Chris Hegedus and famed doc moviemaker D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterrey Pop, etc). The War Room, more from necessity then design, focuses on James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, the key architects of Democrat Bill Clinton’s 1992 successful campaign for U.S. president.

Even in its limited scope and circumscribed ability to get real access, it’s a fascinating window into the day to day machinations of a political campaign. Although the political world of 30 years ago now seems…

It is a profound cinematic irony that possibly the greatest movie ever made about Jesus was made by an atheist.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, rebel Italian moviemaker, committed Communist, troublemaker, made THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW in 1964.

In 2015, the Vatican's own newspaper L'Osservatore Romano named it the best movie about Christ ever filmed.

But Pasolini's reasons for making the movie and the effect of the movie itself are more mysterious, moving, and direct than…

Victor Erice’s 1973 Spanish movie THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, on top of being a justly celebrated classic of world cinema, is also a fascinating Rosette Stone for much of the work of current world-class filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro.

Del Toro is open and effusive in acknowledging the movie’s influence on his own work. He calls THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE one of his “Top 3 films”. And it is fascinating to see how…