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“I always tell the people that the idea behind the classics and the retrospective screenings is not to show old films. The idea is to show good films.” — Doctor Rainer Rother, Head of Berlinale Retrospectives

I had a few reasons this year to attend the Berlinale. ,the premiere film festival held annually in Berlin, Germany and widely known as one of Europe’s “Big Three” Film Festivals alongside Venice and Cannes.

The first: I’m working in Europe at the moment and shopping two new features I wrote and am attached to direct with the producers of my debut feature at the European Film Market (a meeting place that takes place at Berlinale every year where buyers, studios, and filmmakers intersect in raising financing for feature films and television). 

The second: I love watching …

This writer has a frought relationship with moviemaker Peter Bogdanovich. A HUGE fan of 70's freedoms meets John Ford THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. An admirer of PAPER MOON. And a puzzled spectator of much of Bogdanovich's other output. 

Peter Bogdanovich is also one THE great writers about movies and a hell of an actor; as evidenced again here where Bogdanovich has a supporting part as a CIA spook. He is also one of American cinema's strange spirits. Wandering between the two worlds like Ethan Edwards and the slain Comanche, Peter Bogdanovich has made classics and he's made a lot of movies that don't work quite as well. 

So what a revelation it is to watch…

2024's adventurous feature animation THE WILD ROBOT is almost as hard to write about as explaining the beauty and brutality of nature to your seven year old child.

There are tremendous moments of deep emotion. There are also strange tonal shifts that feel like concessions to the "movie by committee" process almost every filmmaker has to submit to in today's studio system.

Hey kid! You want to make a layered, subtle movie about …

This writer was a few minutes into this movie thinking it would be their least favorite Bergman & Rossellini collaboration. This writer ended the movie feeling it was the best.

Wealthy ex-pat Americans Irene (Bergman) and George Gerard, living in Rome, experience the devastating loss of their only child, Michel. George decides it's best to soldier on as things were. Irene goes on a spiritual journey leading to her eventual institutionalization in a sanitarium.

Make no mistake, EUROPA '51 is as brutal and unrelenting as Lars Von Trier's BREAKING THE WAVES, and just as spiritual.

The first scene…

Review of Saturday Night Live’s 50th Anniversary Special which aired on the NBC and Peacock channels live Sunday, February 16, 2025 8p-11p EST.

Nobody asked this writer or the Secret Movie Club website their thoughts on the Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary show. We’re a movie culture community after all. So this is our dive into the pop culture pool unannounced. A big ol’ cannonball…

As a child of divorce, the 1980’s, baby boomers, it was probably inevitable that …

STROMBOLI is a strange film. A strange and beautiful film.

The first collaboration between Italian neorealist master and his new wife, movie star Ingrid Bergman (who scandalized the US by leaving her previous husband at the height of her Hollywood fame for Rossellini), STROMBOLI has many powerful, unexpected rhythms. Like the overwhelming sea that surrounds the island of the movie's name.

The story almost feels like the fourth entry in Rossellini's World War II series …

Some movies try to say it all. And some drive their makers mad.

Stop-motion animation master Phil Tippett, responsible for key stop-motion sequences in classics like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, ROBOCOP spent thirty years to bring his dialogue-less nightmare vision MAD GOD to completion.

CHICKEN RUN this ain't. 

He finally did in 2021 but had a total breakdown…

Joanna Hogg's THE SOUVENIR: PART II complicates THE SOUVENIR: PART I. Often for the good, but not always.

If THE SOUVENIR PART I triumphs because it is a brutal and humane look at a love affair plagued by one partner's drug addiction, THE SOUVENIR PART II continues the story of the partner who survives and must carry on.

But this may not be getting to the heart of it. Both THE SOUVENIR PARTS I & II are …

Joanna Hogg's THE SOUVENIR is a beautiful film for the very reasons that it may turn off some.

This semi-autobiograpical story charts the doomed love between affluent British student filmmaker Julie (a beautifully calibrated Honor Swinton Byrne) and self-destructive Anthony (Tom Burke in commendable Bronte protagonist form), an arrogant yet soulful foreign service staffer with a heroin addiction.

Julie's loving if traditionalist mother Rosalind (Byrne's real life mother and international actor supreme Tilda Swinton) observes from afar.

The frustrations of the movie are its triumphs. Hogg …

Documentary movies are elusive things. Docs about music festivals maybe even more so.

A doc like D.A. Pennebaker's MONTEREY POP captures amazing performances at the 1967 Monterey Pop festival from 1960's luminaries like The Mamas & the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Ravi Shankar and others. And you do, in its most transcendent moments, feel like you are experiencing it as the audience experienced it.

At the same time…

Holy sh*t. 

Writer/director Zach Cregger comes out of comedy. And it's this skill set that may have made him uniquely able to make one of the most terrifying horror movies of the last ten years.

Although we have no intention of spoiling the MANY surprises this movie has in store for you, we may have to tread lightly around and hint at a few. So if you just want to go into this movie cold, stop here. It's worth it. 

If you're review proof, let's tread into the darkness down this tunnel a bit further...