Reading Time: 3 minutes This isn’t your kid’s Disney nature documentary. Nothing against that genre: I enjoy watching cute cavorting penguins or monkeys, accompanied by perky music. But Wildcat is something better, something deeper. In this excellent documentary by first-time feature directors Trevor Frost and Melissa Lesh, the stakes are higher. Survival of the eponymous ocelot isn’t guaranteed, and […]
Andrew Spitznas
SECULAR CINEPHILE
Movies have been a lifelong consuming passion, with vivid childhood memories of staying up late for James Bond on TV and standing in line for the original Star Wars movie. I still watch the occasional multiplex blockbuster, but nowadays, my enthusiasm tends towards arthouse fare and thoughtful documentaries. Happiness is an audience Q&A at a film festival.
I strive to look at cinema through a secular humanist lens, with an eye towards social justice, equality, and life without a religious crutch. As a practicing psychiatrist for a quarter-century, I also love to explore psychological themes in movies.
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Aftersun’ perfectly captures the grief-memory connection
Reading Time: 6 minutes Some coincidences you can’t make up. On the day I watched Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, her masterful film on grief and memory, my daughter sent me a video of my now-deceased son Josh. He was laughing as we watched a silly YouTube cartoon on Christmas Eve a few years back. Oh, the mix of emotions this […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Underneath its pretty skin, ‘Glass Onion’ is spoiled produce
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’ll admit, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery was mostly fun to watch. The flashbacks and twists were playful and clever. It offers some genuine laughs. The cameos were a nice surprise, and its costumes are delicious eye candy. But then I started thinking about what I’d just seen. Way to kill the mood, brain. […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘The Fabelmans’: Steven Spielberg’s origin story
Reading Time: 3 minutes As we’d expect from a master storyteller like Steven Spielberg, he expertly sets the table right at the start of his autobiographical film, The Fabelmans. His family is American, yet different. They’re nurturing, but decidedly nontraditional.. And movies, and their creation, will be the prism through which his proxy Sammy views the world, comprehends it, […]
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‘The Whale’ dives into religious trauma and other barriers to love
Reading Time: 4 minutes “People are incapable of not caring.” This is perhaps the most poignant line in Darren Aronofsky’s profound, empathic new film The Whale. I also think it’s true. Sadly, there are plenty of barriers to caring. Racism and sexism. Political othering. And, explored most deeply in The Whale, self-loathing and faith-based manipulation. If you allow this […]
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‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ excels as portrait of groundbreaking artist, activist
Reading Time: 3 minutes Laura Poitras’ latest film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, truly has everything you could want from a great documentary. It’s got a fascinating, articulate—even heroic—subject at its heart, in photographer and activist Nan Goldin. Her intimate photos of East Coast queer culture, and domestic function and dysfunction, marry splendidly with recent footage of her […]
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‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio’ disappoints with its blandness
Reading Time: 3 minutes It should’ve been so much better. A film from Guillermo del Toro, director of the inventive, visually engrossing Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water. Stop-motion animation from Jim Henson’s studio. A soundtrack from Oscar winner Alexandre Desplat, the go-to music maker for Wes Anderson. Characters voiced by Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Ewan McGregor, John […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘She Said’: Ending Harvey Weinstein’s reign of terror
Reading Time: 4 minutes “He took my voice that day.” There are few things sadder than the way trauma can alter a person and their life’s trajectory. She Said, the film documenting The New York Times’ investigation into movie producer Harvey Weinstein, is an engrossing story of journalistic discovery. But it also does an excellent job of showing the […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Comedy duo: ‘Triangle of Sadness’ and ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
Reading Time: 4 minutes After a year short on laughs—in world affairs and at the cineplex—it’s welcome to have two excellent new comedies drop almost simultaneously. Don’t let the title deter you. Triangle of Sadness had me laughing out loud more than any film since 2020’s Borat sequel. As an added bonus, it has the best comedic vomiting sequence […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Tár’: Stupendous performance, deplorable character
Reading Time: 4 minutes Lydia Tár is one of the great cinematic villains. Control and cleanliness have replaced warmth and authenticity. She’s in love with the sound of her own voice, believing the hype that her pronouncements are oracular. She expects to be fawned over and obeyed. As conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, the transactional nature of her workplace […]