Smart Words About Cinema
MSN Movies recently polled the contributors to submit a list of their favorite films. Not a list of the best films ever made, or the most important, or most significant. This was about personal favorites, the films we return to, the films we love. Four Seattle film writers — all of them contributors to Parallax [...]
Welcome 2013 with one last look back at the best releases of 2011, as seen by the contributors to Parallax View and a few notable Seattle-based film critics. Sean Axmaker 1. Holy Motors 2. Zero Dark Thirty 3. Moonrise Kingdom 4. Margaret (2011 in NY and LA, didn’t screen elsewhere until 2012) 5. Cosmopolis 6. [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980] It is appropriate that they just took “There she is, Miss America” away from Bert Parks. I too have been deprived of the opportunity to sing my same old song again. One could say rhetorically that after 1978 the movies had nowhere to go but up; but [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] I felt a little off-balance throughout film year 1977, and it took me most of that time to figure out why. Even eccentric filmwatchers fall into patterns of expectation, and my Platonic Ideal of eccentricity was taking a beating. Too many of the big, heavily financed productions [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 53, January 1977] 1976 is a year I’m very pleased to see the back of. Several especially nice things happened to me during the past twelvemonth, but an oversupply of cloaca also insisted on hitting the fan with dispiriting frequency, and a good deal of it was cinematic cloaca. Any [...]
Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, partners in business and marriage, launched Milestone Films in 1990. They made a reputation for the company not merely for its restorations and revivals, but for rescuing and nurturing films that might otherwise have been drowned in the noise of the busy movie landscape, from Mikhail Kalatozov’s all but orphaned [...]
[Originally published on The House Next Door] For many years, I maintained a Top 10 list. It was changing all the time, but by the mid-1980s, I had pretty well nailed it down. Only by then was it a Top 12, not a Top 10, and anyone who asked me my Top 10 films got [...]
The only links page that matters… except for all the others. Seattle screenings and cinema events are surveyed at Parallax View here. Is it legitimate to theorize that some culpability for the brutal murders in Aurora lie at the feet of the movies themselves? Apparently, after throat-clearing assertions of their civil libertarian backgrounds, many film writers [...]
The only links page that matters… except for all the others. Seattle screenings and cinema events, including the “Best of SIFF” series and other post-SIFF releases, are surveyed at Parallax View here. Girish Shambu leads off his typically fine collection of links with a welcome announcement: Issue 2 of LOLA, the film journal he edits [...]
[Originally published in Pacific Northwest, January 1988] • Hope and Glory: Down among the green leaves of his family’s backyard garden, young Bill Rohan (Sebastian Rice Edwards) confronts the wizard Merlin, while in the house the stillness of the adults ’round a grumbling radio signals that the Second World War has just been declared…. • [...]
Welcome 2012 with one last look back at the best releases of 2011, as seen by the contributors to Parallax View. Critics listed in reverse alphabetical order Andrew Wright (as posted at Salt Lake Weekly) 1. Melancholia 2. Rise of the Planet of the Apes 3. Cave of Forgotten Dreams 4. 13 Assassins 5. Drive [...]
The 2011 Village Voice Film Poll is out and three Parallax View contributors participated this year. Just for the record, and because it’s no surprise, The Tree of Life took the top spot, just as it did for the Indiewire survey and the MSN poll. As for the lists, you can find all the contributors [...]
MSN Movies published its annual Best of the Year poll this week, featuring Top Ten lists from thirteen MSN writers including a trio of Parallax View contributors: Richard T. Jameson, Kathleen Murphy and Sean Axmaker. The rest of the line-up isn’t too shabby either: Jim Emerson, Don Kaye, Glenn Kenny, Kim Morgan, Mary Pols, James [...]
Welcome 2011 with one last look back at the best releases of 2010, as seen by the contributors to Parallax View. Sean Axmaker 1. Carlos 2. Let Me In 3. The Social Network 4. White Material 5. Winter’s Bone 6. The Ghost Writer 7. Wild Grass 8. Eccentricities Of A Blond Haired Girl 9. Sweetgrass [...]
Best-of lists are by their nature subjective things, and even more so when it comes to DVD/Blu-ray. What makes a DVD release the “best”? The movie itself? The video and audio quality of the mastering and presentation? The supplements? Rarity of the title? Scope of the collection? Critical acclaim? Cult demand? Some inexplicable balance of [...]