Films and Feelings

  The train of Disney remakes typically inspires little awe from the cinephilia elite, but the studio's latest offering, "Cruella," shows more curiosity and ambition than the standard plug and chug reboot. This may have just been Bob Iger checking 1961's "101 Dalmatians" off the list of properties to exploit, but with the film's clever design, writing, and performances, director Craig Gillespie accidentally made the rare remix worth a second glance. This prequel tracks the devilish diva's history all the way back to her childhood. When primary school-aged "Estella" witnesses the death of her doting mother, her fiery, nonconformist spirit becomes her greatest asset. This will carry her into adulthood when she finally assimilates herself into the alluring world of fashion and the path of the indominatable "Baronness" who holds a strangling grip on the landscape. Their odd mentorship melts into something twisted and volatile as Estel...

  It must have been early 2020 when post-production wrapped on John Krasinski's A Quiet Place part II , a film that opens in flashback as we see a community descend in real-time into global mayhem. We see the Abbot family in their final moments of naive bliss before the alien monsters lay waste to the human population. Had this movie premiered in theaters on its original release date last spring, this overture might have been just a clever segue between this film and its wildly successful 2018 predecessor.  But for this weekend's audience, many of which are returning to the theater for the first time since the pandemic eradicated public living, this scene is just short of traumatizing, a mirror to how rapidly our own sense of social equilibrium unraveled before our eyes. How naive, indeed, we were to underestimate the fragility of the social fabric that permits such frivolous pastime as ritual theatergoing. The narrative proper begins minutes after the conclusion of the first ...

                           For a program that’s had less and less viewership with every passing year, we still put a lot of stock into the annual Academy Awards Ceremony and its designation of Best Picture of the Year. The exact criteria for this award change throughout time, but the constant has always been an incentive to honor whatever film captures the cultural subconscious for any given year. For the voters from last month’s ceremony, the listless tourism of Chloe Zhang’s Nomadland apparently really hit home for a world that had been in lockdown for a year.      So what was the Academy thinking in 1954 when they selected the movie that killed Frank Sinatra? Released in 1953 and directed by Fred Zinneman, From Here to Eternity is a romantic melodrama set against the backdrop of impending war. Based on the book by James Jones, the film follows the inner lives of soldiers and civilians in...