Every now and then when teaching film, you get to introduce a budding cinephile to Citizen Kane for the first time. It is not uncommon in my experience for their initial response to it to …

The Criterion DVD had an interview with Neil Labute talking about how Rohmer influenced him, but I confess that towards the end of Love in the Afternoon, the film I kept thinking about was Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

A well deserved Academy Award (for best documentary) went to Gibney’s investigation into the policies and practices that created the Abu Ghraib scandal. Eschewing sensationalistic tactics and avoiding an over-reliance on the photos themselves (which …

Question: What do the following actors have in common?: Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, Keanu Reeves, Nathan Lane, Robin Williams, Alicia Silverstone.

Answer: They were all exposed trying to do Shakespeare.

Lars and the Real Girl is a sweet film that gets a lot of emotional mileage out of showing people being kind. It is a film in which people are loving for no other reason than they can be and where they choose to be compassionate rather than cruel because doing the former seldom costs more than the latter.

What makes the film’s ending so sad and tragic is that I’m not sure that the characters themselves know. One can only spend so much time trying to keep truth hidden before one begins to lose the ability to recognize what it is.