65 years ago on Nov. 14, little Ruby Bridges was escorted into an all-white elementary school in New Orleans. Norman Rockwell, renowned for blissful depictions of Americana, did this remarkable painting for Look magazine. Printed as a double page, over-size spread, it's his masterpiece.

Some inspiring words on cinema in the streaming era from the Pope. Yes, THAT Pope.

My mom watched S01 as it aired but I was 9 & only caught snippets. As soon as I could drive, I rented the whole series on VHS from a video store 30 minutes away, and rewatched parts of it when it came out on DVD. Notoriously, the pilot wasn’t included in either release, so I didn’t see it until 2014

PTU: rich, funny, theatrical, mannerist. The first Johnnie To movie I didn’t just admire but loved, with arguably the defining role for Lam Suet, the greatest supporting actor since Walter Brennan. Endlessly rewatchable.

The Fishing Place (2024, Rob Tregenza) eluded me as narrative but the photography sure hits

I’m two ★★★★ Letterboxd logs of late Linklater or Assayas away from admitting I like the movie equivalent of soft rock

The most confusing things to me about dating are when they've never heard of cross-contamination, and when they don't believe clicking on a trackpad with your thumb is a thing. Plus everything else

Sorry to post this at 9pm when Bluesky is tumbleweeds but everyone should know that Abel Ferrara narrates his new memoir on audiobook. He even pronounces the words www.audible.com/pd/Scene-Aud...

History's littered with beautiful ideas for movies that never got made—Soderbergh's conclusion to Star Wars is the latest—but Abel Ferrara saying on Conan in '96 that he wants to do "Cheers with a little T&A" and ACTUALLY DOING IT 10 yrs later kinda makes up for all of them youtu.be/aY7yyhjOXWw?...

Parents, please check your kids’ candy this Halloween. I’ve just found an ancient metal whistle with the inscription “QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT" inside a Snickers bar. I blew it and heard a note of infinite distance, and now I’m haunted by a figure in pale, fluttering draperies. Be safe.

"I haven't thought much about parades tbh" such an iconic answer that Cuomo immediately tries to pilfer it

In order to watch Emergency Kisses, a Philippe Garrel movie I'd never seen, in 1080p, I had to subscribe to UniversCiné, rent the movie, dl English subtitles, convert the subs from 25fps to 24, find a website that could overlay SRT on streaming video, and correct for drift. I just love streaming 🫩

The bonsai-trimming episode in Safdie's remake of The Smashing Machine is a highlight but the way it pales next to its wordless counterpart from Hyams' original speaks to the dangers of transposing work from a minor to a major key

This Clint bio is readable as summary, worthless as judgment. Why aren’t biographies written by critics, instead of hacks? We need more bios by people like Tag Gallagher, Bernard Eisenschitz, and Dan Nadel, less by journalists who purport to have taste and lack imagination

If Sergio Leone were alive today, he’d still only be a year older than Clint Eastwood

Please everyone stop befouling this good news with frames from Don’t Look Up

At any given moment I am thinking about these photos of Sally Eilers filming Walls of Gold in 1933.

“If I face a film that just delivers the message without leaving me the freedom to form my own perspective, I stay outside.”

The Tracking Shot in Kapo but it’s just about Mike Figgis making Megadoc

This past week's p0ptimism discourse has been thoughtful and these posts from Frank are especially articulate. One angle I haven't seen this round is, what did p0ptimism mean to you? As a teen in the 90s, I didn't know I was nb, queer or neurodivergent. /1

Really enjoyed the Generation Taylor ep of Switched on Pop for giving me vocab to talk about Swift's songwriting: minimal (stepwise) melodies w/perfect prosody, T Drops (a minor 2nd into a descending 5th etc). And for talking about Maisie Peters out loud. That's a first. What next, Claire Rosinkranz

Forget whether or not critics are mean enough anymore, what about Borges via Pierre Menard: “Censure and praise are sentimental operations which have nothing to do literary criticism.”

New Jen Cohen is rich, discursive, a lovely bummer. What a gift it is that old friends like Michael Stipe, Patti Smith and Guy Picciotti are in a position to help him get pictures like this* made. *as if anyone is making pictures like this, as if Robert Kramer had grown up with Dischord and lived

I think we can all agree James Gray was better before he went prestige but returning to his roots to make a story about brothers tangling with Russian Mafia in Queens–w/Driver, Teller & ScarJo–is the most excited I’ve been for one of his movies in a minute

Unpopular (?) opinion(s): Fay Grim is the great Parker Posey movie. Dutch angles are funny

“My entire creative life […] has in one way or another sought to be a kind of resistance to complacent jargon, the dumbing down of complex realities into opinionated sound bites.” – Hal Hartley

Hartley comes home, to an apartment full of stock company, and makes a last film, his usual tools used to gentler ends, a film of ideas as always & a farce ofc. A movie for right now, about a director who wants to do something “useful & perennial. […] service that is constantly & forever required.”

most underrated films of the 70s 70: Rio Lobo 71: Sometimes a Great Notion 72: Junior Bonner 73: Breezy 74: Le milieu du monde 75: Milestones 76: Mado 77: Citizens Band 78: Paradise Alley 79: 1941

IRL fashion aside, I've yet to enjoy a Chalamet performance but know that I now live to see him acting, via Josh Safdie, like ping-pong is all that matters in the world www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI6-...

There's a Kurosawa retro at the local arthouse, so twice this week I spent the afternoon watching Mifune yawn his way through feudal Japan in Tohoscope, and both times the same two guys in the back just laughed their butts off the whole time. My tix cost $7.25 and ngl those guys deserve part of it

furthest N/S/W/E N: Prince George, BC S: Kolhapur, India W: Vancouver E: Busan, S Korea

Fifth time watching They All Laughed but somehow the first time I noticed Robby Müller's cameraman was none other than Ed Lachman. Lachman talks about Müller's love for Joel Meyerowitz, Cape Light in particular, and you can see it. Masters of soft light, the light between buildings.

Thinking about Americana’s aesthetic conservatism, how music that shrinks from the contemporary is somehow less alive, in relation to lines from a Sally Rooney novel: “We can’t conserve anything […] without altering their nature, steering some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way”

A dude bro left a crowded screening of The Tree of Life in a huff when the dinosaurs showed up, saying something like "aw hell no wtf" on his way out. Imagine if he'd stayed for the Sean Penn stuff.

You all sound v smart trashing Materialists but to me the deranged way in which it’s maybe kinda bad, with famous actors forced to downplay in an aspirational but tone-deaf minor key inside 35mm A24 Marriage Story long takes, is actually pretty watchable. Is Celine Song the Gracie Abrams of movies?

Caden’s not wrong, Castration Movie Anthology i is like nothing else. Scummy, feel-bad, endless, real. A cinema for the 2020s.

If Superman movies are pop songs, then this one is One Week

With Top Gun & Days of Thunder, Tony Scott said what if a movie was surface, and a generation of critics, aspiring to taste, lost their minds. Kosinski is no Tony Scott but Hollywood in 2025 is not 1986. Sure, put the force of an industry behind a career-length interrogation of veneer. Why not?

I dug F1. Sue me? Kosinski &co rehearsed 3 scenes w/stopwatches for 2 straight weeks, then filmed them back-to-back-to-back in 15 minutes. Total. In 1 take. Who does that? Roger Corman? Gorgeous dad fantasy nonsense w/fascinating process, like an Adam Hughes comic w/o the cheesecake. I'll take it.

My version of nostalgia is re-evaluating genres I hated the first time around: emo, pop-punk, nü-metal. They're not as bad as I thought OR I really am that old

Tickets to see Brand New in Worcester are so cheap, I almost thought of going, until I remembered why they're so cheap

Had to interrupt S.O.B. (1981, Blake Edwards) partway through in order to watch this scene nineteen times

Plunkett, Parobeck & Burchett snuck a Love & Rockets reference into Batman Adventures #12

“You’ve made one documentary I liked, out of how many — six?” Paul Reubens knew a hack when he saw one.

All I want or need from social media these days is Charli xcx apologizing for how good every M. Night Shyamalan movie is

Egg Cuber (1977)

A film that takes place where you're from

Me at work every day for the next thousand years

Just saw someone refer, in an apparently complimentary way, to There Will Be Blood as "Kubrick by way of George Stevens," and well if that isn't a perfectly succinct way to describe what I'm not crazy about from that period of PTA