Some of Andy Goldsworthy’s art requires a film to appreciate, and this does the job exquisitely. I haven’t come across any other artwork that evokes a sense of time, place, and the rhythms of nature like this does. Some of the interviews seem unnecessary to me – I’m always sympathetic to artists who have difficulty…

I think we all – me, my dad, Ann, and Sarah – wondered in our own way how well a Symphony derived from a soundtrack would succeed. After some digestion, I’ve concluded that it’s highly dependent on how you approach the listening. If you listen to it like a classical symphony it sounds, as Ann…

This must be what happens when you take an absurd Hollywood-style plot and play it down through the entire movie until the end, which you play up artistically. I liked the approach, which forced the focus onto the characters. With the extra breathing room often found in European movies, the tension comes from spaces that…

This was mostly an educational experience for me. When I saw Johnny, John, and June Carter Cash play on my birthday in 1996, I didn’t realize quite what a legacy I was witnessing. While the movie increased my appreciation of that legacy, it didn’t shed too much light on the enigma I’ve always been curious…

A well done tragedy, with good attention to detail and an impressive performance by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I haven’t read In Cold Blood, but the film seemed adept at telling that story through the story of how it was written, which supplies a bit of a biography of Capote in the process. Ann has read…

Probably just because it’s a coming of age flick I thought of Scent of A Woman after watching this. Only the kid is the dour, promiscuous one, the women are smiling, motherly prostitutes, and the outlook is Parisian, with life flowing in an endless cycle of shoplifted sardines, books of true wisdom, diluted Beaujolais, and…

The saving grace of this film is its portrayal of the media. When “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s character puts on the sunglasses of truth, billboards, TV, magazines, signs, and papers show their true messages in black and white: “OBEY”, “BUY”, “CONSUME”, “WATCH TV”, “MARRY AND REPRODUCE”, etc. And the movers and shakers of society are revealed…

A modern story of Irish immigrants in New York, this movie is really about coping with the loss of a child in a family. It’s clearly a deeply personal, autobiographical film, that presents its insights slowly, intimately, and honestly. For someone without children it serves to illustrate some of the forces that create families and…

No surprise, this isn’t a great movie, but it managed to beat my expectations of it. Here there, admidst drowning in its own clichés, it manages to hit on some of the damage done by our cultural definition of beauty. A couple of the more symbolic absurdities are funny. Some good acting by Gwyneth Paltrow…

I think from here on I’m going to read the book or watch the movie, not both. This TV miniseries production of Richard Russo’s book is done well, but having read it already I just couldn’t enjoy it fully.