Film

I had an epiphany while watching “Project Hail Mary.” Ryan Gosling could have played Marty in “Marty Supreme,” but Timothée Chalamet could never have played Ryland Grace in “Project Hail Mary.” There’s an effortless charisma to what Gosling does here that feels like a future Best Actor nomination, without question. It’s a movie star performance […]

In what felt like one of the most hotly contested Oscar races in recent memory, I found myself excited for the 98th Annual Academy Awards more than I had any right to be. Don’t get me wrong, the ceremony itself was overlong and filled with awkward moments, cringey speeches and performative humanitarianism, but the films […]

What do you need from an animated film that’s aimed primarily at children? Is it just something for you to throw on in front of the kiddos for a few hours while you get something else done? Do you want the film to teach vital lessons to your kids while sparking nostalgia for your own […]

For the last few years, I’ve been the lead shorts programmer for the Bend Film Festival, which has involved me watching hundreds and hundreds of short films over several months of submissions. One thing I’ve learned in that time is that it’s easy to tell when you’re watching a terrible one, but when you discover […]

Ever since the first trailer for Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” was released, I’ve been obsessed with finding out why they’re selling the film with the quotation marks around the title. No one does that. Five minutes into the film, I figured out why. This isn’t Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; this is very much Emerald Fennell’s […]

We’re still smack dab in the middle of that time of year when most of what’s getting released doesn’t have much cultural cachet (or a massive marketing budget) and so gets quietly released around the end of January or the top half of February…just somewhere in the first quarter of the year. I still spent […]

For like five minutes, I thought it would be a funny idea to start this review pretending like I was doing a deep dive into the new “Melania” documentary, but then I had the (quite obvious) epiphany that giving money, publicity, or my words to propaganda directed by a hack filmmaker photographed cuddling women next […]

I’m not sure if any two people find the same things romantic, but there are still movies and moments I think are absolutely undeniable. After a cozy night in or a decadent night out, here are a few romantic-as-all-hell movies that will play as the perfect nightcap to your special day. 1: “Phantom Thread” (2017): […]

A one-day film festival will feature more than two dozen documentary shorts made by filmmakers from around the world. The Oregon Documentary Film Festival is being held at The Commonwealth Pub on Sunday, Feb. 15. It begins mid-afternoon with a social networking event involving the filmmakers. An awards ceremony is at 3pm with screenings beginning […]

Here’s how I know my brain is a giant old warehouse full of contradictions, out-of-print VHS tapes and Drew Struzan movie posters: I hold space for the two competing thoughts that the Oscars are an out-of-touch racket that only celebrates films with marketing budgets in the tens of millions, while also obsessively theorizing for weeks […]