It seems like it’s been a while since we’ve really seen Kate Winslet. It’s been a good decade since she turned in the kind of performance we know she’s capable of, the sort of thing she was doing semi-regularly in the first decade of the century.

A few days ago, The Criterion Collection announced they’d be releasing a movie called Mandabi , by one of the true deities of world cinema, the late Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène.

Your first reaction isn’t always your best reaction. Sometimes movies seem different on a second viewing, and sometimes they just sort of change in the days after you watch them, and what you saw on Sunday doesn’t seem the same as what it is on Wednesday.

Writing dialogue that sounds like how people actually talk is ridiculously hard. Step back and think about it, and most of what we say in real life is… pretty boring! And it’s not at all elegant. There are a lot of “um”s, and “like”s and “you know”s, lots of half-thoughts, trailing off… A writer trying to do anything with this is either going to end up with something extremely stylized, or something that’s deadly dull to watch.

You know you’re looking for something to distract you tomorrow night so you’re not stressing out every single minute as votes are counted. And I’ve got just the thing.

A lot of us are probably staying in this Halloween, which means we’ll be looking for something spooky to watch. I’ll put in a plug for The Wolf of Snow Hollow , a flawed but highly entertaining new monster movie from director Jim Cummings.

It seems like everything these days has to be the “best” or the “most,” or people decide it’s not worth paying attention to. Calm down, everyone—a well made cream puff isn’t a hearty meal, but I’m still going to eat the heck out of it.

I mentioned a few weeks back how much fun it was to actually have access to far-away film festivals, since nearly everyone has gone to some form of a virtual festival for obvious reasons. And now, our own Tallgrass Film Festival is here—and with the stipulation that everything is better in a theater, and there’s something special about overextending yourself trying to pack everything in over a few days when things are normal, I have to say, the setup this year is… kind of great. The festival

Filmmaker Radha Blank’s new movie is called The Forty-Year-Old Version , which, yes, sounds a lot like the title of another movie you might know, and, yes, she quite obviously knows that. Blank is a master with word play, being a playwright, screenwriter, and hip hop emcee, and she uses that to her full advantage.

Dick Johnson Is Dead . So we are told by the title of documentarian Kirsten Johnson’s latest film, although it’s not actually true just yet.