The Magic Lantern

With circumstances completely against it, but with the brightest imaginations around set alight by a poet and artist, Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast or La Belle et la Bête (1946) is one of the most indelible creations ever committed to film. My connection to Jean Cocteau, like so many…

The post Episode 073 – Beauty and the Beast appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

When the Creature from the Black Lagoon crawled from the sea onto cinema screens in 1954, Universal Studios found its last great monster. When I discovered it in 1976, I found my first great cinematic love. The Universal monster pantheon turned out to be one of the foundations of my…

The post Episode 072 – Creature from the Black Lagoon appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

A first among equals as a sports film, Hoosiers (Anspaugh, 1986) is an ideal choice for this time of year: March Madness and the coming of spring and fresh starts. With a lead and supporting cast of characters each battling their own frailties, potential, and failings, there’s no need for…

The post Episode 071 – Hoosiers appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

It’s not often that a recent release strikes such an immediate chord with us that it makes its way into our show rotation so quickly, but I knew from the first few moments of Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) that I wanted to talk about it right away.…

The post Episode 070 – Dawson City: Frozen Time appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

Episode 069. Nice. Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all! We learn an awful lot of things from the movies, so I don’t know why the birds and the bees should be any different. In my adolescent world, the options were either the dubious news gathering of the schoolyard or less than reputable…

The post Episode 069 – The Birds and the Bees by Lantern Light appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

What happens when you take a preternatural talent and give him a gigantic crew, cast, resources, many stages, and let him loose to reimagine a work he created with his muse, another preternatural talent? In the case of Sweet Charity (1969), you get a young but experienced dynamo, Bob Fosse,…

The post Episode 068 – Sweet Charity appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

When I first encountered Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), I had no idea how important to me he would become. His films mercifully allow me a window into another world. They are a method of escape, but not in the way you typically think…

The post Episode 067 – Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

Like so many of my favorite Billy Wilder films, The Apartment (1960) begins with a voiceover. Our very own buddy boy C.C. Baxter puts us firmly in the world of making a living, of rising up in the world, or being ground beneath its boot heel. He begins to show…

The post Episode 066 – The Apartment appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

It’s our third annual Ants In Your Pants episode, as we close out 2017! As always, our lists were culled with much difficulty from all the wonderful films we saw this year, and we only talk about those we saw for the first time which made the biggest impressions on…

The post Episode 065 – Ants In Your Pants of 2017 appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

A world of pure imagination. That’s what we’re promised by Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), and boy, does it ever deliver. This adaptation of Roald Dahl’s sweet satire is full to the brim with novelties and notions, some whimsical, some bittersweet. What it doesn’t advertise right…

The post Episode 064 – Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory appeared first on The Magic Lantern.