The Magic Lantern

Hear ye, hear ye! Court is now in session. All rise for our examination of Stanley Kramer’s sterling courtroom drama, Inherit the Wind (1960). This film, an excoriation of McCarthyism dressed up in the garb of the Scopes Monkey Trial, is a true cinematic building block of my adulthood. As…

The post Episode 023 – Inherit the Wind appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

I first saw Robert Clouse’s Darker Than Amber (1970) two years ago, which was a full 44 years after its initial release. That year, I counted it among the very best of what I saw, and I saw a lot of wonderful films. Why did it make such an impression?…

The post Episode 022 – Darker Than Amber appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

It’s been a long time since I have been as immediately taken with a film the way I was with Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013). We don’t often feature films that are this new on the show. Typically, for a movie to make its way into…

The post Episode 021 – The Tale of the Princess Kaguya appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

How far are you willing to go? In George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1988), Rex makes the ultimate choice to follow the trail of the disappeared Saskia until the eternal uncertainty of her fate can be resolved. Few endings in modern memory can match that resolution. Skip the dumbed down (and…

The post Episode 020 – The Vanishing appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

Blue Collar (1978) was Paul Schrader’s first foray into film direction after the notable success of his screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976), and it almost ended his directorial career before it even began. It was a tumultuous enterprise, with Richard Pryor providing fireworks ranging from thrown chairs to pulled pistols,…

The post Episode 019 – Blue Collar appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

I’ve written and deleted a lot of opening statements for this post. First, I set out to simply state that Groundhog Day (1993) is universally beloved. I began to list its accolades, but it doesn’t feel quite fitting to take a comedy and explain its praise. That should be easy;…

The post Episode 018 – Groundhog Day appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

The Long Goodbye (1973) is my favorite Robert Altman film. For the longest time that was McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), but as soon as I saw this I knew I was home. It’s like it was tailor-made for me. Elliott Gould’s everyman detective brings noir, one of my favorite…

The post Episode 017 – The Long Goodbye appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

And we, spectators always, everywhere, looking at, never out of, everything! —Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy” Dear Compañeros, I invite you to fall under the spell of Wings of Desire (1987), Wim Wenders’ visual poem of a scarred, haunted Berlin, of the mortals who inhabit it and the immortal…

The post Episode 016 – Wings of Desire appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

Suspiria (1977) is Dario Argento’s lurid, unreal masterpiece. Its garish palette (it was one of the last films made in Technicolor), baleful sound design and stylized brutality force us through the looking glass in more ways than one. Little did I know when I discovered this that it would be…

The post Episode 015 – Suspiria appeared first on The Magic Lantern.

John Huston’s Let There Be Light (1946) was the final installment in a trilogy of wartime documentaries produced for the U.S. Army. He set about following a group of soldiers who had experienced severe battle fatigue and were undergoing treatment in a military psychiatric facility for a wide array of…

The post Episode 014 – Let There Be Light appeared first on The Magic Lantern.