Reel Encounters

Last week’s column on “A Ghost Story” had me thinking about representations of loneliness on screen.

Who invented the bedsheet ghost? The image of a ghost marked by donning a white sheet with holes for eyes is a classic and familiar concept.

“Mudbound” is a film that will be sold on its relevance.

“Beach Rats,” the winner of the best director award at this year’s Sundance film festival, is a filmic bildungsroman.

I made the potentially problematic decision, to screen Sidney Lumet’s 1974 adaptation of “Murder on the Orient Express” a few days after watching the recent 2017 Kenneth Branagh directed version.

Terence Davies has never met an opportunity for a tableau vivant he did not like.

“The Past” opens at an airport. We watch a reunion between two people.

“The Mountain Between Us” is a film that ends up just where you expect it to.

I have often had the argument with myself, and with others, about what should be expected from purported film “genres.”

There’s a scene in Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” that I use very often when discussing art and our relationship with it.

At the end of the month, there will be a television anniversary that may not be significant to many.

Earlier this month when Donald Glover won the Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Comedy Series (his second that night), he quipped, “I want to thank Trump for making black people number one on the most oppressed list.

“Who drew the dicks?” This is the narrative hook on which Netflix’s new mockumentary comedy “American Vandal” rests.

Visual-media of the eighties seems to have a stranglehold on coming-of-age pre-teen films, don’t they?

The romantic comedy “The Big Sick” did not open in cinemas in Guyana, which seemed particularly odd.

Early on in Perry Henzell’s “The Harder They Come,” the film establishes itself as firmly aware of the cultural and cinematic context from which it emerges.

The new film “Atomic Blonde” is a hyperaware, pop-version of the excellent 2011 adaptation of the John le Carré Cold War spy novel “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” 

The very last moment we see the main characters in “Girls Trip” has been playing on a loop in my brain since I saw it.

In mid-July, HBO released a brief press release about “Confederate,” an upcoming show from David Benioff and D.B.

I left “Dunkirk” with the word “liminality” on the tip of my tongue.