The appeal of films by Jim Jarmusch, especially his early work, is difficult to explain to someone who’s never watched one, and frankly even to some who have. His movies don’t exactly feel or behave like anything you’d expect from a regular movie. 1989’s Mystery Train, for example, has little story or plot to speak… Read More Some Days Just Go Like That | Mystery Train (1989) Criterion Collection Blu-ray
This week in the Film After 11 podcast, I take my son Joseph out to the ballpark for a viewing of Penny Marshall’s rousing 1992 baseball picture A League of Their Own. As a former Little Leaguer, he appreciated the depiction of baseball and the history lesson he didn’t know beforehand. If you’ll forgive the… Read More Film After 11 Podcast | A League of Their Own (1992)
With a narrative premise that sounds like a gimmick, if not the basis for a comedy, The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey is in fact a very heavy drama with significant physical, emotional, and spiritual stakes for its characters. Although imperfect, the movie is quite an impressive artistic achievement that seemed at the time to signal… Read More No Escape from the Real World | The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988) Blu-ray
In this week’s episode of the Film After 11 podcast (remember, we changed the title of the show), I take my son Thomas on a journey back to Medieval times for the rollicking adventure of A Knight’s Tale. Clever boy, he picked up right away that something might be amiss as soon as a rock… Read More Film After 11 Podcast | A Knight’s Tale (2001)
Adapted from a supposedly unadaptable 1928 novel by legendary author Virginia Woolf, Orlando was a key work of the early 1990s independent film movement and continues to reverberate in select areas of popular culture decades later. Spanning a period of some four hundred years, the story is a sweeping meditation on historical significance, personal identity,… Read More There Can Be No Doubt About His Sex | Orlando (1992) 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
As announced last week, the Film at 11 podcast has now officially been rebranded as Film After 11. It’s the same podcast as before, just with a slightly different title. For the inaugural episode, Joseph and I sit down to watch Robin Williams’ 1995 blockbuster Jumanji. If you’ve paid any attention, you may have noticed… Read More Film After 11 Podcast | Jumanji (1995)
The human mind’s dream state has fascinated filmmakers since the earliest days of cinema. Arguably, no other artistic medium has come closer to being able to capture and depict the peculiar logic, or illogic, of dreams than the movies have. The animation medium seems well-suited to that task, and Japanese anime in particular even more… Read More She Really Is a Woman of Your Dreams | Paprika (2006) Blu-ray
With 52 weekly episodes now completed, the Film at 11 podcast has reached its milestone one-year anniversary. Rather than review another movie this week, we’ve decided to take a look back at the past year, decide which films were our favorites, which were our least favorites, and maybe consider whether any of our initial ratings… Read More Film at 11 Podcast | One-Year Retrospective
With the huge success of Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven, Westerns made a big comeback on cinema screens in the early 1990s. Not all of them were awards bait, however. The likes of Tombstone or Young Guns II were just rowdy fun, while director Sam Raimi (creator of the Evil Dead franchise) dabbled with a… Read More Do We Have Any Real Gunmen in This Room? | The Quick and the Dead (1995) 4K Ultra HD
One of my intentions in doing the Film at 11 podcast is to challenge my children by making them watch movies that may be a little outside their comfort zones. For my son Thomas, that means I subjected him to Christopher Nolan’s 2010 mind-bender Inception this week. Although I knew Thomas would enjoy the action… Read More Film at 11 Podcast: Episode 52 | Inception (2010)
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