Tonight I saw the 1989 Australian film Celia. I commend the new Beacon Cinema in Seattle for playing it, otherwise I might not have known about it. Far from being a horror movie as it was mistakenly packaged (Senses of Cinema has an essay outlining how that happened), the layers of this film u...

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Tonight was one of the most fun movie experiences I've ever had. As part of the Silent Movie Mondays series put on by Seattle's Paramount Theater, the 1929 Norwegian film Laila was shown with live accompaniment on the Wurlitzer organ, played by Tedde Gibson. The movie is epic: a story spanning y...

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2018 was, among other things, the year I waited for movies to show up in Seattle's movie semi-wasteland. "Shoplifters" was one of those movies, but it was worth the wait. As of today I've seen every (fictional) movie by Koreeda, and this is definitely one of his best. What it most obviously sha...

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On this day I saw Summer 1993, a 2017 film from Spain, and now over a month later it's still circling in my head. Good movies about children are rare, and this is the rarest of them all: a film in which the entire story revolves around a child's inner life. And it does so in a real way. Much lik...

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The Day After is a recent film by Hong Sang-soo that showed at the Northwest Film Forum. Filmed in spare black and white, little of what actually happens in the film couldn't be found in a second-rate soap, but that's intentional. Pieces of the story are assembled into a puzzling and absorbing wh...

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Thelma has been listed by some as one of the better films of 2017, but I found it only intermittently convincing. A few striking scenes have stuck with me to be sure, not least because of the film's measured pace, but despite often wishing movies would take more time I felt like this one was stretc...

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Here's another childhood-related movie I've been wanting to see: The Spirit Of The Beehive from 1973. I finally rented it it from Reckless, and I don't think I'll ever forget it. Though the film does ultimately follow the imaginative world of children, it also concerns the adults: the girls'...

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The wonderful movie I watched tonight — The Night I Swam — goes right on my list of Movies About Chilhood. It follows a little boy as he wanders off, staying at his level for the most part, watching him with a steady gaze until we begin to sense what he's feeling, along the way capturing many o...

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Yes I did swear never to return to the local multiplex, but now it has reserved seating for all screens, and after a trying week I felt like going out to sit in the dark with the public and see something ridiculous. Annihilation was just the ticket: slow to develop, growing more freaky. Despite be...

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