Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of Golden Years and The Taste of Things, plus a festival preview: Get ready for the return of Cinequest. CURRENT MOVIES WATCH AT HOME The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE: ON TV On February 27, Turner Classic Movies is presenting what is essentially a … Read more
This week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of Drift. Getting ready for the Oscars, I just rewatched Best Picture nominees Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives and Killers of the Flower Moon with The Wife and her father. They all stand up, with Oppenheimer, as the top four on my Best Movies … Read more
This week on The Movie Gourmet – a wrap-up of my experience last week’s Noir City in Oakland where Eddie Muller and team introduced me to four new noirs, two of which are magnificent. Now I’m screening films from the March 2024 Cinequest program. Incidentally, my coverage of Slamdance in January highlighted three films. The … Read more
This week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of The Zone of Interest. The best movies in theaters right now are American Fiction and Poor Things. The best current movies that you can watch at home are Anatomy of a Fall, Killers of the Flower Moon and The Holdovers. CURRENT MOVIES WATCH AT … Read more
This week on The Movie Gourmet: I’m actually at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, covering the last weekend of the Noir City festival of film noir in person. Here’s my Noir City preview with recommended movies. CURRENT MOVIES WATCH AT HOME The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE: ON TV On January 31, Turner Classic … Read more
This week on The Movie Gourmet – two of my favorite film festivals are opening today: And, coming up on TV, besides Babette’s Feast (described below in today’s post), I’m highlighting Jane Fonda’s first Oscar-winning performance in the now 53-year-old thriller Klute. One of the year’s best films, Killers of the Flower Moon, is now … Read more
The Boys in the Boat is the entertaining true story of the ultimate sports underdog – the University of Washington’s junior varsity rowing team, which won gold medals at the 1936 Olympics hosted by Hitler in Munich (the Jesse Owens Olympics). Again, this was UDub’s JUNIOR varsity boat. The Boys in the Boat follows a … Read more
In John Carney’s delightful Flora and Son, Flora (Eve Hewson) is a boisterous, messy and mouthy Dubliner with a bad attitude. Her life sucks, and she knows exactly why – she dropped out of school at 17 to have a baby. As an unskilled single mom, she is barely scraping by on babysitter gigs, and … Read more
In the swords-and-sorcerers fantasy The Green Knight, Dev Patel plays Sir Gawain of Arthurian legend. Gawain is privileged to be the son of a sorceress (Sarita Choudhury) and the nephew of the king (Sean Harris), and both have high hopes for him. But Gawain is short in the maturity department; he is so much of … Read more
You already know that Chinatown is the unanimous choice as the all-time great neo-noir. And you probably don’t need The Movie Gourmet to help you discover LA Confidential, Body Heat, Fargo, Point Blank or Jackie Brown. So here’s a list of less iconic neo-noir. [Note: What is noir and what is neo-noir? Although it’s generally … Read more