In Van Maximillian Carlson?s Princess of the Row, the model of familial loves is boiled down to a teenage girl and the love she has for her father. That may not seem a very difficult concept, but the father in this instance is problematic. Alicia (Tayler Buck) has...
We may not expect an Oscar nominated writer/directorto bring us a short film. But then we don?t often know what to expect from Yorgos Lanthimos (three nominations between The Lobster and The Favourite). Nimic is twelve minutes worth of the kind of surreal weirdness...
Family can be a place of pain or a place of healing. It can be the place we try to escape from or the place we need to return to. It is where we hear words that are like a knife in the heart or like the warmth of a hug. In Alan Ball?s Uncle Frank, it is all of those...
?You think your self-destruction is grand theater?. You?re just a performer in your own pathetic vaudeville show.? Legend has it that on November 3, 1953, famed Welsh poet Dylan Thomas spent the day at The White Horse Tavern in New York. When he got back to his hotel,...
?Life is delicioso; you just have to bite it.? Team Marco, from director Julio Vincent Gambuto, is a story about generations learning from each other. It asks us to look up from our screens to see the world, and more importantly, the people around us. It also reminds...
?The way a state functions can crush people sometimes.? In 2015 a fire broke out in Colectiv, a Bucharest nightclub. Twenty-seven people died because there was only one exit. The corruption that allowed that to happen enraged the populace and led to the fall of the...
I recently had an opportunity to join with some other writers in a roundtable interview with Ron Howard, director of Hillbilly Elegy, based on the memoir by J.D. Vance about growing up in Appalachia and the Rust Belt and eventually going to Yale Law School. The film...
We may think of baseball as the American Pastime, but we are not the only place that loves the game. Baseball is also a very popular sport in Japan, and has been for over 100 years. Each year, there is a nationwide high school tournament leading up to crowning a...
?Cowboy?s not what you do; it?s who you are, It?s just something in you.? One of the key mythic icons of American life is the cowboy. Most young boys, and probably many girls as well, dream of being a cowboy when they grow up. Few actually become cowboys. In Cowboys,...