Show Me Cinema

A Journey Through Cinema’s

PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE

  • 25 in ’25 #20: “Superbad” (2007)

    25 in ’25 #20: “Superbad” (2007)

    There are comedies that succeed because they are funny, and then there are comedies that succeed because they understand something essential about the moment in which they appear. Superbad does both—and that dual achievement is precisely why it became an instant classic. Released in the summer of 2007, Superbad didn’t creep its way into cultural memory; it detonated. Almost…

  • 25 in 25 #21: “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001)

    25 in 25 #21: “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001)

    The Royal Tenenbaums opens with the quiet confidence of a film that already knows exactly what it wants to be. It greets the viewer like a well-loved book—familiar, a little odd, and marked by a dry, knowing humor. From the very first moments, with the instrumental “Hey Jude” drifting over the prologue, the film establishes its…

  • 25 in ’25 #22: “The Holdovers” (2023)

    25 in ’25 #22: “The Holdovers” (2023)

    Early in Alexander Payne’s 2023 film, The Holdovers, Paul Hunham informs his students—without a trace of consolation—that “life is like a henhouse ladder: shitty and short.” It is not merely a joke, or even a provocation, but a thesis statement: a bleak, funny distillation of the film’s worldview, in which suffering is unavoidable, dignity is hard-won,…

  • “Hamnet” – My Favorite Film of The Year

    “Hamnet” – My Favorite Film of The Year

    There are films that touch the heart, films that bruise it—and then there are films that ask you to live with your heart open. Hamnet is that rare, soul-deep experience. Watching it, boundaries between the modern audience and the people onscreen—whose real-life counterparts walked, loved, and mourned more than four hundred years ago—soften and blur, as if…

  • The Quiet Tragedy of “Train Dreams”

    The Quiet Tragedy of “Train Dreams”

    By the time the credits rolled, I felt as though I had watched an entire life — fragile, lonely, unrecorded — unfold and disappear. And I knew that Train Dreams, the new Netflix film based on the 2011 novella, would be one of my favorite films of the year. Not because it dazzles, but because it…

“Relating a person to the whole world: that is the power of cinema.”

Andrei Tarkovsky