Show Me Cinema

A Journey Through Cinema’s

PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE

  • “One Battle After Another” – A Chaotic Film for Our Time

    “One Battle After Another” – A Chaotic Film for Our Time

    Some films hit you like a brick on first viewing, and One Battle After Another is one of them. It’s unruly, overstuffed, and constantly accelerating, as though the movie itself is inhaling the same frantic air as the country it depicts. But when you return to it, the film settles into clarity. All that volatility—the tonal lurches,…

  • 25 in ’25 #23: “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022)

    25 in ’25 #23: “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022)

    Top Gun: Maverick arrived in theaters in the summer of 2022 like a flare shot across a darkened sky—bright, unmistakable, and freighted with a message. After two years of shuttered multiplexes, streaming wars, and the uneasy question of whether the theatrical experience might be fading into myth, here came a film that insisted, without hesitation, that…

  • 25 in ’25 #24: “Elf” (2003)

    25 in ’25 #24: “Elf” (2003)

    Few modern Christmas movies have earned the peculiar dual honor of feeling both immediately contemporary and instantly timeless. Elf (2003), Jon Favreau’s cheery, sugar-dusted comedy about a human raised at the North Pole, is one of the rare entries in the holiday canon that managed to capture the collective American imagination and stay there—year after year, rewatch…

  • 25 in ’25 #25: “Don’t Look Up” (2021)

    25 in ’25 #25: “Don’t Look Up” (2021)

    Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up arrived in December 2021 like a message in a bottle from a civilization already sinking, a film that felt both uncomfortably prescient and almost too on the nose arriving after the second full year of COVID-19 impacting our lives on a daily basis (this was during the rise of the Omicron variant,…

  • Once (2007)

    Once (2007)

    Directed by John Carney Drama R 1h 26m A funny thing, life is. It is an extremely rare thing that a movie captures life so beautifully, that it brings tears to my eyes during the opening sequence. “Once” is that film. There is very little dialogue in the first three minutes, just a long shot,…

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

Andrei Tarkovsky