Show Me Cinema

A Journey Through Cinema’s

PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE

  • The Academy’s Century: “The Broadway Melody” (1929)

    The Academy’s Century: “The Broadway Melody” (1929)

    The second Academy Awards ceremony, held in April 1930, was a quieter, more perfunctory affair than even its already modest inaugural predecessor. The Academy was still working out what it was for, what it was rewarding, and why anyone should care. Somewhere in that institutional uncertainty, The Broadway Melody slipped through — the first sound…

  • The 98th Academy Awards: On Cinema, History, and the Improbable Luck of Being Here

    The 98th Academy Awards: On Cinema, History, and the Improbable Luck of Being Here

    There is a version of this piece that opens with a complaint. A lament about the speeches getting cut off, about a bit that went nowhere, about Sean Penn winning an acting prize for playing a racist and not bothering to show up. That version exists. But I don’t think it is the right one,…

  • Shaking Into Song: “The Testament of Ann Lee” (2025)

    Shaking Into Song: “The Testament of Ann Lee” (2025)

    There is a moment roughly midway through The Testament of Ann Lee when Amanda Seyfried, playing the titular role, locked in close-up, opens her mouth and sings. The camera does not cut away. It does not search the room for reaction shots or retreat to a respectful medium shot. It simply stays, for what feels…

  • The Academy’s Century: “Wings” (1927)

    The Academy’s Century: “Wings” (1927)

    There is a peculiar injustice that history has visited upon Wings. The film is well-documented, widely available, yet it lives in the shadow of a movie it technically predates. Wings premiered in New York in August 1927, two months before The Jazz Singer arrived in October like a thunderclap and rendered almost everything that preceded…

  • “The Secret Agent” is the Strangest Best Picture Nominee in Years

    “The Secret Agent” is the Strangest Best Picture Nominee in Years

    There is a genuinely great film buried somewhere inside The Secret Agent — you can feel it most acutely in its opening hour, which crackles with the kind of lean, paranoid energy that recalls the best American thrillers of the 1970s. The setup is nothing short of genius. Armando, played by Wagner Moura, is an…

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

Andrei Tarkovsky