Show Me Cinema

A Journey Through Cinema’s

PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE

  • “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…

  • Here Comes “The Bride!”

    Here Comes “The Bride!”

    There is a moment, fairly early in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s audacious and maddening The Bride!, where the film seems to dare you to keep up with it. Mary Shelley — speaking from the afterlife, played with electric, aristocratic menace by Jessie Buckley — leans into the camera and announces that she has a story she never…

  • “Sinners” – A Juke Joint at the End of the World

    “Sinners” – A Juke Joint at the End of the World

    Ryan Coogler’s Sinners arrives as something genuinely rare: an original studio film with the ambition, scale, and soul to match its budget. Set in the Mississippi Delta of 1932, it is at once a horror movie, a blues musical, a Jim Crow-era family drama, and a meditation on what happens when a culture creates something so transcendently…

  • Horror Without Torches: Guillermo del Toros’s “Frankenstein” (2025)

    Horror Without Torches: Guillermo del Toros’s “Frankenstein” (2025)

    In the summer of 1816, the sky over Europe dimmed. Mount Tambora had erupted the year before, scattering ash across the atmosphere and lowering global temperatures. The result was what contemporaries would call “the year without a summer”—a season of relentless rain, failed crops, and unseasonable cold. On the shores of Lake Geneva, confined indoors…

  • 25 in 25 #19: “Zodiac” (2007)

    25 in 25 #19: “Zodiac” (2007)

    Zodiac is a film that unfolds less like a conventional narrative than like a slow infection. It seeps in quietly, with one of the most disturbing opening scenes, before taking up permanent residence in the mind. On first encounter, it can even feel withholding—cool, procedural, resistant to the familiar beats we expect from true-crime cinema.…

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

Andrei Tarkovsky