Show Me Cinema

A Journey Through Cinema’s

PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE

  • 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…

  • “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…

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

Andrei Tarkovsky