Author: Grace Cogan
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“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…
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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…
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“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,…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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,…
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A Complete Unknown (2024)
Directed by James Mangold Drama/Biopic R 2h 21m Something somewhat strange happened to me when I saw “A Complete Unknown”. I have never been a Bob Dylan die-hard, although I do deeply respect his writing and will boldly state that several of the songs, he penned are some of the greatest ever written. But listening…
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Saturday Night (2024)
Directed by Jason Reitman Comedy/Thriller/History R 1h 49m Even if you’ve never seen an episode, you know the impact. “More Cowbell” “The Coneheads”, “The Wolverines”, “Emily Litella”, “Matt Foley – Inspirational Speaker”, “The Californians”, “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood”, “Church Lady”, “Close Encounters”, “David Pumpkins”. All are comedy sketches brought to life by the talented ensemble casts of one…
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A Few Good Men (1992)
Directed by Rob Reiner Legal/Thriller R 2h 18m Last week, I remedied a lifelong mistake of having never seen A Few Good Men. I have been a Sorkin fan since seeing his riveting stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird in 2018. What followed was a foray into “The Newsroom” and the deeply lauded “The West Wing.” Other films of…
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