*Note: I largely avoid spoilers, but as always, if you haven’t seen ‘Past Lives,’ you may want to skip this post. When I saw Celine Song’s first-time feature in a theatre, I was drawn to how the love story deconstructs romance films. The narrative centers on the philosophical concept in…

There has been a lot of buzz from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) around Kate Winslet’s performance as photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller, Elliot Page’s return to the movies, and the Talking Heads reunion for a presentation of the 4K restoration of Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense.” Critics…

Every year, noir czar Eddie Muller and the Noir City Film Festival make a stop in Chicago at the beloved Music Box Theatre. The festival’s lineup for 2023 were all films released 75 years ago. The festival opened with “Key Largo,” starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson…

With worldwide signs in 2023 that the climate has broken down, it is all too easy to feel despair and fearful that…

For the past year and a half, I have mostly ignored Medium. I have a newsletter called The Dissenter for publishing articles on whistleblowers, government secrecy, and press freedom. I now believe there might be some value to publishing on this platform, though not news articles or political essays. Going…

[Editor’s Note: This is the third in The Dissenter’s weekly series on 9/11 and its impact on cinema, which will be published as a companion to our series, “Twenty Years In A Security State.”] During the 2004 presidential campaign, Vice President Dick Cheney defended President George W. Bush’s response to…

[Editor’s Note: This is the second in The Dissenter’s weekly series on 9/11 and its impact on cinema, which will be published as a companion to our series, “Twenty Years In A Security State.”] “After September 11, 2001, as American soldiers went into battle in Afghanistan and then Iraq, it…

[Editor’s Note: This is the first in The Dissenter’s weekly series on 9/11 and its impact on cinema, which will be published as a companion to our series, “Twenty Years In A Security State.”] Yunis Shokuri, who was a Guantanamo Bay prisoner for over 13 years, once recalled the plot…

AT&T-owned WarnerMedia’s announcement that FilmStruck will shut down at the end of November left many feeling incredulous. How can it be that this gratifying streaming service will no longer exist? Subscribers desperately hope the suits, who work at a mega-corporation which controls so much of our culture, will relent and…