Author: Jonathan Eig
Highlights from the 31st AFI Latin American Film Festival
The 31st Annual American Film Institute Latin American Film Festival concluded on October 7. Due to disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s festival was about half its usual size and went virtual, making films available to viewers through a streaming platform. Despite less than optimum conditions, there were still a number of outstanding films.…
Will the cinema experience survive?
In the past month, I have written 15 articles about American professional football. That fact may not be of interest to readers of a movie blog – especially an international one like Curnblog whose readers probably think American football is the equivalent of Tom Hooper’s Cats, overblown and silly, spectacle over substance, with the odd…
A Tale of Two Satires: “Beneath Us” and “The Hunt”
Ah, the social satire. It is not an easy nut to crack. Indeed, satire of any stripe requires a delicate balance and a tough skin. There are audiences who will never accept the joke at the heart of Jonathan Swift’s “A Delicate Proposal” or Ernst Lubitch’s To Be or Not to Be, and those may…
The seventeen best films of 2019 that nobody is talking about
As dreams go, it was simple. I wanted to write a Top Ten list. I mean, I do it every year. I’m sure a lot of you do too. Every critic does it. Every film fan does it. Every angry-young-psychotic-who-will-actually-punch-you-if-you-don’t-agree-that-Quentin-is-modern-day-Shakespeare does it. But here’s the thing. Everyone does one and they are all the same.…
The Cinema of 1969: Five classics you may have missed
I’ve started writing fifty-year memory essays of late. It’s probably because I am now far enough past fifty to recall the world I lived in fifty years ago. I mean, I have written about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Double Indemnity (1944) as well, but if I have to go back one hundred…