Watched and Learned: My Take on Films from Whenever and Wherever

For Veterans Day, I picked the first new-to-me war movie I found on Netflix. I did not know that it was directed by Angelina Jolie and co-wr...

Of the scary Netflix movies recommended to me that I hadn't seen, this was one of the most highly rated. I opted not to save it for the ...

This movie has a lot of the same people involved as the next year's Shanghai Express . Maybe that's why it was recommended to me. At...

Looks like this is my first boxing movie viewing in two and a half years . Can't say I missed the subgenre, but this one has a little so...

In its homeland, this is called Sciuscià , a cognate, because that is what the shoeshiners say when trying to get customers. I guess post-WW...

This sat on my list for a long time before my friend and I were looking at possibilities. The same friend had rewatched Road to Perdition w...

The title refers to the far-northern phenomenon of sunlight way into summer nights. Sure enough, the story takes place in that setting, and ...

On one hand, I've grown leery of R-rated Korean features, which aren't all as watchable as Parasite . OTOH, writer-director Kim Ki-d...

This was an Academy Best Picture nominee starring Gary Cooper, but neither of those details drew me in as much as the peculiar title. What m...

This has nothing to do with the hit '67 TV series of the same title. That said, it is another British program in which nobody has a give...

Until a few months ago, I had never read a Paddington Bear book in my life, so I brought no nostalgia to this viewing. Ordinarily, I'm l...

I knew going in that this would be gloomy. Nevertheless, I was interested to see something directed by Steve McQueen (the British one) other...

In the 1980 Sam Shepherd play True West , aspiring screenwriter Lee calls this the last great western, but his description makes it sound aw...

I knew I wasn't going to love this. Martin Scorsese fare is rarely even moderately enjoyable to me. But it is one of the most champio...

I knew going in that this would not be a jolly holiday flick. It's about prisoners of war, after all. Still, I could think of no more ap...

Heh, when I moved this up in my queue, I didn't know that the story would start on Halloween and end a few days later. That detail is to...

I saw the 1934 adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas classic some years ago, inspired by its excerpt in V for Vendetta . Although I enjoyed it (...

Oh look, James Cagney in prison. Sound familiar? Well, despite what you'd expect, he's innocent of the major charges this time. The ...

No, it has nothing to do with Capitol Hill or any other famous real hill. I chose this film partly because I hadn't seen any work of Sid...

The '70s were a strange time for westerns. After late '60s classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , The Wild Bunch , and t...