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Sarah Polley’s Women Talking: A Movie of Ideas By Arnold Anthony Schmidt As might be expected, the most intriguing thing about director Sarah Polley’s film Women Talking, nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars, is what the women talk about. The film treats sexual violence, but only a hint of that appears on […]

“The World Turned Upside Down: The Transformative Energy of Cabaret” By Arnold Anthony Schmidt Powerful art often comes out of personal experiences, especially experiences undergone at moments of profound historical and social transformation. Such is the case with Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), which stars Liza Minnelli, Michael York, and Joel Grey. Set in 1931, the […]

“Trading Places: A Comic Switch with an Eye on Eddie Murphy” By Arnold Anthony Schmidt Most of us have spent time daydreaming about “what if?” What if we were richer? Smarter? More athletic? Less shy? Lots of things. In the course of dreaming, we perhaps consider which person in the world we’d like to change […]

“The Manchurian Candidate: A Political Thriller That Packs a Wallop”  By Arnold Anthony Schmidt  Back in the day, talk of the Beatles and “Beatle-mania” saturated the news. My mother claimed that, when it came pop star frenzy, her generation had all of us (then) young people beat. After all, she’d been one of the thousands of […]

Spectacle & Personality: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette  By Arnold Anthony Schmidt  Legend has it that Marie Antoinette, when confronted with the poverty of breadless peasants, reportedly said “let them eat cake.” This is one of those “facts” that we all know about the eighteenth-century French queen, and it’s actually not true. For the many who […]

Rebel Without a Cause and “The Kids Today!” By Arnold Anthony Schmidt It seems as if people have always complained about “the kids today!” Those young people don’t respect their elders. They’re wild. Too sexual. The satirist Juvenal, writing in the second century, paints Roman youth – and, in fairness, pretty much everyone else! – […]

Kiss Me Deadly: A Classic Film Noir with a Twist  By Arnold Anthony Schmid Admit it: when you think about film noir, you don’t associate it with the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti! Yet the suggestive role played by Rossetti’s 1862 sonnet “Remember” in Kiss Me Deadly illustrates only one of the many things that make […]

“A Road Trip With a Twist: Compartment No. 6”  By Arnold Anthony Schmidt  Like many, I particularly enjoy narratives in which audiences first see characters as one kind of person, only to have them end up as quite a different kind entirely. Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No. 6 (2021), winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes […]

“Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” by Arnold Schmidt Films by Iranian Asghar Farhadi, one of the few directors to win two Oscars in the Best Foreign Language category, generally revolve around people making difficult, perhaps unresolvable, decisions. His most famous, the Oscar-winning 2011 A Separation, follows a family in which the […]

By: Arnold Anthony Schmidt

“Life in the Rear-view Mirror”
(Drive My Car)

When a movie has a title with the word “drive” in it, audiences expect highspeed chases, acrobatic escapes, and catastrophic car crashes. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s elegiac Drive My Car has none of those physical actions, but it will definitely carry viewers along on an emotional ride, with lovers trying to chase memories and escape regrets, only to experience catastrophic psychological impacts in the end.

By: Arnold Anthony Schmidt A Camera’s Eye View (The Power of the Dog and Macbeth) Okay, let’s just get the awards buzz out of the way right up front. Both The Power of the Dog directed by Jane Campion and Macbeth directed by Joel Coen are going to receive oodles of Oscar nominations and will likely win a few. Both Campion and Coen will likely receive Best Director nominations, and many critics consider her a favorite for winning it. In terms of acting, reviewers praise Kirsten Dunst from The Power of the Dog, who garners even more critical […]

By: Arnold Anthony Schmidt Re-living the Past (Being the Ricardos, Last Night in SoHo) Recently, I wrote about the ways holiday films use the past to evoke nostalgia. Two very different recent films also take viewers on trips back to yesterday, where what has come before reflects our society today.  Being the Ricardos, starring Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz, recreates a week in the life of what was then the era’s most prominent television couple. It’s scripted and […]