The first word that that popped into my head after watching Angus MacLachlan's altogether wonderful A Little Prayer was "kind." This is a deeply kind film, the kind of film that restores one's faith in independent filmmaking, but in humanity.

Time has been incredibly kind to Jonathan Glazer's Birth, a film that was somewhat overlooked at the time, whether due to the controversy that surrounded it or a general unwillingness to engage with it.

Announcing the From the Front Row Podcast! That's right, I'm hitting the airwaves with deeper dives into my favorite filmmakers and cinematic styles, along with a few other treats and surprises along the way.

Lav Diaz' Magellan is an anti-epic. It has all the trappings of a sweeping tale of exploration and conquest - beautifully designed period sets and costumes that transport the audience back in time to the 16th century and beyond. But you'll find no grand fanfares on the soundtrack, no romantic, picturesque depictions of sailing the open sea in 1500s. Magellan is something else entirely, a grim and often harrowing depiction of colonial brutality as an act of self-mythologizing, created and often undone by its own storytelling and self-delusion.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Simon Franglen, the composer of Avatar: Fire and Ash, for an in-depth discussion about his work on both Fire and Ash and The Way of Water, and we we got to talk about how music can be used to not only support a film’s story, but connect with the audience on almost subliminal level. He offered fascinating insights into his process, his collaboration with James Cameron, and why the scene where Col. Quaritch brings the villainous Varang to the RDA base is the most pivotal scene in the entire series.

Flashback to several years ago: I would never have suspected that the 28 Days Later movies would one day be resurrected as one of the most interesting horror franchises of the modern era.

The dadaist movement was an anti-art movement that emerged from the ashes of World War I. It was a nihilistic reaction to the atrocities and horrors the world had witnessed during the Great War. Suddenly, life no longer seemed to matter, let alone art, so the dadaists sought to revolutionize art by essentially tearing it down and rendering it meaningless.

Following up last year’s terrific Laurel & Hardy: Year 2 set, Flicker Alley has released a third compilation of their silent shorts of 1929, which marked the third year of their iconic collaboration.

Year-end list making is always a daunting task for me, and this year I’ve given up on trying to make a list claims to be the last word on the year’s best films.

Based on a true story, Craig Brewer's Song Sung Blue follows Mike and Claire Sardina, a pair of celebrity impersonators who fall in love and form a group called Lightning and Thunder. Mike (Hugh Jackman) performs as Neil Diamond, while Claire (Kate Hudson) performs as Patsy Cline. They make ends meet by playing in bars and county fairs - but their ambition and showmanship begins to draw a following, and gets the attention of Eddie Vedder, who invites them to open for Pearl Jam as they come through town.

"DREAM BIG" declares the viral marketing campaign for Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme, a bold and sometimes obnoxious strategy that mirrors the go-for-broke audacity of its titular character, played with a kind of meta gusto by Timothée Chalamet.

When I sat down to watch The Testament of Ann Lee, I had forgotten that it was a musical. I was so instantly captured by director Mona Fastvold's use of movement and dance that my early notes on the film talk about how it feels almost like a musical. And then they began to sing. Not songs that tell the story necessarily, but hymn-like dirges that draw us into the devout world of 18th century Shakers both as acts of worship and depictions of religious ecstasy.

James Cameron wastes no time in plunging us back into the world of Avatar in the blockbuster series' third entry, Fire and Ash. Picking up right where 2023's The Way of Water left off, the latest film gives the audience no time to breathe as the fallout from the previous film is swift and fierce. The war is on and there is no rest for the weary Na'vi clans on Pandora.

I'm not going to lie to you and say that Ella McCay is a good movie. It is a film that does not seem connected to any conceivable plane of reality, as if space aliens who've never met an actual human wrote a movie about the American political system. Naturally, I loved every minute of it.

For all the screen adaptations of his plays over the years, cinematic depictions of William Shakespeare himself have been somewhat rare. The most famous of these is, of course, 1998's Shakespeare in Love, a film whose Best Picture win remains controversial despite being a perfectly charming ode to the Bard and his work.

Michael Showalter's Oh. What. Fun. is a fascinating case of a film that starts out with a certain amount of promise and then derails so quickly that one wonders if everyone suddenly received a blow to the head about a third of the way through production.

There's something bold about Bradley Cooper's decision to follow up his ambitious Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, with a decidedly smaller scale film about a middle aged man who turns to standup comedy to cope with the fallout of his divorce. It makes perfect sense, the depth and intensity of Cooper's process on Maestro has been widely publicized, and Is This Thing On? feels like something of a breather in comparison.

Hollywood loves movies about the magic of movies. They can be comedic (Singin’ in the Rain, Day for Night), personal (The Fabelmans, 8/12), reflective (Sullivan’s Travels, Stardust Memories), acerbic (The Player, Sunset Boulevard), but it's rare to see something quite a mournful reflection on the nature of stardom and with all the sacrifice and artifice it entails as Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly.

As someone who generally enjoyed Knives Out and Glass Onion as satirical, socially aware whodunits, I did not expect for the third entry in Rian Johnson's series of mysteries to be such a beautiful and deeply moving exploration of faith.

Clint Bentley's meditative new film, Train Dreams, has drawn inevitable comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, The Thin Red Line). While I don't think this film belongs in that rarefied company, I'm also aware that Bentley doesn't seem to be reaching for that same level of spiritual profundity. No, Train Dreams works because its goals feel more simple, a tone poem of lost Americana that explores the lives of the forgotten men and women whose toil and suffering helped usher in the modern age.