Film

Film

Most people would agree that the perfect Thanksgiving combination is cornbread and gravy. Add a little turkey and sausage stuffing to the mix and it's one of the best holiday meals on the culinary calendar. (Apologies to Christmas, but I don't believe Scrooge when he talks up a perfectly cooked goose). For me? The perfect holiday combo is a good movie and family. Hell, put it all together and nothing beats a food-coma snooze halfway through Remember the Titans.

"born to play"

"How in the world did they distribute this? Who paid for this? Who was watching this?" Sure, the government pays for them, universities buy them and academics screen them for students, but these filmmakers are also studied and appreciated within cinephile circles in a way that, say, 1940s newsreel directors are not. How did these filmmakers find an audience outside the ivory tower?

And yet it has to be said: his lavishly upholstered vampire romance has ambition and panache and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer to it to Robert Eggers's recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu. There are some very bizarre touches, including one shot that appears to show a land border between France and Romania.

When describing how obsessed he was as a kid with Mary Shelley and the Romantics, an artistic movement from the early 19th century, he concluded, "I discovered I was a 14-year-old girl in Victorian times." The audience laughed before he'd even finished his sentence. Getting the reaction he likely intended (though he said it in complete sincerity), the beloved writer-director introduced his 13th and latest film-an adaptation of Shelley's infamous 1818 novel-with confidence.

In 2016, the legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki was shown a bizarre AI-generated video of a misshapen human body crawling across a floor. Miyazaki declared himself "utterly disgusted" by the technology demo, which he considered an "insult to life itself." "If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it," Miyazaki said. "I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all."

San Francisco is definitely an outlier on the movie theater scene right now, as our single-screen movie houses may be enjoying something of a renaissance instead of going totally extinct like they are in pretty much every other town. The Mission District's Roxie Theater just managed to buy its building outright to guarantee its survival (okay it also has a smaller, adjacent, second theater called Little Roxie), the Upper Fillmore's Clay theater is going to be reopened after a physical restoration,

Stuck in Love is an indie romcom from 2012, the directorial debut of writer-director Josh Boone, who would later go on to make The Fault in Our Stars. It boasts a stacked cast featuring Greg Kinnear, Lily Collins, Nat Wolff, Jennifer Connelly and Logan Lerman (and smaller roles for Kristen Bell, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Glen Powell, as well as a cameo from author Stephen King).

In the westward-bound section, Freddie ends up in Paris, broke and desperate but eager for a bit of glamour all the same. An encounter with raffish but slippery Christos (Fernando Guallar), another immigrant, results in Freddie securing a job in the Opera neighbourhood persuading Nazi soldiers with his perfect fluent German to come to a nightclub he and Christos work for. This is how he hopes to raise enough money to pay for forged papers.

He lives with his wife and daughter on an isolated parcel of land in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. He does his job as a logger efficiently and quietly, working in companionable silence with most of his co-workers. He doesn't get drunk; he isn't in debt; he doesn't get involved in situations that don't immediately seem to pertain to him. In other words, he minds his own business.

But in the 1985 Star Wars TV movie Ewoks: Battle for Endor, presumably aimed at children, young Cindel (Aubree Miller) watches as her parents and brother are murdered in front of her. She's maybe 8 years old, tops. And the reason why her entire family is slaughtered? Because this bizarre Star Wars movie didn't want a cute little girl to have a human family, but instead, she had to get adopted by the Ewoks.

Marissa Bode is feeling sentimental. She's at the tail end of a whirlwind press tour for Wicked: For Good, which has sent her to events across London and New York and signals the end of her time in Oz. "It's just a press tour, but it's still saying goodbye in and of itself," she says as she settles into our table at Midtown's Jams.

Similarly, having solved the Middle East and Ukraine issues with only a couple of technicalities to iron out and put an end to so many other wars as well, Donald Trump may also be tempted to sob at having run out of important tasks. And yet, just as he is about to kneel in anguish on the Oval Office carpet, he is apparently perking up at the thought of one more mighty challenge.

Jean Vigo's L'Atalante, his poetic and surreal 1934 romance about a young couple living on a canal barge, is one of the most beautiful, sensual films of all time. Dita Parlo and Jean Daste play the newlyweds getting awkwardly accustomed to married life in close quarters, and their love story shapes the film. But it's their bargemate, the uncouth Pere Jules, played by Michel Simon, who steals the show:

Hello! I am the weak female lead in this dystopian Y.A. action movie, and I really just need to lie down. Ever since we ran away from Society six days ago, my ankle's been acting weird. Not, like, broken-weird, but every time I step down it kind of makes this clicking noise? Wait, it just did it again. Did you hear that?