Category Archives: 2021 in Films
April 2021 In Films
In April my freelance writing kept on keeping on. I’m going to recap it all here in case you missed it! Since it was a five Friday month, I spoke to five different women directors (and two men) for my Moviefone column: Emma Seligman, Charlène Favier, Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher, Marilyn Agrelo, and Shari Spring Berman and Robert Pulcini. I also took a look back at the career of Joan Micklin Silver. A few Old Hollywood nerds got together and launched the Classic Film Collective on Patreon. Join at any level and you can read out monthly film recs and each month I’ll be contributing a poem. In April I wrote a poem about Lana Turner! I was a guest again on the Zodiac Chronicles podcast. And speaking of podcasts, the first two episodes of Prog Save America are out! In episode one Arianny Pilarte joins me to talk about Bruce Springsteen and New Jersey. In episode two I’m joined by Jill Blake as we count down our top ten rock flute tracks! For Nerdist I wrote about unicorns, Lina Wertmüller, and movie stunts. Lastly, I made my debut at Bright Wall Dark Room with a very personal essay about The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) and forgiveness.
Of course, aside from all that writing I also watched a metric ton of movies! Yes, you will see after the cut that I watched a whopping 123 new-to-me films in April! How? Why? Click on the cut to find out!!
March 2021 In Films
First and foremost, I did a lot of writing and podcast guesting in March. For Moviefone I wrote about women directors who should get Oscar nominations this year (spoiler alert: two of them did!!) and 7 Riot Grrrl films to check out. For my Moviefone column Female Filmmakers in Focus I wrote about Amy Poehler’s Moxie & Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us, Natasha Kermani’s Lucky and interviewed its cinematographer Julia Swain, I interviewed Phobias directors Camilla Belle, Maritte Lee Go, and Jess Varley, and I interviewed Slaxx director Elza Kephart. I made my debut at Ebert Voices taking a look at how the landscape for films directed by women has changed since I embarked on my #AYearWithWomen project in 2015. For my debut at Nerdist I wrote about how Philip K. Dick influenced The Weeknd. For my debut at debut at Vulture I wrote about three of my favorite working actors: Tzi Ma, Shea Whigham, and Luis Guzmán. For my debut at Crooked Marquee I wrote about why I love (and miss) Meg Ryan (you’ll notice I watched A LOT of Meg Ryan movies this month). Podcast-wise I joined Ryan at The Matinee to talk Oscars (we’ve been doing this for a decade now!!), I joined Jen Johans on her podcast Watch With Jen to talk about the rebel girls of Daisies, Foxfire, and Skate Kitchen, and lastly I dropped the trailer for my new music podcast Prog Save America, which will be launching later this month. Can you believe even with all of that I still watched A LOT OF MOVIES. So as always, after the cut you’ll find everything I watched in March, a breakdown by decade, and I highlight some of my faves.
February 2021 In Films
February came and went so fast I feel like I have whiplash and I fear the bulk of 2021 will follow suit. Thankfully, there’ll always be movies to distract from the abyss that is time. Along with watching far too many films in February, I also started a column at Moviefone called Female Filmmaker In Focus which you can read here and I wrote about the movie parallels in the videos for The Weeknd’s After Hours which you can read here. As always, you can see everything I watched plus a breakdown by decade after the cut.
January 2021 in Films
My watching as I dove head first into the New Year followed a few distinct phases. For the first week or so I did not have a working computer, so rather than relying on streaming I delved into the wild world of blind-bought Blu-rays that had been piling up (mostly from Kino, Twilight Time, and Criterion). You can also detect some frantic catching up on films on the Criterion Channel that expired at the end of January, films on Netflix that I had actually watched months ago back when that was my job, a deluge of screeners for Best International Oscar contenders (lots of free screenings of those popping into my inbox; I was overjoyed!), and lastly a handful of films from the Sundance Film Festival. As always, I’ll highlight a few favorites after the cut.
the diary of a film history fanatic 