Michael Phillips

1 week ago | thederrick.com | Michael Phillips |Michael Phillips

“So many cameras.” Unusual in the pre-digital age, before rampant cellphone camera chronicles of everyone’s lives changed our visual landscape forever. This is what photographer and filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed remembers of her childhood in “A Photographic Memory,” a supple nonfiction triumph. Seed’s film pieces together an idea of a vanished loved one, from inchoate fragments of loss unique to those who never really knew a parent.

1 week ago | thederrick.com | Michael Phillips |Michael Phillips

The right sports movie can really do a number on you. It can maneuver around cliches, resistance points and aversions to string-pulling to win the big race against your more skeptical instincts. The right sports movie, even if it’s not great, has wily ways of inspiring us to do something, try something, go somewhere we haven’t yet. It can bend us, at least a little, into a new, in-progress variation of the person we were the last time we checked.