Flickfilosopher

3 weeks ago | flickfilosopher.com | MaryAnn Johanson

Just like that amazing concrete from ancient Rome that we are not able to replicate today, we have lost the ability to buckle swash like Hollywood of yore could. We simply don’t know how to do it anymore. We get the occasional nod to it that kinda sorta works, like, shockingly, Disney’s Jungle Cruise, from just four years ago. Though you have to squint hard to see it even there.

1 month ago | flickfilosopher.com | MaryAnn Johanson

It’s been a quarter of a century since the debut of the Final Destination horror franchise. It’s been 16 years since we were told that the 2009 installment was The Final Destination… and then they just plowed right onto Final Destination 5 two years later, in 2011.

1 month ago | flickfilosopher.com | MaryAnn Johanson

Sinners is a movie to make you remember why you fell in love with movies. A movie to make you fall in love with movies all over again, if, say, perhaps *ahem*, The Movies have gotten infested by IP contractual obligations and it feels like there’s nary an original story or authentic voice to be found on the big screen lately, and everything goes straight to streaming anyway so why even bother making the trip out to a big screen.

Mar 7, 2025 | flickfilosopher.com | MaryAnn Johanson

It’s a madness that has gripped many a film lover: What if I made my own movies? And so it is with Nasir Shaikh (Adarsh Gourav), a young man in the middle-of-nowhere industrial city of Malegaon, India, who helps his brother run their struggling “video parlor,” a sort of small cinema projecting VHSes of old movies. Nasir loves Keaton and Chaplin; their local audience, not so much.

Mar 2, 2025 | flickfilosopher.com | MaryAnn Johanson

Herewith my guesses about which nominees will take home Oscars tonight. Come back tomorrow, when I’ll add the winners, and see how well I did. I’ve had another terrible year as I continue to cope with some mental and physical health issues, so I haven’t reviewed anywhere near as many of this year’s nominees as I’d have liked, but I have seen most of them.