My Courses

Before I was a friend and colleague, I was a fan. In my early and mid-teens in the 1970s, I was a loner jock/pop culture nerd who was obsessed with these pursuits: Playing and watching baseball and football and to a lesser extent basketball, and consuming issues of Sports Illustrated and Sport and Baseball Digest,…

In Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” a once-revered Norwegian filmmaker struggles to mount a deeply personal project related to his family history, going so far as to attempt to enlist his estranged daughters—in defiance of their wishes—to help realize his vision. For Stellan Skarsgård, playing the filmmaker in question, Gustav Borg, was a uniquely rich opportunity;…

In a career retrospective talk at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, Mamoru Oshii spoke, if not regretfully, mournfully about “Angel’s Egg.” The legendary Japanese writer and director—who secured his place in animation history with “Ghost in the Shell”—said that his dreamlike, allegorical 1985 OVA film nearly killed his career: “After that, nobody gave me…