My Courses

One of my great great great grandfathers fought for the Union and survived the Battle of Antietam. After his infantry unit was wiped out, he survived by crawling under a heap of corpses and staying there for two days. As a child, I often found myself thinking about a person doing what he did and…

Opening this year’s section is Jonathan Millet’s “Ghost Trail,” in which a Syrian war refugee (Adam Bessa) hunts his former torturer through France while struggling to heal from the scars, both literal and figurative, that his quarry left him with.  Once a literature professor in Aleppo before he was imprisoned by the government, subjected to…

Early on in the new Richard Linklater comedy “Hit Man,” the film’s main character, a nice-guy teacher named Gary (Glen Powell), informs the audience of a truth they may not want to hear: Hit men aren’t real. “It’s a total pop-culture fantasy,” he says in voiceover. “But because hit men have been a staple of…

What’s broken in moviegoing? And how can it be fixed? Why do I ask?  Surprise: It’s not because of the box office performance of “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and “The Garfield Movie” over the 2024 Memorial Day weekend.  Sure, it was the worst such weekend for the industry in decades. Neither did poorly, in any real meaning of the word,…

Daisy Ridley battles jellyfish and the patriarchy with equal pluck and aplomb in “Young Woman and the Sea.”   Ridley stars in this compelling biographical drama as Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Ederle accomplished this feat in 1926—nearly a century before the open-water swimming triumph depicted in last year’s Oscar-nominated…