Jeffrey Overstreet

Winnie the Pooh (2011)

This is the third review from Filmwell’s guest contributor Lauren Wilford, who blogs at Midas and the Movies. We are pleased to announce that Wilford has agreed to join the Filmwell team as a regular contributor, so you will see more of her reviews in the coming months. • The advertising campaign for Disney’s new Winnie […]

Jeffrey Overstreet

Beginners (Mills, 2010)

This review is the second from Filmwell’s guest contributor Lauren Wilford. • “You don’t know me. I like that.” So says the She of Beginners to the He, on one of those floating walks that fill up the start of a relationship. She’s teasing him, but we know it’s more than a bit of banter– it’s an […]

Jeffrey Overstreet

Midnight in Paris (Allen, 2011)

Today, we welcome a new guest contributor, Lauren Wilford, with a review of the new film by Woody Allen. Lauren studies Theatre and Art History at Seattle Pacific University. She wanted to add Philosophy as a third major but she watches movies instead. She blogs at Midas and the Movies. • Midnight in Paris: the title slides in […]

Jeffrey Overstreet

Paul Thomas Anderson and the ghost of Flannery O'Connor

Today’s breaking news about new cast members in Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film project, The Master, is very intriguing. Variety reports that Fiona Dourif, daughter of Brad Dourif, has been cast as the follower of a religious leader. Recent updates on Anderson’s project report that Anderson has “greatly overhauled” his original script. At first, the […]

Jeffrey Overstreet

Odysseus, the lotus eaters, you, and me.

This is from A.G. Harmon’s “Bread and Circuses,” posted at Good Letters, the blog of Image: Just as democracy requires care—the hard work of civic participation, and an often discomforting engagement with communal undertakings—lest the very thing that is so great about it, autonomy, degenerate into self-absorption, so does the mind require some type of […]

Jeffrey Overstreet

Guest contributor Stephen Lamb on Poetry

This week, we welcome a guest contributor to Filmwell, Stephen Lamb. Today, he takes a look at the new film by Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong. • Poetry is a summons to pay attention, an invitation to look closer at the world around us. In her wonderful little book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, […]

Jeffrey Overstreet

Handmade wonders: Cicada Princess

Take a couple of minutes and watch this behind-the-scenes clip from Mauricio Baiocchi’s animated short Cicada Princess.

Jeffrey Overstreet

Scribbled in the Dark: Meek's Cutoff

This is the best I can do translating the barely legible notes I made, and completing sentence fragments I scribbled, in a darkened theatre during a screening of Kelly Reichardt’s film Meek’s Cutoff: “Dry.” That’s how the film feels. Muted colors, in an area where there is no alternative — Eastern Oregon. Nothing interesting or […]