Dan Conley

I was spoiled by opening scenes in the movies of my youth. The turning point year for me was 1977. I saw “Rocky” early that year, a movie that barely let you into your seats before tossing you right into the ring for a fight with Rocky Balboa. Soon after

For my next big project, I’m going to continue my slow speed chases through some more films that I love. I’m going to pick from my all time top 150 list, but I will come nowhere close to writing about all of them … we’ll see how much

While waiting forever for my AMC theater movie to start today, I saw a series of movie trailers, things I usually enjoy on some level. But I was annoyed to see that two of the movies had the same sappy tagline — Dream Big. This is a phrase I heard earlier

A weakness of movie criticism is that one is expected to capture the essence of a film on a single viewing in some solid, permanent manner. Now that I’ve worked through several long-form studies of films in very short bites at a time, I notice the pitfalls of the

I’m in a mood these days to make a brief return to Montaigne and to reconsider his thoughts on solitude, both for the ways I agree and disagree with him. Instead of diving into his full, sprawling essay on solitude, I’m going to unpack this paragraph: “Seek no

Over the last month, in addition to writing full treatments of two Kieslowski movies, I have watched an astounding 61 movies, just under two per day. This includes 13 movies watched in theater (10 at the Chicago International Film Festival) and a nearly endless string of streamed movies on the