Author Archives: Chance Solem-Pfeifer

If modern life has you down, consider a spiritual summer fling with the oracles and the lotus-eaters in this week’s movies. First, Noah and Chance reckon with the cruel, entrancing, maybe even hilarious horror of “Midsommar” (2019) in which a Swedish death cult plays host to the fallout of a bad relationship. Then, it’s on […]

This week, we unpack “The Last Black Man In San Francisco” for what it can tell us about the individual’s relationship to an idea as slippery as gentrification. What’s more, co-writer and star of the Sundance award-winning indie Jimmie Fails joins the program to discuss skateboard wipeouts, how to develop physical chemistry, and why he […]

Treading water on television is a good way to not be on television anymore, as we learn from this week’s movie trio about TV institutions getting new life through new blood. In the new office comedy “Late Night,” Mindy Kaling shakes up a white, apolitical late show, just as Rachel McAdams saves a GMA knock-off […]

With college looming, there’s a certain class of high-school comedy that races the clock. This week, Chance and Noah watched “Booksmart” (2019) “Superbad” (2007) and “Can’t Hardly Wait” (1998) for a trio of movies about graduating seniors with one last chance to ace their social lives. Big questions include: Does the women-led “Booksmart” strike the […]

With the untimely passing of writer/director/producer John Singleton last month, Be Reel takes stock of his life, times and film career. From the seminal “Boyz n the Hood” to the endlessly meme-able “Poetic Justice” to the unsung epic “Rosewood,” Chance, Noah, and author Tochi Onyebuchi reflect on Singleton’s role as a preeminent black filmmaker and […]

This week, Chance and Noah dive into the one-inch pool of movies based on fan fiction — writing that takes the characters of more popular sources and, apparently, has them do weird sex stuff. In addition to the new YA film “After” (2019), our case study includes the mega-franchise “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015) and […]

Writer and director Madeleine Olnek first considered that Emily Dickinson might have been an actual human being with desires, muses, and ambitions when she read a 1998 New York Times investigation of the famed poet’s original drafts. The result was the play “Wild Nights With Emily“, now an inventive literary comedy starring Molly Shannon, Amy […]

All it takes is a carnival coin-trap, a packet of Party City fairy dust, or a wizard who needs you as his champion and — SHAZAM! — that pesky childhood is over in an instant. But is being thirty, flirty and thriving all it’s cracked up to be? This week, “Big” (1988), “13 Going On 30” (2004), […]

On an interview edition of Be Reel, Chance talks with director Emma Tammi about her new horror film “The Wind” (out now from IFC Films). They discuss how Tammi made the transition from documentary filmmaking to genre mashups, how the wind haunted real-life pioneers, and why trauma is having its day in the horror genre. […]