Author page: Travis Danner

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho is one of global cinema’s most consistently interesting directors — his films are typically blockbuster-style entertainments told with supreme visual flair yet always housing deeper layers of social commentary underneath. This is a delicate balancing act for…

It’s Halloween 2019 and the subscription model for web-based content distribution is king. Given that you, as a citizen of the world, are extremely likely to be subscribed to at least one of the two streaming behemoths, Netflix or Amazon Prime,…

Against the illuminated blue backdrop of the main theater at the Barbara Mertes Center for the Arts, Las Positas College English professor Steve Budd sauntered back-and-forth across the stage, embodying at least 12 different characters, some in conversation with each other, and…

An officially recognized sub-genre, defined by the Watching Staff at the New York Times as “character-driven films [that] are all talk and no action,” the “hangout movie” is a grand cinematic tradition— representing such classics as Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” Richard Linklater’s immortal “Dazed and Confused” and…