Category: The Cotton Club

My 2025 Personal Film Festival, Part 2

For Part 1 of this series, please see here. I reiterate that I am not a film critic in the traditional sense, just an autodidactic lover of film and film history. By the time I finished rewatching Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007), No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) and Nosferatu: A Symphony … Continue reading My 2025 Personal Film Festival, Part 2 →

Matt Berger Badlands, Before Sunrise, Bringing Out the Dead, Charles Starkweather, Chungking Express, Coupling, Dashiell Hammett, Dazed and Confused, Diane Lane, Eddie and the Cruisers, Fallen Angels, Film, Film Noir, Francis Ford Coppola, Goodfellas, Hammett, He Said, She Said, HistoryBuffs, Hong Kong, In the Mood for Love, Jim Jarmusch, Kevin Bacon, Koyaanisqatsi, Martin Scorsese, My life, Mystery Train, Nicolas Cage, Night on Earth, Philip, Philip Glass, Richard Linklater, Rumble Fish, Rupert Holmes, Slacker, Stranger Than Paradise, Streets of Fire, Terrence Malick, The Cotton Club, The Seventh Victim, Val Lewton, Where the Truth Lies, Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire, Winona Ryder, Wong Kar-Wai 2 Comments May 14, 2025 13 Minutes

Measuring the Unmeasurable: Ranking One’s Favorite Music, Part 6 (My 100 Favorite Albums)

In five previous essays (here, here, here, here, here), I detail how I used appearances on 434 mixes (August 1981 to November 2023) and total plays to calculate a score for 9,560 tracks. Using these Track Scores (“TS”), I ranked my favorites from a tie for #7,529 (2,032 tracks with one play and no mix … Continue reading Measuring the Unmeasurable: Ranking One’s Favorite Music, Part 6 (My 100 Favorite Albums) →

Matt Berger Brian Eno, Data collection, Genesis, Hammett, Jazz, John Barry, King Crimson, Mark Isham, Measurement, Miles Davis, Music, New Wave, Peter Gabriel, Progressive Rock, Roxy Music, Rupert Holmes, Stan Ridgway, Statistical reasonsing, Steely Dan, Talking Heads, The Beatles, The Cars, The Cotton Club, The Police, The Public Eye, The Smithereens, The Waterboys, Twin Peaks 2 Comments May 26, 2024May 29, 2024 14 Minutes

My 100 Favorite Films…Probably

[Ed. note: This essay was updated on April 1, 2025] On December 1, 2022, Sight and Sound Magazine released the results of its decennial Greatest Films of All Time Critics’ Poll (“SS Poll”). The key result is that Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles dethroned Vertigo as the “greatest film of all time.”[1] … Continue reading My 100 Favorite Films…Probably →

Matt Berger A Night at the Opera, Alfred Hitchcock, Back to the Future, Charlie Chan, Data collection, David Lynch, Double Indemnity, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Film, Film Noir, Hammett, L.A. Confidential, Marx Brothers, Measurement, Murder on the Orient Express, My life, Neo Noir, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Sidney Lumet, Statistical reasonsing, Thank God Its Friday, The Cotton Club, The Maltese Falcon, The Public Eye, The Sure Thing, Times Square, Woody Allen 8 Comments January 14, 2023April 1, 2025 21 Minutes

Grappling With the Instinctive – and Unnecessary – Fictionalization of History

I recently watched Michael Mann’s Public Enemies for the first time since its 2009 theatrical release. Based on Bryan Burrough’s excellent 2004 book of the same name, it narrows the focus of the sprawling book to the cat-and-mouse game played by bank robber John Dillinger and Melvin Purvis, special agent in charge of the Chicago … Continue reading Grappling With the Instinctive – and Unnecessary – Fictionalization of History →