Watch List Weekly Recap 1/7/22

This is the Friday recap of Ty Burr’s Watch List postings for the week. If you’d like to receive this weekly email ONLY, please go to your account page and under “Email notifications” uncheck every box except “Weekly Digest.” If you’d prefer to not receive it at all, uncheck just “Weekly Digest.”

Tuesday i returned from a week off with tales of chasing the rare Steller’s Sea-Eagle up and down the Eastern seaboard. No, it’s not about movies, but you sign up for this newsletter, you’re going to get birds every once in a while.

Where Sea-Eagles Dare

This newsletter is mostly about movies, sometimes TV shows and music. Every so often it’s about birds. Today it’s about birds.

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Thursday was a back-flip into a movie of my (and maybe your) early adolescence, 1969’s “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” — good fun if not great art.

Nostalgia Tour

Sometimes it’s comforting to revisit not the great films of one’s youth but the junk. Not actual bad movies but the disposable commercial flotsam, the product that has no thought of art or even a long shelf life. Movies like “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.”

Ty Burr's Watch List

Some thoughts on the passing of Peter Bogdanovich, a director who had it all and lost it all and then got a little of it back.

Peter Bogdanovich 1939-2022

For many years, the narrative about Peter Bogdanovich was that he was a wunderkind who lost the knack. After the low-budget meta-monster movie “Targets” (1968), featuring Boris Karloff as a version of himself, Bogdanovich broke through in 1971, at 32, with “

Ty Burr's Watch List

Finally, a review of “The Tender Bar” (Amazon Prime) and a meditation on the merits of a movie star who’s maybe best when he’s not the star of the movie.

Belle Affleck

The following post was ready to go when the news came in this morning that Sidney Poitier has died. I’ve written a lot this week, maybe too much, but as one of the most important stars in the history of the movies — creatively and culturally — Poitier merits appreciation and then some. More to come.

Ty Burr's Watch List

I’m working on a Sidney Poitier appreciation — as befits one of the most important actors in the history of the medium — and will get it out when I can. Fingers are a little typed out right now.

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