Gregory Solman

I'm the critic at large for DVD Express (www.dvdexpress.com) and DVD.com, where I write The Undercover Critic column under the name of Roger Wade as well as numerous bylined features. I'm also a freelance writer for Film Comment magazine, for which I've written since 1990. I'm a graduate of Notre Dame and earned a Master of Fine Arts in Film History, Theory and Criticism from Columbia University's graduate School of the Arts. I was a frequent freelance contributor to Films in Review (1980-83), The Boston Phoenix (1984-86), where I worked under Michael Sragow; PAPER and The City Sun, where I worked under Armond White; and Video (1986-89) and other newspapers and magazines too numerous to list. Most recently, I was Editor in Chief of the now-defunct monthly magazine of Variety, for which I wrote for many years while I was West Coast Editor of Millimeter. Having once had a television show on movies (Manhattan Cable, 1981-82) and a radio show in Boston (WFNX-FM), I'm occasionlly used as a critic/movie reporter on television. I've done work for for E! Entertainment Television, MSNBC, Showtime/The Movie Channel, the BBC and RAI (Italian television). I've lived in Los Angeles since 1989, and spend my little remaining time as the lead trumpet player for the Los Angeles City College jazz band.

I'd prefer to champion an era rather than a particular movie. For me, the Sweet Sixteen, as I call it, is between 1967 and 1983. That's the period when the generation who'd grown up on the classical Hollywood narrative style changed cinema forever. The filmmakers whose work consistently interests me made that era the most glorious in cinema history, either by anticipating the style of storytelling, laying the foundation, or by original artistic conception. They are, in no particular order: Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, John Boorman, Francis Ford Coppola, Arthur Penn, Martin Ritt, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Alan Rudolph, Sam Peckinpah, Walter Hill, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Wim Wenders, Akira Kurosawa. I've probably neglected some of my favorites because, as you can see, 1967-1983 was an embarrassment of riches!

Los Angeles

http://www.dvd.com/stories/play/undercover_critic/story_868.asp