Milt Calloway

The first movie I ever saw in a theater was “The Magnificent Seven,” in 1962, at the Capri Theatre on Plymouth Avenue in North Minneapolis. I was seven years old. My father took me. He was a route driver for Twin Cities Dairy, and every other Saturday was his day with me while my mother worked the register at Dayton’s department store downtown. He did not explain the movie to me beforehand. He bought me popcorn that came in a paper bag, not a bucket, and he said, “Pay attention.” I have been paying attention for sixty-three years.

I spent twenty-six years as the film critic at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, from 1981 to 2007. Before that I spent four years reviewing movies and concerts for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and before that I spent two years writing about anything they would let me write about at the Milwaukee Journal, which is where I learned that you cannot review a movie you did not finish watching, a principle I have violated exactly once in my career, for a film so aggressively bad that walking out was itself a critical act.

The Star Tribune job was the one that made me. I reviewed somewhere north of four thousand films during those twenty-six years. I interviewed directors and actors and cinematographers and the occasional screenwriter who was surprised anyone wanted to talk to them. I covered Sundance eleven times. I flew to Cannes twice and Toronto nine times and thought Cannes was exhausting and Toronto was the best film festival in the world, which I still believe. I watched the movie industry change from a business that made some art into a business that made some content, and I have opinions about that transition, which I will share with you at regular intervals.

My father, Milton Sr., never finished high school. He read two newspapers a day and could tell you what was happening in city politics with the precision of a man who had studied it, which he had, just not in any classroom. When I told him I wanted to be a writer, he said he thought that was fine as long as I was going to write about something real. I told him movies. He said, “Movies are real if you pay enough attention.” This was the best critical theory I have ever encountered, and I have a master’s degree in film studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so I have encountered a fair amount.

I married Denise in 1979. She was a librarian at the Hennepin County Library who had read more books than I had watched movies, which I found both humbling and attractive. We raised two sons in a house in the Kingfield neighborhood of Minneapolis that we bought in 1984 for what now sounds like a number I invented. Marcus is an architect in Chicago. Jerome teaches high school history in Madison. They both grew up watching movies with me on the couch and learning, without my intending to teach them, that the way a camera moves through a room is a sentence. I am proud of them for reasons that have nothing to do with movies and everything to do with the kind of men they became.

I retired from the Star Tribune in 2007, which means I left daily criticism just as the internet was remaking the entire enterprise. I have spent the years since writing freelance reviews and criticism for various outlets, teaching one film course a year at the University of Minnesota, and watching movies the way I have always watched them: in the dark, with my full attention, and with the understanding that every film is asking you to give it two hours of your life and that this is a request that deserves to be evaluated honestly.

Denise died in 2021. We were married forty-two years. I do not write about this except to say that I still watch movies in the living room where we watched them together, and that the chair next to mine is empty, and that some movies are better company than others. I know which ones. I will tell you.

I live in Minneapolis. I see three or four movies a week in theaters and another two or three at home. I have a subscription to every streaming service, which Denise would have found absurd and which I justify as a professional expense. I write about what is worth watching. I write about what respects your time. I write about the movies that changed the way I see things and the movies that reminded me why I started looking in the first place.