First Cow It opens boldly, with three minutes of credits. Just white font on a black screen. When was the last time you saw that outside of a Woody Allen movie? Movies don’t have opening credits anymore because we don’t have the attention span for it. Or they think we don’t. Next, we get the…
My ongoing quest to write as many words about the films of 2020 as possible continues. If you’re interested, check out parts one, two, and three. 5. Sorry We Missed You I live in the country, where there’s a lot of space between houses. I also have five dogs who all need to be walked,…
10. Sound of Metal The impressive debut film from director Darius Marder is winning raves for its sound design, which replicates the experience of being hearing impaired, at various levels, for the viewer. Rightly so; it’s a neat trick, and it helps to immerse the viewer in the soul of its lead character. But when…
I was going to write a little something up here about the recent announcements by Warner Bros. and Disney that have, to many, put the future of film in doubt. I don’t share the fears of my colleagues. I’ve written before about cinema’s resilience. It has survived the Legion of Decency, the Red Scare, the…
What’s the purpose of film criticism? To explicate a movie’s meaning, to expound on how it fits into a director’s oeuvre, or to put the film in social context? Great criticism can do all three at once, but in my heart of hearts, I still think of my role as a consumer guide. I want…
This post contains mild spoilers for The Invisible Man. The guy in the row behind me was talking. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it was loud enough to distract me from the film. This was a screening for both press and the public, which meant that he likely didn’t know I was there…
There are very few laughs in Brad’s Status. This is by design. Contrary to its marketing, which pitches the Ben Stiller film as a cringe comedy about a father embarrassing his son on a trip to visit colleges, the sophomore directorial effort from Hollywood screenwriter Mike White is a dark, desperate affair. It’s a deeply…
You might have noticed this blog basically doesn’t exist anymore. When I started it five years ago, I was posting two or three times a week. Then I started getting published elsewhere, and my original posts here began to dwindle. These days, it is a repository for reviews no one has paid me to write…
A Quiet Passion is a chilly, detached affair, just as Emily Dickinson would have preferred it. The first biopic of Dickinson, one of the greatest American artists, is not particularly interested in her playfully haunting poetry. We get snippets of it here and there, but this isn’t one of those biopics in which the subject’s wretched…
In the 1960s and 1970s, Americans flocked to spaghetti westerns like The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly and The Outlaw Josey Wales . These films subverted the morality of classical westerns by depicting vicious worlds that went without heroes. Compared to their predecessors in the genre, they were far more violent, with an amorality…
Edward Snowden is director Oliver Stone’s kind of hero: a zealous patriot who becomes disillusioned about his beloved country, publicly criticizes it, is labeled a traitor, and eventually learns a more complex definition of what it means to be patriotic. Stone has been down this road before – with the young Vietnam-era soldiers of Platoon and Born…
In every possible way, Pete’s Dragon is a throwback to a simpler time. The family fairy tale, a remake of an unremarkable 1977 Disney movie, takes place in a world where small towns have no chain stores and no one carries a cell phone. It could be the 1950s or just a forgotten town in…
SPOILER ALERT: This post contains a discussion of the plot and ending of “The BFG.” Consider yourself warned. For ninety minutes, The BFG is one of the most intimate, apolitical movies Steven Spielberg has ever made. Despite his reputation as a popcorn auteur, Spielberg’s work has always carried at least a hint of politics, even…
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