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 the early decades of cinema, Catholics called the shots in Hollywood. All films were submitted to the Catholic Legion of Decency for approval, and, if they didn’t meet the agency’s standards of morality, there would be a boycott, and 20 million American Catholics would stay home. We’ve come a long way since then. In…
The boy in Sing Street doesn’t seem like anything special, not at first. It’s his first day at a new school, forced to switch in the middle of the year because his parents are trying to save money. He’s already had a run-in with the school bully, and it’s easy to imagine what his future will…
I liked Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” so much I wrote about it twice. First, there was my review in Washington City Paper. My editor challenged me to draw some connections between the film and “Born to be Blue,” a biopic of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker that was released the same day. I did my…
Quentin Tarantino is not exactly known for his subtlety, so when he opens The Hateful Eight with a close-up of a crucifix half-buried in snow, we know what he means: his is a world where salvation is dead and no god exists. Well, there is one god at least, but his name is above the…
You’d be forgiven if, when you heard they were rebooting the “Rocky” franchise, you groaned and rolled your eyes. I certainly did. At this point, it’s easy to be cynical about the Hollywood sequel-making machine, but when done right, a film franchise can still provide unique pleasures. “Creed” follows the lead of James Bond and…
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