If you are like me and you follow a lot of movie writers on Twitter, you probably found yourself observing something akin to a virtual stoning yesterday afternoon. And for the target, it wasn’t the first time. On Wednesday, Rex Reed of the New York Observer published a short review of V/H/S/2 in which he…
If you ask me – and you’re reading this post, so let’s assume you did – one of the great Hollywood mysteries of our era is why Sam Rockwell is not a bigger star. He’s funny and charismatic, he can do nuanced dramatic roles, and the man can dance like nobody’s business. Most of all,…
In this series, Movies That Matter, we examine films that have pushed boundaries and impacted public policy or society. See the recent entries in the MTM series here and here. * * * If you’re watching it for the first time, you’ll only get a few minutes into Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959)…
Hey everyone. I’m back in The Atlantic today with a new piece on the similarities between The Lone Ranger, Iron Man 3, and White House Down. Here is an excerpt: Though people often forget it, Westerns are also war movies, as they take place during the American-Indian Wars of the 18th and 19th centuries. So…
So The Lone Ranger comes out today, and I kind of feel like I already saw it. It’s a western by way of Pirates of the Caribbean, right? Same director (Gore Verbinksi), same producer (Jerry Bruckheimer), same star (Johnny Depp), and if the trailer is any indication, it will feature the same type of breathtaking,…
If future historians are ever looking for evidence of the political schizophrenia and tribalism that engulfed American in the post-9/11 era, they could do much worse than White House Down, a film that presents itself as an argument for peace and reason but is built on a foundation of cartoonish, consequence-free movie violence and a…
I had a piece in The Atlantic this afternoon on Big and the other body-swap movies (Vice Versa, 18 Again!, Like Father, Like Son) of the late ’80s. Here is an excerpt: The dominant, lasting image in all these films is that of a grown man acting like a child. In Big, Vice Versa, and Like Father, Like Son, the…
Last weekend, Anthony Flores and I tackled the AFI Docs Festival (formerly Silverdocs). Here is the second part in our series of capsule reviews (see part one here): Cutie and the Boxer When we first meet the famed Japanese painter Ushio Shinohara and his wife Noriko in Cutie and the Boxer, they come across as…
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