What we all know – and like most things we all know, it’s a simplification, but in this case not such an extreme nor indefensible one – is that George Lucas stuck the Ewoks into Return of the Jedi to sell toys. “Warrior teddy bears” isn’t the most all-time slam-dunk moneymaking idea, to be sure, […]
“This movie is too long” is something I complain about to the point of self-parody, but seriously, The Love Witch is too long to a degree that makes most “too long” movies seem painfully efficient. It’s a pastiche – a pastiche so good that it feels like we need some other word to describe how […]
I don’t know how much you like ’50s Hollywood musicals. Maybe you don’t care for them at all. Maybe they’re your favorite thing. But here’s what I do know: no matter how much you like ’50s musicals, you don’t like them nearly as much as Damien Chazelle loves them. You did not, after all, make […]
Hell or High Water is comfort food cinema, above all else: whatever one might say about its level of execution (which is quite exceptionally high), one cannot say that it’s at all surprising. It’s a neo-Western for neo-Western lovers, a lean character study of Texan poverty told with wiry masculinity of the sort that, had […]
It is clear to anyone who’s followed my reviewing through more than one Oscar season, I’m sure, that I have very little use for biopics. But anything can be done right, and there’s not much more right you can get than Jackie. On paper, at least, the film looks like a craven attempt to win […]
Loving is a nice movie. It is a very fucking nice movie, of the kind that shimmies on out when people are starting to sort out which films they want to give awards to, but which doesn’t tend to receive any of those awards, except in a kind of pitying way. And nice movies are […]
The Eyes of My Mother wins, by my count, two superlatives for itself among recent American horror films. It is, on the one hand, the most beautiful such movie in an inordinately long time – long enough that I gave up trying to figure out when. That’s selling it a bit short, actually: it’s also […]
A second review requested by Cammy, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There’s not all that much competition, but I rather think that Gattaca is among the very best of all the original “thoughtful” sci-fi movies out there (by which I mean, not quite hard, not quite […]
