If I may risk dipping my toes into The Discourse, I would like to offer a thought. It is possible for two things to be simultaneously true: first, that smartphones and social media have absolutely turned the brains of everyone under the age of 45 into mashed bananas, and left us a society unable to […]
It can be to keep it in mind, especially with the memories of the grisly 2020 Oscar-baiting Trial of the Chicago 7 so fresh in memory, but there is in fact something Aaron Sorkin does very well. He’s great at writing a very particular kind of procedural narrative, in which egocentric, talented people involved in […]
There are many indelible moments sprinkled across the 128 minutes of The Power of the Dog, writer-director Jane Campion’s first feature film in the twelve long years since 2009’s Bright Star (which was itself her first film in the six long years since 2003’s In the Cut, so if I am doing the math right, […]
The idea of Kenneth Branagh writing and directing a semi-autobiographical story of his childhood in Belfast, right around the time that tensions between the nationalists and loyalists in Northern Ireland broke out into open violence in 1969, is not one that fills me with any great amount of automatic optimism. Branagh is quite a sufficiently […]
King Richard is the kind of film designed to make you feel sweet and warm and nice while you’re watching it, with maybe just a soupçon of self-righteousness, and then to evaporate like the morning dew the literal instant that it’s over. It is a sports biopic, probably my all-time second-least-favorite kind of movie (musician […]
The text “A fable from a true tragedy” is the very first message that Spencer has for us, and this tells us the most important thing we need to know about it. Namely, this is not a biopic of Diana, Princess of Wales, but an impressionistic psychodrama based on the material of her largely unhappy […]
The original Brodaway production of the musical Dear Evan Hansen won six Tonys off of nine nominations, making it the single most-awarded production of the 2016-’17 season. In some years this would mean very little, but that season was an atypically competitive one for critically-acclaimed new musicals, meaning that there had to be some actual […]
When confronted with a story as vigorously trashy as the one underlying The Woman in the Window – adapted from the 2018 novel by A.J. Finn, the pen name of Daniel Mallory, a book editor who very openly described how the book came about as a compendium of every trope in popular post-Gone Girl crime […]
Pieces of a Woman is the kind of film that gets watched because it received a solitary acting Oscar nomination, and even before it received that nomination, it was discussed for literally only two things, one of which is the performance that received that nomination. Which, for the record, belongs to Vanessa Kirby, one of […]
The detention center at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, where hundreds of men were (and in some cases still are) held for years at a time, mostly without having been formally charged with a crime or tried before a judge, represents what I would consider the single most flagrant human rights violation perpetrated by the United […]
Anyone comfortable stating in public “I am a fan of the directorial works of Lee Daniels, and I root for his films to succeed” honestly deserves exactly what they get. But the thing is, I am a fan, and I do root for him; whatever one wants to say about his first three movies, 2005’s […]
The Father is the most miraculous kind of film adaptation of a theater piece: one that’s almost impossible to imagine being staged live. In principle, sure, one can ponder how this exact screenplay might be fitted into a theatrical space, and how it could use stagecraft to get at the same sense of slithery, unstable […]
