Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose Somewhere, J.J. Abrams left a movie theater, blinking a little bit behind those signature glasses of his, and he murmured to himself, “Gosh…the new West Side Story has a lot of lens flare, doesn’t it?” I suppose I should feel some gratitude to Steven Spielberg,… Read More West Side Story (2021)
Dir. Jon Watts. Starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Willem Dafoe Spoilers, but also I might be the last person in America to see this. In Spider-Man 2, there are two climactic action scenes which must be considered alongside the best sequences of this subgenre. First, the one where Spider-Man stops a speeding train, saving the many… Read More Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
Dir. John Ford. Starring John Wayne, William Holden, Constance Towers The standout sequence of The Horse Soldiers is about the cadets of the Jefferson Military Academy, which is to say that the best part of this movie about Marlowe (Wayne) and Kendall (Holden) has very little to do with either one of them. In a… Read More The Horse Soldiers (1959)
In the spring of 2017, a friendly nimrod with good intentions and only a tyro’s understanding of, hem hem, cinema, decided he wanted to create a list of the top 100 American movies which would be better than the American Film Institute’s. While recognizing that he did not have the learning to make such a… Read More Which Movies Will Be on the Next AFI Top 100 List?
Before Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President David Rubin passed the baton to Tracee Ellis Ross and Leslie Jordan to announce the Oscar nominees yesterday morning, he said something that caught my attention more than any nomination did. He said there were nearly 9,500 voting members of the Academy. First of all, 9,500… Read More Return to Five Best Picture Nominees
Another year of Oscar nominations, another year where I can’t do this as it’s happening because no one pays me to do this at my day job. So it goes. Thank you for reading me anyway! 1) The Power of the Dog is the front-runner for Best Picture, full stop. Many of your favorite movie… Read More 94th Academy Awards Nominations: Hastily Scribbled Thoughts
Dir. Rodney Ascher I refer back to this moment in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a lot, partly because it’s funny and mostly because it’s useful. Harry has just given an interview to The Quibbler about the return of Voldemort, and it’s selling like hotcakes and creating a fair amount of mail… Read More A Glitch in the Matrix (2021)
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Mark Strong If Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and Stephen Gaghan were making hyperlink cinema in the years preceding Zero Dark Thirty, then what Bigelow and writer Mark Boal are making is more like citation cinema. There’s a fascination with phrases which become title cards, such as “black site”… Read More Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Dir. Chloe Zhao. Starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Brian Tyree Henry Eternals is not good. It’s so not-good that I actually have a hard time knowing where to start with the not-goodness of it, a problem that typically reminds me of that whiny Rise of Skywalker review that I wrote a couple years ago. It’s… Read More Eternals (2021)
Dir. Caroline Laskow and Ian Rosenberg I’d basically given up on Welcome to Kutsher’s long before hitting the forty-five minute mark of the film. This is a short documentary, barely seventy minutes long, and it’s pretty clear that it’s being stretched to the brink long before then. Welcome to Kutsher’s is made for people who… Read More Welcome to Kutsher’s: The Last Catskills Resort (2012)
Seeing Things Secondhand 