Dir. Scott Z. Burns. Starring Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Maura Tierney Dan Jones (Driver) is determined to see his report come out “the right way.” It’s what he tells a New York Times reporter (Matthew Rhys, for the first time in his career meeting someone in secret without wearing a ridiculous wig) when it looks like… Read More The Report (2019)
Dir. Noah Baumbach. Starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Azhy Robertson This came out yesterday, so I guess spoilers, but also if you’re worried about spoilers don’t go on Twitter either. Until the fight, I felt like Marriage Story worked. The fight is not a bad scene, especially if one was waiting for an earthshaking screaming match to… Read More Marriage Story (2019)
Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci Spoilers, I guess. People still care about those, though if you’re on the Internet I don’t know how you wouldn’t know what happens in this movie. There are two good reasons why there are so many newscasts in The Irishman. The first seems purely technical to… Read More The Irishman (2019)
Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart I wrote a review of Mamma Mia! a few years ago, and now I’m kicking myself for not saving it for one of my unlikely movie pairings to alongside The Dark Knight. The two of them couldn’t be neater fits: two of the top five grossers of 2008,… Read More The Dark Knight (2008)
Dir. Ari Aster. Starring Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper Upon being shown the living arrangements for the young people of the Hårga, Mark (Will Poulter) is aghast at how open they are. Everyone sleeps around the perimeter of a single square room. By now we’re at least an hour into the picture, and… Read More Midsommar (2019)
Dir. Bong Joon-ho. Starring Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam Spoilers below, for a movie that, even in the mind of a “spoilers are meaningless” reviewer, kind of works better without knowing anything. In August 1914, a servant killed seven people: one was the mistress of the house, two were her children, and the other… Read More Parasite (2019)
Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. Starring Paul Muni, Edward Ellis, Glenda Farrell There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense about the last half-hour of Fugitive. James Allen (Muni) is a sucker, and apparently so is his lawyer, who has the foresight to tell him not to return to the Southern state he’s escaped from but doesn’t have the… Read More I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Dir. John Carpenter. Starring Karen Allen, Jeff Bridges, Charles Martin Smith What separates grief from its lesser emotional cousins is how total it is, how difficult it is to shake, how nearly it stalks. In a film filled with gorgeous moments, the one that stands out most to me takes place in a truck stop… Read More Starman (1984)
Dir. Robert Eggers. Starring Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, a very sassy bird As this is still in theaters, here’s a spoiler warning, but also I don’t know that this is a movie someone who cares about spoilers would be into, so… Persona: Ingmar Bergman’s twenty-seventh movie 3 Women: Robert Altman’s fourteenth movie Mulholland Drive:… Read More The Lighthouse (2019)
Dir. Armando Iannucci. Starring Simon Russell Beale, Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor “I know about the hockey team.” This is the single funniest line in The Death of Stalin, a gravity well which sucks in comedy as easily as it sucks up horror or prestige drama. It is a perfect distillation of what works when the… Read More The Death of Stalin (2017)
Seeing Things Secondhand 