Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn A “Zemeckis cube” and a DeLorean, a long chapter of the film devoted to painstakingly recreating The Shining, namedropping the Millennium Falcon, and of course, the somewhat controversial usage of the Iron Giant. If on one snowy night, his lip cut up from a punch and his mind… Read More Ready Player One (2018)
Dir. Tom Hooper. Starring Francesca Hayward, Robbie Fairchild, Judi Dench The gamble that any production of Cats makes, whether it’s a stage show or a movie, is that the spectacle of the piece will outweigh the inherent strangeness of the material. The answer is a really hard “No!” for a lot of people for the musical itself,… Read More Cats (2019)
Dir. James Ponsoldt. Starring Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, Mary Elizabeth Winstead I was listening to an old episode of Screen Drafts the other day, the one on Films About Filmmakers, and one of the guest drafters was James Ponsoldt. I was really taken with him. I’ll let you listen to the episode (which he does with… Read More The Spectacular Now (2013)
Dir. Bryan Singer and also unofficially Dexter Fletcher. Staring Rami Malek, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy Peter Sellers believed that he would have won an Oscar for Being There if only Hal Ashby hadn’t put outtakes in the credits. It broke the spell, according to Sellers. “Chauncey Gardiner” was on such a different planet that to remind… Read More Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
Dir. J.J. Abrams. Starring Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega There are spoilers, but can you spoil something that was already rotten? Ha! Ha! Ha! This would be a bad movie even if The Last Jedi had never existed, one reliant on lame screenwriting, quests which are urgent but never important, and a centrist distaste for bloodletting.… Read More Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
Dir. Bradley Cooper. Starring Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott We could talk about spoilers, but the concept for this movie is eighty years old, and let’s face it, we all know what happens. The politics of A Star Is Born are what we might euphemistically call “old-fashioned.” They are the politics of whites in… Read More A Star Is Born (2018)
Dir. Mike Judge. Starring Ron Livingston, David Herman, Ajay Naidu Since watching Office Space for the first time, I’ve struggled to come up with a way to describe just how bad it is. The story of a bunch of nobodies being nobodies at their nothing jobs, intended as a color-by-numbers for beta males, is so terrifically dumb… Read More Office Space (1999)
Dir. Mike Newell. Starring Lily James, Michiel Huisman, Katherine Parkinson The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society will, I hope, go down in history as the Saving Private Ryan of period romantic dramas. What both movies share is a tremendous sense that you should feel something and a complete inability to actually give us… Read More The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)
Dir. Ron Mann There’s nothing remotely Altmanesque about Altman, which, given the practically fetishistic load the movie hangs on the word, seems disappointing. (One wants to like the presence of past Altman collaborators giving definitions to the word, as I know I did when Michael Murphy went first. It was when I realized Michael Murphy wasn’t… Read More Altman (2014)
Dir. Breck Eisner. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penelope Cruz Dir. Kerry Conran. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Giovanni Ribisi Two blockbusters, like in indignity, In the mid-aughts, where we lay our blame, From seared desert to dieselpunk city, Where bad reviews force bad pictures aflame. In Sahara, a group of ex-Navy Americans assist a… Read More Sahara (2005) and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Seeing Things Secondhand 