Dir. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman. Starring Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Liev Schreiber This is the kind of superhero movie I imagined when I was a preteen: witty, action-packed, heartfelt, and most of all absolutely overflowing with possibility. Multiverses are cheating, fine, but here’s an example. The first superheroes I ever got into were… Read More Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Starring Lily James, Richard Madden, Cate Blanchett Pretend I sound like your mother when I say: This is just a nice movie. The story of Cinderella (James) is one that banks on the obvious cruelty that the stepmother (Blanchett) and stepsisters (Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera) throw at our innocent heroine. Some… Read More Cinderella (2015)
Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie This is a recent release at the time of publication, so I’ll throw a generic “spoilers” alert up for it. There was a friend of Bob Rafelson’s named Donna Greenberg, who recalled a story about a weekend morning when she was at home with her… Read More Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
Dir. Kelly Fremon Craig. Starring Hailee Steinfeld, Blake Jenner, Kyra Sedgwick When Nadine (Steinfeld) is at a particularly low point, she launches herself into her more or less sympathetic history teacher’s classroom and launches into a string of word vomit. The movie wants to play some of it offhandedly, such as Nadine’s offering Mr. Bruner… Read More The Edge of Seventeen (2016)
Dir. Alex Garland. Starring Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander Dir. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin There are two things which really stand out about Free Solo. The first is that El Capitan is really tall, and the second is that Alex Honnold is not a likable person. I don’t want to pile on the guy, because… Read More Ex Machina (2015) and Free Solo (2018)
Dir. Damien Chazelle. Starring Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke It’s a Damien Chazelle movie: the answer is in Justin Hurwitz’s score. Chazelle and Hurwitz are, at this point, tied to the hip, and perhaps in thirty years they’ll even be remembered as closely (if not as fondly) as Spielberg and Williams or Fellini and… Read More First Man (2018)
Dir. Ari Aster. Starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Gabriel Byrne Never trust Ann Dowd! I don’t watch that much television, and even I know never to trust Ann Dowd! Anyway, the movie I’ve seen Hereditary compared to most frequently is Rosemary’s Baby, which I’m not sure I understand. Granted, these are two horror movies without any real jump… Read More Hereditary (2018)
Dir. Barry Jenkins. Starring Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Regina King Thorough spoilers for a movie still in its wide release. There’s a noteworthy costume choice made in the first few moments of If Beale Street Could Talk. With the camera towering over Tish (Layne) and Fonny (James), we can see that their outfits go together.… Read More If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring Zoe Kazan, Tom Waits, Tim Blake Nelson If the six segments of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs are meant to cohere, then it’s as six distinct pieces of the various types of the western genre. It hits on virtually all of them from gunmen to highwaymen, wagon trails (why… Read More The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
Dir. Paul Schrader. Starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles I spent a long time preparing the joke: when an American remakes Winter Light (and sort of smushes in a little Diary of a Country Priest), he ends it with an explosion. The movie disappointed my joke, alas, although I’m not sure it would have been worse if… Read More First Reformed (2017)
Seeing Things Secondhand 