Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Starring Shirley Jones, Gordan MacRae, Charlotte Greenwood The year is 1955, the year of Kismet and Rebel without a Cause. The black-and-white musical is dead. The model of 42nd Street is crumbling around the feet of The Band Wagon. The three M’s (that’s “Method,” “Meisner,” and “Miller”) are coming to symbolize the… Read More Oklahoma! (1955)
Dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan I’m in my tenth year as a high school teacher, and I’ve been listening to conversations in my classroom and standing in the hallways and reviewing papers long enough to know that teenagers, as a class, are not much for new… Read More Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
Dir. Joseph Kosinski. Starring Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly Joseph Kosinski and Tom Cruise are a director-actor match made in Hell, and not in the fun Herzog-Kinski way. I imagine that the two of them plus Christopher McQuarrie and whichever other Tom Cruise pets helped make this film are probably even copacetic with each… Read More Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
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. 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)
Dir. Adam McKay. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep There are spoilers here for a recent release, though Don’t Look Up definitely strikes me as the kind of movie that’s hard to actually “spoil.” The funniest thing in Don’t Look Up is the running gag about the general at the White House who charges… Read More Don’t Look Up (2021)
Dir. Ridley Scott. Starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino Spoilers for a recent release. Tempting as it is to begin with the accent work in this movie, I think it’s more revealing to begin with Dariusz Wolski’s photography. House of Gucci is shot in most of the same washed-out tones that one comes to… Read More House of Gucci (2021)
Dir. Lin-Manuel Miranda. Starring Andrew Garfield, Robin de Jesús, Alexandra Shipp There are spoilers for a recent release below…as always, I don’t care, but maybe you do! During my musicals phase, this one (which I’m abbreviating as TTB the rest of the way because I have not gotten any more patient in my obsolescence) was… Read More tick, tick…BOOM! (2021)
Dir. Pablo Larrain. Starring Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Sally Hawkins Spoilers for a recent film, but one of the best things about Spencer is that I’m not sure it can actually be spoiled in any meaningful way. In the first few minutes of the movie, a fleet of Land Rovers drives perilously close to the… Read More Spencer (2021)
Seeing Things Secondhand 