Reviews

March 30, 2022

Film noir and the movie-made American male

Recently I spoke at Hillsdale College on film noir as part of a program that introduced audiences to four of the most impressive movies in the genre that defined the tough detective in America and the less popular type of doomed romantic. Continue Reading...

March 24, 2022

Volodymyr Zelensky is the Servant of the People

Three Ukrainian oligarchs, a shadow Triumvirate as it were, stand on a balcony overlooking a gorgeous town square. An election for president is imminent and they’re tired of wasting millions on backing their own candidates and then millions more on ruining those candidates’ rivals. Continue Reading...

March 23, 2022

The Power of the Dog is everything that is wrong with Hollywood

My long series on Oscar movies is coming to an end with angry words about Hollywood. To summarize, I liked Wes Anderson, loved Paul Thomas Anderson, was amused by Ridley Scott, disappointed by Steven Spielberg, and disgusted by Guillermo Del Toro. Continue Reading...

March 18, 2022

A Dark Knight of the soul

The Batman plunges us straight into the middle of a crisis of faith. Gone is Bale’s confident and charismatic playboy. Robert Pattinson’s Batman hasn’t slept for a week. He journals, sulks, and obsesses over details. Continue Reading...

March 14, 2022

Who’s writing Vladimir Putin’s Animal Farm?

It’s 1934 and Gareth Jones (James Norton), journalist and foreign adviser to British prime minister Lloyd George, is trying to convince a room full of stuffed shirts with fancy government titles that Adolf Hitler is looking to wage war in Europe, to build a thousand-year Reich. Continue Reading...

March 10, 2022

The Batman is a modern noir mess

The story begins on Halloween, almost exactly 20 years after the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne. A new killer—an internet sensation, as it turns out—is on the loose, violently ridding Gotham City of its excesses. Continue Reading...

March 03, 2022

Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is a dead end

Guillermo del Toro won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Shape Of Water (2017), a movie infamous for a leading lady so desperate for intimacy that she makes love to a fish, probably the best metaphor for the ongoing moral collapse of the women who like such movies. Continue Reading...

March 02, 2022

Midnight Mass: There is no feast on a fast

Near the beginning of the Netflix series Midnight Mass, released in late 2021, an Ash Wednesday service is faithfully shown, complete with a young priest’s effective and moving sermon, explaining the ashes as “a smudge of death, of ash, of sin—for repentance—because of where this is all heading, which is Easter. Continue Reading...

February 24, 2022

Licorice Pizza is the L.A. fairy tale we didn’t know we needed

My series on cinematic nostalgia continues—after Wes Anderson’s Francophilia, Ridley Scott’s Italian farce, and Spielberg’s Puerto Rican fiasco, here’s a California story: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth feature film, Licorice Pizza, the only Hollywood movie made last year with some reason to be remembered. Continue Reading...

< Previous 1 … 7 8 9 10 11 12 Next >

Exit mobile version