Brokeback Mountain (2005)
I wrote about this extraordinary movie for In Review Online to commemorate its 20th anniversary.
A World-Class Achievement
On A Minecraft Movie and a Future of Media Team, It’s a hit! This opening weekend, movie-going audiences dug into A Minecraft Movie, making it the no. 1 film in the U.S. and 75 global markets, bringing in an impressive $313.7 million – the largest domestic opening weekend
The Neural Network with Red Hair
"What's that say? Oh, um . . . it's Latin for From Small Things We Aspire Toward the Great." -- The Woman with Red Hair I listen, with alarming regularity and alacrity, to the podcast The Town. It's delicious junk food, and, as someone who&
At Night, All Cows are Black
Growing up, December and January held the distinction of best and worst months in moviegoing, respectively. For a few reasons, these distinctions have melted away. The first of which is simply the disintegration of something called the movie calendar altogether. Traditionally, at least from my layperson's POV, the
The Brutalist (2024, Corbet)
(Spoilers) Overture Let’s, for a moment, set aside the hysterics, the histrionics, and the hyperbole. Let’s imagine that The Brutalist hasn’t been met with a response equal in rapture to Dark Side of the Moon playing backwards in your veins, with claims not unlike Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s
The Night Of (2016, Created by Richard Price & Steven Zallian)
I like the serial format, generally; I like what can be done with it to build suspense, to enhance mystery, and to deepen the psychological interiority of a particular work's characters. Crime & Punishment was published serially, for example. The format seems to behoove crime stories, but even
The Substance (2024, Fargeat)
A who’s who of extreme cinema lions hiding in the shadows here: Noe, Cronenberg, Lynch, Easton Ellis/Harron, Von Trier, Argento, and I’m sure I’m neglecting a few more. This shouldn’t work; it’s never worked for me before: arthouse horror sucks. But Fargeat snuck a
Joker: Folie à Deux (2024, Phillips)
Frownland Spoilers Fully expected to hate this; turns out it was made specifically for people who hated the first one. Sat bemused and slightly irritated for the first forty minutes, feelings growing ever exacerbated by the minute following each howl from the Joker Head behind me, but when it reveals
Megalopolis (2024, Coppola)
Time Stop A little autobiography: My dad introduced me to Francis Ford Coppola through Apocalypse Now. First by way of his incessant quoting of the movie, particularly the immortal “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” line, and then via the DVD (theatrical, not redux) we had found
Deadpool & Wolverine (2024, Levy)
NOTE: This is meant to be read in conjunction with my Twisters review. "I'm definitely gonna be the People's champion, but . . . I'm gonna be the champ the way I wanna be." - Muhammad Ali Ring the bell, Deadpool is the People'
Twisters (2024, Chung)
Note: Major spoiler in paragraph three. It’s easy to tell that Lee Isaac Chung—director of the modest, exceptional Arkansas drama Minari—wants to make a earnest paean to middle America and its folk culture while integrating the inexorable blemish of capital and technology on that culture, both popularizing
Amadeus (1984, Forman)
My story with Amadeus began, as I'm sure it often does, with my grandfather. My grandpa always liked movies, but demonstrated a particular inclination following my grandma's death: he would invite me over to watch classics like The Godfather and Gladiator or catch new releases that