THE DEAD DON’T DIE takes the tropes, idioms, and beloved foibles of low-budget zombie flicks and, with a skillful flick of its auteur’s cinematic wrist, recontextualizes them into a stylized gloss on the new normal of 2019. Certainly the “Make America White Again” ball cap sported by the most reviled citizen (Steve Buscemi) of sleepy… Read More »
AVENGERS: ENDGAME
The stakes have been raised so many times with event flicks that, when approaching one, hope is always tempered with experience about what to expect, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson. With AVENGERS: ENDGAME, though, hope wins out. The spectacle is everything it should be, and the story, of necessity a meandering thing, is nonetheless sustained by… Read More »
DOCTOR STRANGE
DOCTOR STRANGE you ask? Let me sum up the latest cinematic offering from Marvel Comics in one word: spectacular. From a whiz-bang opening sequence where space folds in on itself as combatants hurl magical fire at on another, to the charismatic, ahem, marvel that is Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role, this action film is… Read More »
HAIL, CAESAR!
If Douglas Sirk had directed a film noir written by Billy Wilder, it might have looked something like HAIL, CAESAR!, the latest thoughtful tangle of philosophy and whimsy from the Coen Brothers. Taking place in a 1951 Hollywood not entirely unlike the one that actually existed, it mixes Cold War paranoia, carefully managed studio PR… Read More »
Amy Schumer is No TRAINWRECK
Turning gender roles neatly on their heads, Amy Schumer has created a screwball comedy of considerable substance. Taking sure aim at the abomination of the formula rom-com, she satirizes not just the genre, but the state of contemporary single-hood. Starring in a script of her own devising, she is fearless, relentless, and completely unapologetic as the titular hot mess, also named Amy, with commitment issues and a healthy libido.
TEKNOLUST
One of my favorite lines in Lyne Hershman-Leeson’s TEKNOLUST concerns the side effects of knowledge. They’re dangerous because they’re unpredictable. Once you learn something, paradigms shift, assumptions evaporate, and you’re forced to look at the world in a whole new way and maybe even re-think your whole life. Scary stuff. The film ponders the nature… Read More »
THE STATEMENT
Conspiracy buffs will enjoy THE STATEMENT more than just about any other sort of moviegoer. For the rest of us, this story about a Frenchman who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II fails as the thriller that the filmmakers may have had in mind. It is, rather, more along the lines of a… Read More »
YOUNG ADAM
There is no one actually named Adam in YOUNG ADAM, based on the novel by 50s Brit Beat Alexander Trocchi. Its use is open to interpretations, biblical and other. Make of it what you will, but be prepared for a harsh, yet mesmerizing dissection of the way morality is often lived rather than how it is always… Read More »
CONSTANTINE
I can see where CONSTANTINE, based on the graphic novel Hellblazer, might have seemed like a good idea for a movie. Good versus evil on a cosmic scale, special effects whipping across the screen with a wild abandon not unlike the whirlwind to be found in the second circle of Hell, and a cynical anti-hero… Read More »
MICHAEL CLAYTON
MICHAEL CLAYTON begins with a monologue by Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), a brilliant but unhinged litigator who has spent too much of his life defending the indefensible. In it, beautifully encapsulated, is the heart of the film, which is to say, that it’s only a madman who has the clarity of vision to do the… Read More »