HUSTLERS is about as subtle as a pole dance when it comes to making a case for the poetic justice of what a gang of strippers did to the very Wall Street bankers who plunged the country into financial chaos back in 2008. And that is how it should be. The script written by director… Read More »
RAMBO: LAST BLOOD
And so we have, putatively, come to the end of the John Rambo saga. What began as a popcorn flick with a few hard-edged lobs at the price of war on the psyche has, over the years, devolved into an ego massage for its standard-bearer, Sylvester Stallone. He returns as a greyer, more wizened Vietnam… Read More »
READY OR NOT
READY OR NOT has one of the great cinematic punchlines. It’s much better in context, so I won’t give it away, but suffice to say that it’s not only pithy, it’s also all too relatable. So is the film itself, in a deliciously twisted way. This very black comedy plays on the fine line between… Read More »
ANGEL HAS FALLEN
The word is carnage. ANGEL HAS FALLEN never goes more than a few minutes without someone or something being taken out. Sometimes in multiples. Often with a fiery conflagration. Very often. This third in the series featuring dogged Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) finds our hero happily settled into blissful domesticity with wife… Read More »
LUCE
LUCE is less a film than a political dialectic on race and class in these United States, and a brilliant, exquisitely performed one at that. Told with a deliberate, sometimes maddening ambiguity, it challenges the audience at every turn about where the truth lies, and the limits of familial loyalty. By the end, not every… Read More »
ONCE UPON A TIME . . . IN HOLLYWOOD
The 9th film from Quentin Tarantino, aka ONCE UPON A TIME . . . IN HOLLYWOOD, takes us back to 1969, and a land of fragile dreams, transactional relationships, and the manifestation of the dark side of it all in the form of Charles Manson (Damon Herriman). Manson himself has but a cameo in the… Read More »
THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE
As a trenchant examination of the roots, expression, and consequences of toxic masculinity, THE ART OF SELF DEFENSE has no peers. As a black comedy told with a straight face and a tone of conviction, it is a first rate guilty pleasure. Any film that can draw guffaws as a small child is gently choked… Read More »
MIDSOMMAR
At the end of MIDSOMMAR, our much put-upon heroine, Dani (Florence Pugh) smiles. It’s her first real smile of the film, and how she got there is a tale of bucolic splendor, ecological harmony, and psychic terror. Brought to us by Ari Aster, the iconoclastic mind behind HEREDITY, it finds in parable and metaphor the… Read More »
ANNA
There is in Luc Besson’s ANNA fully one-third of a very good movie. That third is a finely drawn satire, cartoonishly violent in its sublimation of female rage as it addresses female exploitation in the modern world using the milieus of espionage and modeling as the metaphor. The other two-thirds is a plodding retread of… Read More »
THE DEAD DON’T DIE
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 »
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