How many ham actors can one movie sustain? Ridley Scott sees that question, scoffs, and then proceeds to make House of Gucci, a film based on the Sara Gay Forden book that documents the tragic way inRead Full Review
Month: November 2021
Licorice Pizza
The Auteur Theory is mostly self-aggrandizing bunk, but it exists because of directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, a filmmaker who clearly follows nothing beyond his own artistic impulses. His films are idiosyncratic; sometimes stately, sometimesRead Full Review
Drive My Car
Creature comforts are a major motif in Drive My Car. The two main characters of the film feel safest when they’re behind the wheel of a fire engine red Saab, coasting along the highways of metropolitan Japan.Read Full Review
Belfast
Every major director reaches an age where they make their autobiographical film. Good or bad, I’m often weary of anyone’s ability to withstand their own nostalgia. Belfast – an amusing but broad black & white movie about aRead Full Review
King Richard
King Richard is an old-fashioned Hollywood biopic, with all the sentimentality and mythologizing that that entails. What’s surprising is how the film turns that to its advantage. Will Smith (perhaps the last of America’s bankableRead Full Review
Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn
Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn certainly earns the distinction of Best Movie Title of 2021. It promises irreverence and promiscuity, a degree of playfulness with an edgy adults-only bent. Bad Luck Banging delivers on thatRead Full Review
The Power of the Dog
In a Jane Campion film, intimacy and brutality are often intertwined. The relationship between her characters is often a dance of passion and possession, with one often complimenting (and then disintegrating) the other. The Power ofRead Full Review
C’Mon C’Mon
C’Mon C’Mon is Mike Mills’s weepiest film to date. His first two features – Beginners and Twentieth Century Women – were about parents trying the best they can despite their own emotional shortcomings. That these are storiesRead Full Review
Passing
Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, is a landmark text. It’s provocative subject matter – racial passing – was a controversial subject then and still a bit taboo today. Rebecca Hall choosing this adaptation to be herRead Full Review
Eternals
After over a decade, and dozens of films, it’s hard to imagine that there are even more superheroes springing out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It strains the mind to conceive of a universe with soRead Full Review
Spencer
A fable based on a true tragedy. This is the statement that begins Pablo Larraín’s latest film, Spencer, about a tempestuous Christmas weekend in the life of Princess Diana. “Fable” warns us that what we’ll see shouldRead Full Review
Last Night in Soho
The image of Swinging 1960s London is immortalized in films like Michael Antonioni’s Blow-Up and John Schlesinger’s Darling. In those films, and several others, high fashion and sexuality entangle with the sinister underbelly of vice and murder. TheirRead Full Review