I dawdled a bit posting this piece I wrote about Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Luke Skywalker, mostly* because I’m lazy. (*Entirely because I’m lazy.) But that shouldn’t give you reason to think the piece isn’t important to me. It’s actually one of the most important things I’ve written all year in the sense that … Continue reading →
I liked the musical numbers in The Greatest Showman. I liked them a lot! Like all good musical numbers, they help facilitate storytelling; they’re also bright, beautifully orchestrated, utterly joyful, and so compelling that I found myself tapping my feet through most of them. (The rest are not feet-tapping songs, which is to say that they … Continue reading →
For my second piece about one of my top three favorite movies of the year, being Guillermo del Toro’s brilliant The Shape of Water, I took to the pages of The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog to talk about the element of his work that I find so compelling: His unfailing sense of wonder and awe. No … Continue reading →
I put down a thousand plus words about the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, Phantom Thread, in my review for The Playlist; I put down a couple hundred more in a “best of the year” blurb I put together for the same site; I will be putting down even more hundreds of words for a piece I’m … Continue reading →
Well, you can probably guess how this intro blurb is going to go. I can’t help it. Guillermo del Toro’s movies speak to me. His grasp on the language of cinema is such that his movies always hit me right in my brain-spot. (Tangential truth: I pity people who don’t vibe with his work. They’re … Continue reading →
I liked Nightcrawler so much that I’m bummed I couldn’t like Roman J. Israel, Esq. more; I like Dan Gilroy, I like Denzel Washington, I like Carmen Ejogo, and I like Colin Farrell. (In case you don’t already know, I also like social activism and social justice.) This movie should have been a slam dunk for me. … Continue reading →
There is a part of me that loves Coco, the new Pixar film, for Coco, and a part of me that loves it for essentially being a big ol’ “eff you” to our president and his openly xenophobic, anti-immigrant ideology, which isn’t really an “ideology,” because let’s face it, Donald is not an ideological kind of … Continue reading →
I’m sort of tired of comedies that adopt the simple method of point-and-shoot – see The Big Sick – but I can forgive them for mere adequacy of craftsmanship so long as the writing is both a) good, and b) doesn’t overstay its welcome. In the case of Mr. Roosevelt, I get the sense that the film’s … Continue reading →
Simple answer to the question posed by the title of my latest piece at The Hollywood Reporter: Yes. Yes it does. Luc Besson’s latest and underloved summer CGI extravaganza, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, has its flaws, most of them being tied to Dane DeHaan’s ill fit as the cocky action hero type, … Continue reading →
I could do with a new Cartoon Saloon film every couple of years or so, ideally more often than that, but it’s animation, what are you gonna do; besides, the movies this studio knocks out are always worth the wait. Back in 2014, I reviewed Song of the Sea. This year, I reviewed The Breadwinner, a very … Continue reading →
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