We’re a bit light this month in the Criterion department, but one of my Paste Magazine compadres and I managed to squeak out blurbs about Antonio Pietrangeli’s I Knew Her Well and Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid. (This leaves a big The Graduate shaped hole in our coverage, but c’est la vie, c’est la vie.) For my own part, The Kid is … Continue reading
Fair warning: I really didn’t want to write this piece, and I’m doing it out of misguided obligation. Maybe I’m whining, but cut me some slack; I’ve already written about the #OscarsSoWhite fracas, and also contributed a handful of yadda yaddas to Paste Magazine’s annual Oscar preview (though I spend most of my yaddas turning my nose up at the … Continue reading
Well, we did it: we predicted the Oscars. Or, more specifically, we made our Oscar predictions. I have my own personal mumblings about the ceremony coming later today, but if you want to see what the gang at Paste Magazine’s Movies section thinks is going to go down this Sunday, you’d best hightail it on … Continue reading
I’m cheating on the title here, and I know it, but: Only Yesterday, one of the earliest films by Studio Ghibli co-founder and all around genius Isao Takahata, has enjoyed neither a theatrical run nor a home video release here in North America since the film premiered twenty five years ago. (That, of course, doesn’t mean people … Continue reading
“Guest stars have been a thing for Brooklyn Nine-Nine since the very beginning, when Stacy Keach, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, and Patton Oswalt showed up for one-offs, and Craig Robinson, Marilu Henner, and Kyle Bornheimer each stepped into limited but recurring roles. (Remember: Doug Judy is still around!) But after season two took several paces back … Continue reading
As promised: my interview with Robert Eggers and Anya Taylor-Joy, respectively the director and lead actress on The Witch, that one film I won’t shut up about. I can’t say that this posting means I will shut up about the film for forever – I will be shocked if I don’t circle back around to it … Continue reading
Bottle Rocket, Wes Anderson’s 1996 debut feature, turned twenty years old this past Sunday. It’s weird to think that the movie could possibly be that old, but it’s weirder still to consider it in light of how much Anderson’s style has changed since he first premiered it two decades ago. Watching Bottle Rocket along with, … Continue reading
In case you don’t already know: I really liked Robert Eggers’ The Witch. A lot, in fact! So much that apart from that there review I just linked, I also wrote this nifty little piece about some of the film’s historical and cultural foregrounding. The long and short of it is that 17th century New England … Continue reading
There’s not a lot that I have to say about Roger Eggers’ The Witch that isn’t perfectly encapsulated by a single line from Drew McWeeny’s review out of Sundance 2015. “I’m not sure how you explain what you want in scenes like these to kids,” he wrote of one specific and electrifying moment midway through the … Continue reading
“In Hebrew, the name Zev means “wolf,” but the protagonist of Atom Egoyan’s new film,Remember, is more like a lamb. Zev Gutman strikes no predatory impressions when we first meet him lying prone in bed, calling out his dead wife’s name in a state of bestirred delusion. He cuts a feeble figure: He does not … Continue reading
Did you think the world let Meryl Streep too easily off the hook for describing herself as “a humanist” rather than a feminist? Are you of the opinion that she should have gotten more, not less, flak for participating in Suffragette‘s “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave” photo shoot? If you answer yes to … Continue reading
Heard about that Deadpool movie? If you watch TV, or if you are a slave to any particular social media platform, then yes! You have! Even if you aren’t, there’s a good chance you have heard people talking about it who do watch TV, or who live a gross percentage of their lives on Twitter. Such is the strength of … Continue reading
Movie Mezzanine, one of my long-time outlets (if you count two years, give or take, as a long time on any quantifiable scale), underwent a makeover in 2016, and I’m happy to share my first contribution to the site in all of its new and shiny glory: an essay about the Catholic Church sex scandal on … Continue reading
“Add vinegar to baking soda and you’ll get a chemical volcano. Mix baking soda into buttermilk batter and you’ll turn out a heap of tasty pancakes. But if you introduce displaced police officers from the 9-8 precinct to the tight knit crew of the 9-9, you’ll get nothing short of combustive mayhem that’s akin to … Continue reading
Let’s get one thing outta the way: Hail, Caesar! is minor Coen brothers. It is not No Country For Old Men, though if we are using that as the yardstick separate “minor” Coens from “major” Coens, then nearly every film they have made since 2007 falls into the former category. You can instead lump Hail, Caesar! in with A Serious … Continue reading
“Every omnibus film and anthology flick, regardless of genre, has to figure out its framing device as if it’s painstakingly assembling a puzzle: How best to successively link a series of interconnected yet mostly unrelated micro-narratives? What makes an effective plotting glue? Horror anthologies show that you can use just about anything to achieve that … Continue reading
Confession: I cried at the end of Kung Fu Panda 3. Do not take my response to the film’s emotional payload as a strict endorsement of the whole package; as third entries in movie franchises go, Kung Fu Panda 3 is a good bit of fun that falls victim to diminishing returns and an unpolished script. How many times must Po, … Continue reading
“Your enjoyment of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies will hinge on whether you find the joke it and the novel from which Burr Steers adapted it funny. If yes, this movie is your jam. If no, it is your neurotoxin. Some movies are critic-proof for sheer incomprehensibility.” (Via Paste Magazine.)
“There are so many stray observations worth making about Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s latest installment that figuring out where to start is like ice-skating uphill. Stephanie Beatriz deserves to be cast in an action movie so she can kick asses full time; only Joe Lo Truglio can over-enunciate “phở” with devastating comic effect; we don’t actually know … Continue reading
“If you need another reason to fume at this year’s slate of Oscar nominees, look no further than Pablo Larraín’s The Club. Think of it as a Chilean counterpoint to Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, sans the gloss and with a greater emphasis on the guilty and afflicted than on the supposed saviors: Spotlight is about good … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 