It’s been a while since I saw the Nelms brothers’ Small Town Crime, and it’s also been a while since I wrote up my review for Paste Magazine (which you can now read ’til the cows come home, if that’s your idea of a good time), and I’ve come closer to nailing down what it is about … Continue reading
I exhausted my brain writing about Hale County This Morning, This Evening for The Playlist, so I’m leaving this intro short. Basically: You really need to see this movie. You also need to see it on a big screen, which is something I rarely demand when recommending documentaries. Hale County This Morning, This Evening is fucking beautiful. It’s also … Continue reading
Poor Scott Cooper. This guy, he just can’t make a movie I’m capable of tolerating. I bet he’s pretty bummed. I hated Out of the Furnace; I also hated Black Mass, a movie I took personally as a Bostonian. (Seriously, someone make a fucking movie about Boston that doesn’t hinge on bad accents for once, please.) Cut … Continue reading
As with Juan Carlos Medina’s The Limehouse Golem, my fondness for TNT’s The Alienist is derived in part because I’m just into this kind of story: Gothic or Gothic-adjacent procedurals, where the protagonist(s) stare head-on into a darkness they’re ill-equipped to fathom due to the constraints of their era they live in. Not that anyone living in 2018 … Continue reading
My remote Sundance rampage continues! (Sundancepage?) From soul-crushing Greek arts farts to a documentary about police corruption in America, specifically police corruption in the NYPD, the largest police in the country. Crime + Punishment is tangentially about brutality, because how could it not be, but it’s primarily about quotas: How arrest quotas are still in play among … Continue reading
I’m sort of a career goof, and so I have a natural inclination toward characters who are also career goofs. Meaning, there’s more than one reason why I compare Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Mary and the Witch’s Flower to Harry Potter. There’s the obvious reason – they’re both about schools for young witches! – and there’s the secondary reason, which … Continue reading
You don’t have to look very hard to find a movie where Nicolas Cage loses his shit for one reason or another, and in many instances no reason at all. But Mom and Dad, his new movie, shows him in a mode of crazy we don’t see very often – uninfluenced crazy. Yes, this is a … Continue reading
When we talk about modern Greek cinema, we’re guaranteed to talk about two filmmakers in particular, being Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari. (Aside: Tsangari is a much, much, better filmmaker than Lanthimos.) This is so true that even when we talk about other Greek filmmakers, like Babis Makridis, we’re still talking about Tsangari and Lanthimos, … Continue reading
Happy The Commuter day, aka “the day Andy finally remembered to post his The Commuter pieces from last week”! In my second article about Jaume Collet-Serra’s new Liam Neeson action movie, I go all in on my frustrations over how fucking disposable Liam Neeson action movies tend to be. It’s true: They can’t all be The Grey. But … Continue reading
I never realized how incomplete my life was without a Liam Neeson actioner where he beats up a man with a guitar, that is until I saw The Commuter. The Commuter is the latest in Neeson’s mini-filmography of big, dumb action movies where he plays either regular dudes or super badass dudes (some of whom live their … Continue reading
This one’s short and sweet (and a tad late, whatever, big whoop): In the year-end circus of praise and awards ceremonies, some critics and publications manage to find time to actually think about and write about the worst movies they saw over the last 365 days. As a critic, and as a person, I find … Continue reading
It’s typical that Ryan Murphy things tend to rub me the wrong way, which is why of late I’ve made a point of avoiding Ryan Murphy things. The last Ryan Murphy thing I watched was Feud. I loathed Feud. So I ignored every other Ryan Murphy thing released last year, being American Horror Story‘s eightieth season, which continued my … Continue reading
New year, new feature. For context, I wrote a very long piece about my experiences completing the #52FilmsByWomen pledge in 2017; that piece didn’t pan out, being both too lumbering, too unfocused, and too performative for its own good. But there’s a positive outcome here, being this, a monthly feature for Paste Magazine, highlighting four to five … Continue reading
I’m happy enough to sneak a terrible-on-purpose play on Shakespeare into my review of Maya Forbes’ very good The Polka King that I don’t mind my reference to Phanuel being cut from the final copy. Take that bad with the good, or maybe in this case the bad with the very bad. Whatever. I don’t know. … Continue reading
Who loves Nazis? Nobody. Except maybe other Nazis. That’s sort of the thrust of In the Fade, or part of its thrust: Polite society has no use for Nazis, but impolite people is okay with Nazis, and most of all, other Nazis are okay with other Nazis. Fatih Akin’s film is about a woman, played by … Continue reading
Here: Have some context. I saw The Strange Ones back in the summer of ’17 when a team of publicists were nice enough to send me a screener for the purposes of adding to my #52FilmsByWomen list. I waited for the film to become commercially available, and I waited some more, and then I stopped waiting … Continue reading
I’ll be upfront here: I really don’t agree with either the placement or inclusion of a big chunk of the movies included on Paste Magazine‘s 50 Best Movies Of 2017 list. (Notable entries: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, I, Tonya, John Wick Chapter 2, It, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Blade Runner 2049, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Logan, The Killing of a Sacred Deer.) But that … Continue reading
Happy New Year! Also: Happy Criterion Round-up! Election is nothing to sneeze at, but if you ask me, General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait is the film from The Criterion Collection’s December slate with the most contemporary significance. (It’s also really good. Keep that in mind. Even if Donald Trump wasn’t our fucking president, it’d still be … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 