It’s the last “Films By Women” piece of 2018! I bet you’re pretty bummed. But it’s okay; there’ll be other lists soon. Like, “in a month” soon. We’re already getting our 2019 watching underway over here in Andy Crump land. (There is no “we.” I am using the royal “we.” It’s my blog! I … Continue reading
I tried, guys. I promise you I tried. Oh, how I tried to give Vice, the new Adam McKay movie, a fair shake; tried not to read the movie as “The Big Short, but wicked extra, and also obnoxious.” But I couldn’t, because that’s exactly what it is, times ten, and don’t let any clever types try … Continue reading
For your consideration: A whole heapin’ helpin’ of real good performances in real good movies. My picks here: Brady Jandreau, Joaquin Phoenix, Kiki Layne & Stefan James, and Ben Foster & Thomasin McKenzie. Maybe the last two feel like cheats, and in a way they are. But in a totally different way they’re not, because … Continue reading
Should fate ever afford you chance to speak with Chris Morgan, do, and make sure you’ve more than 20 minutes to talk to him: He’s a talker! And a good talker! I say this a lot, but I honestly could have talked all day with Morgan about movies and storytelling, which probably explains his vocation … Continue reading
No better way to preamble this piece than by saying that speaking with Trevante Rhodes was a humbling experience; he’s a gracious man, to say nothing of his talents as an actor or his Herculean physique, and while we did do some press about his new movie (Susanne Bier’s Bird Box), we talked more about male identity … Continue reading
Preamble: Man, the DCEU movies are fucking bad. (Excepting Wonder Woman, which is good until it’s bad.) …okay, got that out of the way. Aquaman kinda rocks. Like Wonder Woman, Aquaman cradles its share of flaws and bad creative decisions, most of them involving the totally great Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who deserves to be a big huge movie star and … Continue reading
I did, four years ago, write a review of Pawel Pawlikowski’s post-war masterpiece Ida, but I’m not certain it’s still online or if I ever even shared it on this website; that’s too bad, because it’d be nice to revisit my words for context for Cold War, Pawlikowski’s new film, which I imagine years from now I’ll also … Continue reading
Well: We did it. It’s not often that a critics group’s awards match up closely with my own feelings, and if I’m being really nitpicky, this year’s Boston Online Film Critics Association awards miss a few marks for me; if you know me well and you’ve followed this blog since I started bitching about a certain … Continue reading
True story: On first hearing of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, I wrote it off and put it out of my memory, thinking, “this sounds like a pretty naked excuse to put a bunch of different Spider-Man variations into a single movie for the purpose of moving lots of ancillary product, and also most Marvel movies aren’t … Continue reading
Well, you can’t win ’em all. Thought exercise: Even if I did like Suspiria and Hereditary (they’re bad), I’d probably put Mandy ahead of them both. Mandy is a distinct horror throwback, but the film feels current, of the moment, a time capsule for reviewing its era sans wistful nostalgia, and it frankly stands to move the genre forward in … Continue reading
“Hmm,” you’re saying, checking movie listings, trying to figure out what exactly you should consider going out to the movie theater palace to see, gauging whether or not this movie or that movie is worth spending your money (which you can earn back) and your time (of which you have a finite amount as a … Continue reading
It happens to us all: We crib, subconsciously, from the books and movies and shows and plays and such that make up our creative genetic material, whether when we’re writing our own books or movies or whatever, or writing about others’ books or movies or whatever. In the case of Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, that mental bleed wound … Continue reading
I suspect, by now, that a number of those of you reading my work and my Twitter feed are just about sick of hearing me complain about Ari Aster’s Hereditary. Well…I’m going to complain about it a couple times more, though in this instance, we’re talking less about a complaint than a comparison. If you’re going to make … Continue reading
I didn’t share this the other day because…I’m…lazy, I think? I gotta be honest, keeping this ol’ sucker up to date is a chore on my middling days (and don’t worry, it’s a joy on my best days). Also, I am never sure what the best way is to sum up the Criterion round-ups. We watched … Continue reading
Here we are, gang: Year end time. Time for the year to end. Time for the lists. Time for critics to tell you all what is best in this year that is ending. Yadda. I wrote about the new Frederick Wiseman film. You probably didn’t know a new Frederick Wiseman film even came out this year, did … Continue reading
Two Hirokazu Kore-eda movies! In one year! What a gift to all of humanity, Shoplifters in particular, this humane but knotty and deeply complicated movie; good though The Third Murder may be, it simply isn’t Shoplifters, the best “family is what you make it” movie of 2018 (and “family is what you make it” is indeed a surprising sub-theme … Continue reading
This is maybe the first Films By Women spotlight I’ve done where I am guilty of not seeing one of the movies on the list, or, in the case of Kino Lorber’s Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers set, any of them; I didn’t have an “in” to score a review copy, so I had to review this more … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 