I have been known to describe interviews I’ve done in the past as “the best interview I’ve ever done.” I say this because I mean it, but I’m also saying it from a place where objectivity doesn’t exist. The truth is that every interview I do, in general, is better than the one I’ve done before … Continue reading
Surprise: Studio Ghibli made a beautiful movie. Once you’re done collecting your jaw from the floor, you can click this link and zip over to The Playlist and read the review I wrote about Michaël Dudok de Wit’s The Red Turtle, a movie so lovely, minimalist, and thoughtful that it may assuage whatever sociopolitical anxieties you’re wrestling … Continue reading
Let me tell you: Based on the poster, I honestly expected to hate Hidden Figures with a passion. I expected it to be sappy feel-good bullshit; I expected it to do its history a series of disservices; I expected it to waste its talented leading actresses. But it doesn’t! At all! The film works! I don’t … Continue reading
Last October, I was given the opportunity to have a sit-down with Patrick Ness, author (ish) of the low fantasy, young adult novel A Monster Calls, and to talk with him about the experience of adapting his own novel (ish) from page to screen. (“Ish” meaning: Ness was contracted to write it, but author Siobhan Dowd, who … Continue reading
Well, you all know what this post is about. A brief intro: Most years, I agonize over my top ten list to the bitter end, and then for a while after, too. This largely has to do with volume. I don’t tend to see all of the movies that I want or need to in a … Continue reading
I like seeing directors take pains not to pigeonhole themselves. Take André Øvredal, the Swedish filmmaker who shot Trollhunter back in 2010. You’d half expect him to make another movie in that vein, blackly funny and tons of fun. (You’d also hope he would make that movie, or any movie, sooner than six years after Trollhunter became a … Continue reading
I can’t stop writing about year-end stuff! And there’s more year-end stuff to come! Unsatisfied with writing about the performances I wrote about for that other “best performances” feature, I decided to write about five more performances for Paste Magazine’s own “best performances” feature. I I think I totally crushed it. You tell me.
…hey, how about that, another year end list, whaddya know. 2016 is a big documentary year, as in “there are a lot of great documentaries that came out this year.” I wrote about Ava DuVernay’s 13th, and Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, two fundamentally unalike films that remain among the year’s best documentary offerings, for The Playlist.
I ranked Silence in the #4 position on my BOFCA ballot this year, so naturally my review of the film has pretty high praise for it. You’ll hear a lot about the film in the coming weeks, much of which will, I’m certain, be bent around matters of representation; the questions raised in those conversations are … Continue reading
If I had to count down the best films in a specific genre, that genre might as well be horror, so that’s what I did: I, in tandem with a handful of my esteemed colleagues as Paste Magazine, put together a list of the fifteen horror movies in 2016 that most deserve your time and … Continue reading
The year end train continues! Over at The Playlist, I wrote a few capsules about a few of the best performances of 2016, notably the dueling works of Isabelle Huppert, who appears in both Elle and Things to Come, two very different movies where she plays very similar roles. You should maybe take a looksie, eh? … Continue reading
When did Pablo Larraín become one of cinema’s hardest working people? The guy has two movies in theaters right now, and they’re just the second and third movies of his that have graced screens in 2016. The Club is probably the best of the bunch, but I liked his latest, Neruda, a sort-of biopic about Pablo … Continue reading
Is there that much difference between a play and a movie that it’s worth talking about? Yes, of course, but also no; it depends greatly on the movie in question, and that movie happens to be Fences, a film that’s based on a play and shot like a play and which ultimately feels like a play, but … Continue reading
You’re aware, I imagine, that I am a member of BOFCA, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and if you are aware of that, then you are also likely aware that every year, we vote, as critics groups do, to determine with authority which movies of the last 365 days were, in a word, “best.” … Continue reading
All We Had encompasses a very, very particular storytelling aesthetic that I find absolutely loathsome, in which the director, Katie Holmes (also its star), decides it’d be fun to soft-shoe life lived hand to mouth on the open road. It’s basically dress-up, except she’s dressing up like a really poor person. I’d rather not say … Continue reading
I liked Sophia Takal’s sophomore film so much that I wrote about it twice: Once for Independent Film Festival Boston, once at the beginning of this here December month. (Both times for Paste Magazine, because surprise.) If you’ve already seen the film, well, no harm in reading my thoughts. If you haven’t, see it, then think … Continue reading
I found the experience of Lion frustrating, but it took me time to understand the depths of my frustration. The film works for about an hour, its first hour, where young Saroo Brierly winds up lost in Calcutta, a place where he knows neither a soul nor a word of the language spoken; the terror he … Continue reading
What a crazy world we live in, where a person can do the right thing and get their ass kicked for it by bureaucracy. That’s what Johnny Ma’s debut film, Old Stone, is all about. It’s a lean, harsh bit of work, maybe a bit too off the rails in its final moments (and certainly too … Continue reading
I’m a 32 year old man and I love princess movies. There. I said it. Moana is no exception, but this is also because I love Dwayne Johnson and have since my days as a wrestling fan. (“In between now and then, I’ve grown up,” says the guy who still think farts are hilarious.) Anyways, so … Continue reading
A movie about a man who keeps bees, his son who keeps books, and the silly generational tiffs that erupt between them on a farm in rural Northern China. Sit on that for a second. Sounds dull as a stone, right? Right! But The Beekeeper and his Son is actually a super interesting film, one that’s … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 