All Film Reviews

Arsenic and Old Lace (Not Rated)

“What’s your favorite film?” It’s the question every cinephile delights to hear, yet also dreads. Delights, because finally someone made this social function less awkward — and besides, who doesn’t want to extol their loves before others? Dreads, because who can pick just one movie?
Green Room (R)

The recent trailer for the now delayed Dune reminded us that “Fear is the mind-killer.” This mantra is particularly appropriate for the tumultuous year of 2020, as well as the regular Halloween season. As we enter haunted corn mazes to be scared by costumed spooks or social distance at home and watch scary movies, we experience […]
Fright Night (R)

Here is a terrifying thought: we can’t outgrow monsters. Once they have been breathed into existence, there is no willing them away. They are eternal, the necessary evil that allows us to define better what goodness might look like. Their most frightening feature? The ability to adapt and survive and always find a way to feed off […]
The Birds (PG-13)

“Consider the birds of the air,” Christ tells us. The birds neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, yet our heavenly Father feeds them, and so the birds remind us to depend on God, in faith, for our provision. Man is good at finding ways to provide for himself, though. Faith is something of […]
Nosferatu the Vampyre (PG)

Twilight aside, the most ubiquitous images of the vampire hail from the black and white era: Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, he of the endlessly parodied accent, and the elaborately gothic sets and shadows of F.W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu. Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of Murnau’s 1922 film is an odd beast, though. As Dracula, Klaus Kinski is […]
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (R)

I once had a math teacher tell me that any book that has to be read more than once to be understood isn’t a good book. At the time, I was not sure I agreed with her. If you asked me a few years ago, I would definitely have disagreed. Today, I am not so sure. To […]
The New Mutants (PG-13)

It may be three years late, but The New Mutants is finally here. Getting to watch what is now officially the final X-Men film made under 20th Century Fox’s banner was nothing short of surreal because, at one point, I really thought it might never be released.* Last summer, I wrote about how Disney absorbing 20th Century […]
Tenet (PG-13)

One suspects that Christopher Nolan became a filmmaker because film is a uniquely time-based art form. In Inception, minutes of waking life translate to hours of dream time; in Interstellar, an astronaut boards a spaceship shaped like a clock and travels into a black hole that stretches hours into years. Nolan is fascinated by time, […]
The Master (R)

Those who admire the films of Paul Thomas Anderson are no strangers to the labyrinths his thematic puzzle boxes construct — one could probably watch Magnolia half a dozen times in the span it would take to unravel all of its mysteries — and yet, The Master lingers tantalizingly even above this, the most oblique […]
Gran Torino (R)

Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is a tall, white-haired, racist veteran of the Korean War trying to make sense of a changing America. The enjoyment he once found sharing his neighborhood with white folks has morphed into abjectly watching Hmong immigrants invade the homes around him. Faithful dog on one side and case of Pabst Blue Ribbon on the other, Walt is the weathered remnant of an America gone by.
Spider-Man 2 (PG-13)

According to FilmFisher’s rating system, to award a film the perfect 5-fish rating is to claim the film is “not merely a towering achievement in its genre” but also “makes ardent strides towards virtue and offers the viewer an acute and profound entrance into the ancient discussion of human excellence and the transcendence of God.” I am willing to make all these claims about Spider-Man 2.
Hell or High Water (R)

While the wild west has certainly evolved in the past two hundred years, Hell or High Water evokes the power of romantic frontier stories. This contemporary west is a stage for gunfights and thunderstorms as well as casinos and car chases. It’s a west where cowboys carry smartphones and drive new trucks, but also wear […]
A Canterbury Tale (G)

In this strange season we currently find ourselves in, I occupy more time than ever before by reading books and watching films. A little over a month ago I watched something of a forgotten gem — British duo Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale — and not a day has passed since that it hasn’t crossed […]
The Invisible Man (R)

In the early days of cinema, just after the introduction of sound, many of the cinematic genres we’re familiar with today were crystallized by particular studios who focused their efforts on certain niches. Universal Pictures had the horror market cornered with their adaptations of late 19th century literature, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and HG […]
Light from Light (Not Rated)

The central question of Paul Harrill’s gentle chiller Light from Light is the same one ghost stories have been asking for centuries: is the house haunted? Richard (Jim Gaffigan), who’s begun experiencing strange phenomena since his wife passed away in a plane crash, suspects it may be. Shelia (Marin Ireland), who works a normal desk […]
JoJo Rabbit (PG-13)

Parodying Hitler is nothing new. Charlie Chaplin played him in The Great Dictator (1940), long before Look Who’s Back (2015), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Mein Führer: The Really Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler (2007), and the countless memes that subtitled Hitler’s bunker tirade in Downfall (2004). Before the U.S. had entered WWII, mocking Hitler for two […]
1917 (R)

When I was about 13, my father rented (from an establishment called Blockbuster) an odd little film called Rope. He is an Alfred Hitchcock aficionado and had discovered that this was one of Hitch’s lesser known films, which he had yet to see. In the days before IMDb and easy internet access, information like this was […]
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (PG-13)

An early scene in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a fitting metaphor for the film as a whole. Finn (John Boyega) and Poe (Oscar Isaac), fleeing TIE Fighters in the Millennium Falcon, escape their pursuers by “lightspeed skipping” – a dangerous maneuver (or so we’re told, though it goes smoothly enough for our […]
Black Christmas (R)

It’s fitting that, about three-quarters into Bob Clark’s yuletide chiller Black Christmas, I almost laughed out loud when a character exclaims in a panic, “The calls are coming from inside the house!” Before watching, I’d been unaware that the iconic line now synonymous with the horror-slasher genre had originated here, knowing it only as an […]
Black Christmas (2019) (PG-13)

Further proof that studios think that any intellectual property is better than having no intellectual property, Black Christmas, the second remake of the original film, actually doesn’t benefit from its namesake since it bears very little of that infamous, incredible proto-slasher from 1974. The idea to update what was an incredibly socially relevant and quite subversive […]