All Film Reviews

Mercy Rule: Ice Cream For Your Darlings (Not Rated)

Praising Mercy Rule for what it doesn’t get wrong is a fairly straight forward task. Praising the film for what it gets right is a bit trickier. As with most “Christian films,” Mercy Rule was shot on a small budget and with few recognizable faces, though the film lacks an altar call, a conversion and […]
A Player that Struts and Frets: Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (R)

“Birdman is the thing with feathers,” to adapt a line from Emily Dickinson to describe Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). The Birdman perches in the soul of Riggan Thomson, played by the indomitable Michael Keaton, and functions as hope, the spirit rising above the quotidian. There is also a […]
Chappie (R)

Whither Blomkamp? Chappie is the third feature-length film of South African director Neill Blomkamp, and, sadly, a disappointing attempt to reheat most of the ingredients of his acclaimed debut District 9. In that thoughtful and naturalistic variation on the familiar aliens-invading-earth premise, Blomkamp revealed a considerable gift for evoking pathos with the least likely characters: […]
The Americans: The Best Show on Television (Not Rated)

The German philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in effort to show the pervasiveness of Christ’s Crucifixion in culture and as an axiom in social life, used the “Cross of Reality” to describe the suffering at the center of human experience. An actual Cross is key, not just as a symbol of anguish, but in form. Life does […]
Kingsman: The Secret Service (R)

With a film as superficially slick and fun as Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, it’s mightily tempting to view the film on an accordingly superficial level, judging it based on its shallow pleasures and surface flash – and certainly, there are manifold pleasures to be enumerated here. One could list off the film’s many […]
Welcoming the Masses?: The Good Lie (PG-13)

The beginning of The Good Lie plays like a documentary. Sudanese children frolic in a close-knit village, their words translated on the bottom of the screen. Two brothers play a game to memorize the names of their ancestors, and they tend their village’s cattle herds together. Suddenly, a troop of Northern Sudanese fighters brutally massacres […]
Kingsman: So Much Action, So Few Returns (R)

Colin Firth has a reputation for playing the underdog. He is an urbane actor and generally makes intelligent decisions in the roles that he plays. But, since his role as Mr. Darcy in the Pride and Prejudice miniseries 20 years ago, he has made a career of portraying a man in an uphill battle, sometimes […]
What Kind Of A Man Are You? (R)

Speaking of his wife and her brawny boss who is over for dinner, small town barber Ed Crane looks at the two flirting in his kitchen and remarks dryly to us, “I guess Doris liked all that he-man stuff. Sometimes I had the feeling that she and Big Dave were a lot closer than they […]
Full of Rag Water and Bitters: Blue Ruin (R)

You’re full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin and you spill out -Tom Waits, 9th & Hennepin The star-crossed lovers are dead when the movie begins.There was a story of love, adultery and murder left aside. There were years of trauma skipped over, the dissolution of one family and the rallying and recovery of […]
Where the Violent Bear It Away: A Most Violent Year (R)

In a decadent society, decency is a sin, and it is one of the few that is unforgiveable. This is a lesson learned by Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), the borderline hero and heating oil entrepreneur at the center of J. C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, although he insists on learning the hard way. Adversity is […]
Defect & Exile: The Hunt For Red October (PG)

I revisited The Hunt For Red October recently and found it a far different film than I remembered. I saw this one in the theater when I was nine and revisited it more than a dozen times in my teens, though I had not seen it in a decade when I started it a few nights ago. […]
Blackhat (R)

Blackhat begins with a sinister shot from outer space of the whole world connected. Thin blue lines spiderweb across the globe as the camera zooms in on one particular power plant in one particular country. The camera continues to zoom through a computer screen in the power plant and zip past bands of cables – […]
American Sniper: The Shot Heard Round the World (R)

When it comes to making heroes from rogues and outcasts, Americans (and Texans in particular) are incredible alchemists. William Travis was a debtor, Jim Bowie a slaver and James Bonham a convict, but that is not what any of them are remembered for. And, despite their faults, the world has found incredible use for such […]
Red Hook Summer (R)

“We live in a world of should-not-be.” Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer (2012) is the story of Silas “Flik” Royale, a thirteen-year-old African-American boy from Atlanta who is sent to live with his “old school” preacher grandfather Bishop Enoch in the Brooklyn projects for the summer. Although we don’t really know the reasoning behind this […]
The Imitation Game (PG-13)

One of the forte subjects of the famous French philosopher Rene Girard is mimetic desire – that is, mankind as a species adept at imitation. In fact, imitation is our chief means to learning. But when imitating, humans also imitate other’s desires, which conclusively leads to desiring the same things. Girard refers to this negative rivalry […]
Where the Wild Things Are: Put Off All Your Beast (PG)

“Inside all of us is a Wild Thing,” goes the tagline to Spike Jonze’s 2009 film Where the Wild Things Are, based on the popular children’s book by Maurice Sendak and Max is the wildest of the wild, son and younger brother in a broken family. Jonze with co-adapter Dave Eggers craft a touching film […]
Unbroken (PG-13)

I tend to be forgiving of film adaptations from a book because film is an entirely different medium. Movies rarely hit the emotional and philosophical depth of a well-written novel, but they can provide stunning visuals and an entertaining way to relive a good story. For me, the guidepost to a good adaptation is this: […]
Grimm Tales: Into the Woods (PG)

The woods of classic fairytale lore are the locus of secrets, danger, and freedom. The wolf knows he is safe to stalk Little Red Riding Hood behind the trees; the witch trusts that no one will find Rapunzel’s tower in its depths. Fast forward several hundred years, and Disney cartoons have scraped much of the […]
Children of Men: Rachel Weeping In The 21st Century (R)

A little less than a decade back, the greatest Christmas movie of all time came and went with disappointingly little fanfare— I say “disappointingly little” despite the fact two dozen top American film critics put it in their top ten lists at the end of the year. A few of their reviews dabbled in the […]
Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder: The Place Beyond the Pines (R)

“He’s my son and I should be around him. I wasn’t around my dad and look at the… way I turned out.” The film opens with the speaker, Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), shirtless and bedecked with a tattoo scheme in which White Chocolate likely served as inspiration. He paces about a small utility room twirling and […]