All Film Reviews

Paper Towns: The Teen Whisperer Mumbles (PG-13)

I know only of John Green what Hollywood has told me, which means Paper Towns is but my second venture into the mind of “the Teen Whisperer,” as Margot Talbot once referred to him in The New Yorker. As with The Fault in Our Stars, the characters in Paper Towns are self-reflective and hungry, but […]
Inside Out: The Problem of Sadness (PG)

In his iconic work, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis said, “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” […]
In Bruges (R)

Early in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell), two Irish hitmen, are standing in a museum, contemplating a painting of the Last Judgment. Ray describes purgatory as “the in-betweeny one – you weren’t really shit, but you weren’t all that great either” – but the humor of the description belies […]
Self/Less (PG-13)

Self/less is the latest example of an increasingly common type of thriller, to which, for lack of a pithier designation, I will refer to as the “Idiotic As It Seems, It Might Also Actually Happen Soon” movie. Normally this type of story will involve a character in some sort of life crisis who undergoes a […]
Jurassic World: It’s No Wonderful Life (PG-13)

“Oh, my God! We finally, really did it! You maniacs….Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” The righteous invective Charlton Heston bellows in the final moments of The Planet of the Apes seems similarly suited to the resurrection and public opening of Jurassic Park. Bewilderingly, though, Jurassic World (both the film and the […]
Cinderella: Unenlightened And Loving It (PG)

In the last ten years, the Disney Corporation has broken the heads off more than a few statues they carved back in the 50s and 60s. Given that the company made their billions entertaining children, and given that Americans in no wise view children as they did when your grandparents were kids, such image smashing […]
Song of the Sea (PG)

The first words of the Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea are a quotation from Yeats’ poem “The Stolen Child”: Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand. For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. In the poem, a group of fairies […]
Holy Satire: Believe Me (PG-13)

God created satire. At the end of Job—the oldest book of the Bible—God answers Job’s bitter questions with a set of his own humorous, unanswerable queries. In Isaiah and Jeremiah, God mocks idolaters by describing how useless it is to expect anything from a god made with your own hands. Humor ideally brings out the […]
Tomorrowland (PG)

In the opening minutes of Tomorrowland, a young boy shows us his homemade jetpack. It is meant to be fun and inspiring, but has one problem: it doesn’t work. It’s always nice when a movie hands you a metaphor for itself. It’s not nice when that movie breaks your heart in the process. There may […]
The Importance of Being Poppy : Happy-Go-Lucky (R)

The opening scene of Mike Leigh’s shamefully overlooked Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) is a master class in establishing a character. Poppy, one of the great female characters in cinema, is introduced riding her bike. Her course is a wobbly wheeled delight, she’s dressed eccentrically and smiles frequently, but what is most noticeable is her full-eyed wonder, her […]
Rich Hill: A Look at Poverty Before It was a Statistic (Not Rated)

Before the collapse of industrial empires like Detroit, there was rural America. And rural poverty has been forgotten for much longer than the most excessive architectural subjects of ruin pornography have existed. Andrew Droz Palmero and Tracy Droz Targos’s Sundance documentary, Rich Hill, is a reminder of a whole culture that is rarely found in […]
It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad Mad Max (R)

It’s hard to appreciate paganism properly. I can’t think of many convincingly pagan characters from motion pictures, because most cinematic pagans are nothing more than Republicans or athletes in togas. They talk like us, think like us, dress like us dressing like pagans, opine like us. Our ancient Greeks are suffragettes and our ancient Egyptians […]
Avengers: Age of Ultron (PG-13)

Halfway through Avengers: Age of Ultron, the eponymous robot waxes poetical and says to a few of his cronies, “Everyone creates the thing they fear.” It’s possible that this line was added by the writer and director, Joss Whedon, as an indication of how he felt about this movie. In many ways, Ultron is not […]
Ex Machina (R)

Ex Machina derives its title from the Latin “Deus ex machina,” meaning “god from the machine.” The film’s removal of God from its titular equation is apropos, as is the allusion to classical tragedy. In this polished directorial debut, Alex Garland (writer of 28 Days Later and Sunshine) has crafted something of a modern Greek […]
Song of the Sea (PG)

Come away, O human child To the waters and the wild With a fairy, hand in hand For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. This quote from Yeats fittingly opens Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea, which seeks to understand a world full of weeping through the eyes of a human […]
Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (Not Rated)

I write this on a train, returning home after four days in New York City. In the last five years, I have toured three high school classes through the Metropolitan, the Cloisters, and the smaller museums of Manhattan, like the Morgan and the Frick. While El Greco and Fra Angelico’s Adoration scenes are true and […]
The Material Fix Fails The Spiritual Crisis: It Follows (R)

Let me overstate the case: at least so far as Hollywood is concerned, horror is the one genre which yet thrives. I’ll come to back this in a moment. I once had a friend who had the awful job of reading unsolicited scripts submitted to a major Hollywood studio. All the scripts he read were […]
Defying The Elder Zosima: Going Clear (Not Rated)

Before Orthodox Christians receive the Eucharist, they confess, “Of Thy Mystical Supper, O Son of God, accept me today as a communicant; for I will not speak of Thy Mystery to Thine enemies, neither like Judas will I give Thee a kiss; but like the thief will I confess Thee: Remember me, O Lord in […]
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 […]