All Film Reviews

Ant-Man: A Humble Beginning (PG-13)

When a new planet swims into the ken of the Marvel cinematic universe, the gravity must be intense. Like stout Cortez staring at the Pacific for the first time, the wonder of new discovery quickly gives way to acquisition and assimilation. After several rounds of feature-length introductions to The Avengers, Ant-Man is an unexpected departure […]
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (PG-13)

When the theatre lights go down, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation starts to play the breathless beginning of Lilo Schifrin’s famous theme before the Paramount Studios mountain has even left the screen. With the Mission Impossible franchise now securely established, this is not a film that intends to waste time winning over its audiences. No, […]
Lost, Season One: Strangers On A Plane (Not Rated)

More than ten years since it began and more than five years since it ended, I have begun a grand revisitation of Lost. When I first began the show, I had just married and was still in school. I wasn’t much of a reader during my first encounter. I understood that many of the characters […]
Jupiter Ascending: Descent to Some Kind of Love (PG-13)

Conjure, if you will, a moving image of the hippest rollerblader you’ve ever seen. If you are strapped for stock images, try the reuniting-the-team segment at the front end of D2: The Mighty Ducks, or some other nineties vintage of the same ilk. Now, hoist that rollerblader twenty, thirty, a thousand feet into air—the same […]
Mr. Holmes: When Logic Fails (PG)

From the beginning, Sherlock Holmes stories were as much about the interplay between logic and emotion as about ash-dust and ciphers. Holmes symbolizes the pinnacle of reason and remove, yet he comes to need the compassion and friendship of Watson. Mr. Holmes playfully snubs the Watson accounts as exaggerations, but the titular detective needs friendship […]
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 […]