All Film Reviews
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Avengers: Endgame (PG-13)
One of the many, many things the Marvel Cinematic Universe has severely lacked is a sense of poetry — visually, verbally, thematically, or otherwise. But what strikes me about Avengers: Endgame is that it is a small but significant step toward reversing that trend. The film contains a surprising number of poetic touches and grace […]
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Pokémon Detective Pikachu (PG)
In my review for 2019’s criminally underrated The Kid Who Would Be King (still not a fan of that title), I lamented the dearth of classic family adventures like the ones Joe Johnston was so good at directing during the 1990s. What I’d neglected to remember was that we’d actually gotten a fairly good and fairly […]
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The Mustang (R)
If The Mustang were a song, it would have been written and recorded by Johnny Cash. The fundamental elements are all there: Love, God, and Murder. It is the story of a convict who is placed in a very unique rehabilitation program: a rehabilitation program that uses horses. The old man who runs the program […]
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The Curse of La Llorona (R)
Syncretism has come to the Conjuring universe. Quite obviously, The Curse of La Llorona is a story rooted in Mexican folklore, dating back to the 19th century, about a mother who does the unspeakable, killing her own children in a fit of jealous rage. Considered as a piece within the Conjuring universe, however, the film functions much […]
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High Life (R)
Space wasn’t always scary. At first, it was simply the stars and little else. As time went on, humanity began to learn more about the solar system, but I doubt many thought to be afraid of it. In the early 20th century – perhaps even sooner than that – writers began to speculate about the cosmos in a less strictly academic manner. Science-fiction was born. By and large, these writings were optimistic and more than a little naïve.
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Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (PG-13)
I have a strange history with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. When the first film came out in the summer of 2014, I was completely taken in by it and willfully ignored the friends who told me it was bad – until I watched it one time too many and veritable scales fell from my […]
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Iron Man Three (PG-13)
As the fishes above attest, this is not going to be a grand apology for an overlooked masterpiece. I am merely offering a few modest words on a film’s modest merits. In the rush of Marvel movies released since its premiere in 2013, Shane Black’s Iron Man Three has largely been forgotten – a victim […]
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The Conjuring 2 (R)
The message that emerges from The Conjuring 2 is simply this: home is where the father is. More pointedly, home is where the faithful father is. The Hodgsons are a family with no father, and their lives are objectively and demonstrably the worse for it. Their biological father’s abandonment left the family exposed – exposed to grinding poverty, the stresses that accompany it, and bullies of all sorts. Ed reverses this trend, restoring function, hope, and faith to the home. Conversely, when Ed is eventually driven from the home through deception, the Hodgson family crumbles – emotionally and in terms of their safety.
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Hellboy (2019) (R)
Life’s all about checks and balances. Just last week I was excited that we’d finally gotten a superhero film, Shazam!, that was interested in being something different and had real thematic weight. And then the clunky, absolutely unnecessary reboot of Dark Comics’ Hellboy came along this weekend and reminded me that happiness is sometimes so fleeting. To put it mildly, […]
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Dumbo (PG)
In a sense, viewing this iteration of Dumbo seated next to my mother was to come full circle: I watched the original film every single day for a month when I was a toddler – or so she tells me. Of course the Nietzschean themes of eternal recurrence and childlike wonder are so archetypal that the original film, a masterpiece written in the key of kitsch, uses them without so much as a wink or a nod to belie its philosophical quandary or artistic intent. This latest film had high standards to live up to.
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Shazam! (PG-13)
As an avid comic book fan, let me tell you… This glut of superhero films we’ve been enduring for the past decade or so has been absolutely exhausting. Quality control ensures that each of these films look the part, but very few have captured that kinetic childhood joy of flipping through comic book panels and dreaming about […]
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Us (R)
Since we’re about to speak at length about a horror film, especially one directed by someone that every news source likes to tout as the next Hitchcock, it seems appropriate to use a quote from a Dario Argento film. After all, Argento was the true successor to Hitchcock, and even then, to call him just that would be […]
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (R)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the sophomore film of director Michel Gondry, has a flawless screenplay. Its tale is one of a shy man named Joel (an inoffensive Jim Carrey) and a girl he falls in love with after meeting her at a train station in Montauk, a girl by the name of Clementine […]
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The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (R)
It’s a well-known fact: the cinematic year of 2007 was one for the ages. Those fortunate enough to live through it remember the year fondly; those who, like myself, thrived at that point on a steady diet of Veggie Tales and Disney’s Homeward Bound, admire it from afar in wistful retrospect. In perhaps the best […]
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The Kid Who Would be King (PG)
The inexplicably long-titled The Kid Who Would be King (was there no easier alternative?) opened at the end of January this year without any fanfare from 20th Century Fox. It’s no surprise that the film sunk like a stone at the box office. The marketing campaign just wasn’t appealing, there’ve been countless films about Arthurian legend, and, worst […]
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Captain Marvel (PG-13)
Somewhere in Captain Marvel, the heroine (Brie Larson) sits down to chat with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). Earth has been invaded by shapeshifting aliens, and to prove he isn’t one, Fury rattles off a string of backstory details and character quirks. He then asks the good Captain to do the same, but instead of […]
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Miller’s Crossing (R)
“You always take the long way around to get what you want, don’t you, Tom?” asks Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) about halfway through Miller’s Crossing, the Coen brothers’ third feature. Tom (Gabriel Byrne), the closest thing the film has to a hero, only replies: “What did I want?” Like their leading man, the Coens tend to take the long way around, and most of the time, viewers come away from their films wondering what they wanted.
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Alita: Battle Angel (PG-13)
Alita: Battle Angel knows exactly what kind of film it is. At one point during its two hour runtime, surprisingly brisk for a big budget Hollywood blockbuster these days, Alita (Rosa Salazar) straight up offers another person her heart. She goes so far as to remove it from her mechanical chest, holding it in her hand […]
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Vice (R)
When the 2019 Academy Award nominees were released in late January, many people were excited about who and what was being considered for an Oscar in the different vital and sometimes overlooked categories that make filmmaking possible. But of course, the highlights are the nominees for Best Picture, representing the best movies had to offer for […]
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A Star is Born for the Fourth Time (R)
The Bradley Cooper-helmed remake of A Star is Born marks the fourth time that this story has been told through celluloid. Each film follows the same basic plot: a rocky romantic relationship between a talented man and woman. The woman rises to fame partially because of her connection to the man. And then the man […]