All Film Reviews

Spectre (PG-13)

“My name is Lester Burnham,” intones the protagonist of Sam Mendes’ debut film, American Beauty. “This is my neighborhood. This is my street. This is my life. I am 42 years old. In less than a year, I will be dead. Of course, I don’t that yet, and in a way, I’m dead already.” With […]
Drunk gods: Victor Frankenstein (PG-13)

When I remembered that Igor was never a character in the original Frankenstein story, I began to expect less of Victor Frankenstein, which makes Igor its main character. When I discovered that this version’s Frankenstein lives in a steampunk London, my expectations lowered yet more. They would descend much lower still. This is a shame, […]
The Martian: The Art of Not Knowing a Place for the First Time (PG-13)

If there is a reason why Americans do not easily cease from exploration it is because, for us, knowing a place for the first time is a horrifying prospect. English colonial writers had a sense of place and Russian novelists a sense of space, but Americans have always been most at home on the frontier—a […]
Sicario: The World after the Monopoly of Violence (R)

If Sicario wants you to know one thing, it’s that good fences make good neighbors; especially wrought iron fences, fences that are topped off with razor wire, lined with infrared cameras and maybe have a guard tower with a mounted machine gun or two every half mile. To see the film’s portrayal of Mexico, one […]
Control (R)

I once spent an afternoon on Babblefish, inputting English song lyrics, translating them into other languages, then translating them back into English to see how they’d changed. Something hidden but true might be discovered within the English that would only come to light when the English was subjected to the grammatical rules of another language. […]
Beyond the Mask: Parable or Fluff Film? (PG)

Some stories shun a theme or philosophy or moral—they are meant purely for enjoyment. No one gets much moral edification from The Three Musketeers, but it remains a classic because we enjoy reading it. Die Hard has remained popular not because of any deep and lasting truths, but because it’s macho eye candy. These movies […]
The Enduring Brilliance of The Office: We Are All David Brent Now (Not Rated)

A scene in The Office Christmas Special nearly gives David Brent away. Or rather, David Brent comes closer than usual to giving himself away. The Christmas Special is set three years after the conclusion of The Office and plays catch-up with faces made famous by the BBC2 documentary series. David has been made redundant, won a […]
Black Mass: The Cost of Looking the Other Way (R)

Bostonians can rest assured that, unlike his earlier crime film Out of the Furnace, their home city is portrayed as being remediable. It does not even seem to be particularly corrupt. What it is, however, is tribal, with the Irish and Italians constantly at one another’s throats. It is a tribalism which not only defines allegiances in the criminal underworld but also among police and federal authorities.
Charlotte’s Web (1973) (G)

In the world of trigger warnings, where one needs to wear kid gloves just to touch the kid gloves, the old 1973 animated adaptation of Charlotte’s Web is a relief. I see recent children’s movies from time to time, and I know that beloved characters still die, but nothing in kid’s movies of late rivals the […]
Good Kill: The Banality Of Slaughter? (R)

“It is well that war is so terrible, lest we should grow too fond of it,” says Robert E. Lee. Most veterans, from the Bunker Hill to Afghanistan, would agree with this statement. But what happens if war ceases to be so terrible? This is the question at the center of Good Kill, the latest from […]
The Man From U.N.C.L.E., or, “The Anti-Kingsman” (PG-13)

In his essay, “Kingsman and the Maybe Genius of Non-Winking Satire,” Hulk Film Crit makes the rather bold assertion that Matthew Vaughn is a kind of blockbuster Martin Scorsese. As different as their methods may be, Hulk argues that their intentions are deeply similar: both approach ugly subjects with a brutal honesty that acknowledges the allure […]
Welcome To The Good Life: Italy Unpacked (Not Rated)

As a classics teacher, “What’s Italy like?” is a question I can answer with a reasonable degree of certainty, provided you want to know what Italy was like hundreds of years ago. However, there is a vast chasm between “What’s Italy like?” and “What’s Italy like in the summer?” and the answer to the first […]
Judging Your Neighbor : Two Days, One Night (PG-13)

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian co-directors of Two Days, One Night, capture the spirit of a modern day Dickens, but without the maudlin Victorianism. The Belgian natives stick to the lower class in their films using a documentarian hand-held camera; frequently using available light, unknown actors, eschewing soundtracks, tracking shots and big budgets, […]
The Fantastic Four: It’s Not Getting Better (PG-13)

When I went to see The Fantastic Four, I was expecting what I usually expect from adaptations of Marvel comics: I didn’t think that it would be particularly memorable, but neither did I expect it to be particularly bad. I was wrong on both accounts: It was memorably bad. I understand that I was probably […]
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 […]