All Film Reviews

It’s a Wonderful Life (PG)

Scrooge’s nephew calls Christmas “a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the […]
Green Book (PG-13)

Peter Farrelly’s Green Book is a lesson to all Americans: Black Lives really do Matter, and, just maybe, all lives matter too. A house divided against itself cannot stand, but the division this country is now faced with is not one of race, sex, gender, sexuality, or any other label. It is a division of […]
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (PG)

I love Spider-Man. To be more specific, I love Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. That isn’t to say I don’t love any other iteration of the character but it is the standard with which I judge all other iterations. Perhaps it isn’t the most objective, and it certainly isn’t the most ideal. While I think it is the […]
Bumblebee (PG-13)

To watch Bumblebee is to be caught in the middle of a tug-of-war between two different movies. One is a forgettable blockbuster and wannabe franchise reboot about toys from the 1980s, and the other is an efficient if not novel throwback to children’s adventure films of that decade like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. In the end, […]
Widows (R)

You’ll have to forgive me. It’s been nearly three weeks since I initially saw Widows. Immediately after the screening, I felt very positively about the film, which I thought leveraged some really great technical filmmaking and a game cast to offset a messy script with too many threads and a pretty weak late-game twist. But in […]
The Other Side of the Wind (R)

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” – Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time “A fact of life: […]
Ralph Breaks the Internet (PG)

I would probably do well to confess up front that I am not really the right person to review Ralph Breaks the Internet. I harbor no fondness for its predecessor, Wreck-It Ralph, which I saw once upon its release in 2012 – and, while I’m being frank, I have not really enjoyed a new animated […]
You Were Never Really Here (R)

Lynne Ramsay’s 2018 film You Were Never Really Here begins with a sigh — or perhaps more of a gasp. We’ve cut from a black screen to an image of Joaquin Phoenix’s character Joe, his head wrapped in a plastic bag, slowly breathing in and out. With each exhalation the bag inflates, allowing space, breathing […]
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (R)

The films of the Coen brothers are replete with dark ironies, but few rival the fact that the staunchest moralists working in Hollywood today have been so consistently labeled as cynics or dismissed as nihilists. Their impeccable new effort, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is the latest in a streak of masterpieces now over a […]
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (PG-13)

I have dreaded writing this review ever since I left the theater, and don’t think I will get much enjoyment out of it. There is no pleasure to be had in speaking against a group of artists whose work you have always enjoyed — and even been shaped by — in the past. Some take […]
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (PG)

Half-Blood Prince is the first, and perhaps only, Harry Potter film to feel like it isn’t trying to be a good “Harry Potter film” and just does its best at being a good film. The seventh film has a similar tone, and Azkaban encapsulates what it is to be a Harry Potter film the best, but my point stands. In the sixth cinematic installment of the franchise, Harry Potter and his friends are ordinary British teens placed in extraordinary circumstances, but instead of focusing on the circumstances, the film chooses to focus on the teens – and is much better off because of it.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (PG)

In the evangelical circles of my childhood, Harry Potter was anathema; when I was allowed to read the books in high school, they still carried the sense of something forbidden about them, though by the time I reached college, J.K. Rowling was suddenly accorded the reverence due a long-lost member of the Inklings. Suffice it […]
Let the Right One In (R)

Early in Let the Right One In, a young bully asks his victim, “What are you looking at?” Soon we find the victim, a dispassionate boy named Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), fantasizing about turning the question back on his tormentor. His rehearsed vengeance is overheard by the vampire Eli (Lina Leandersson), and well into her courtship […]
Halloween (R)

Let’s just get this out of the way: the new Halloween commits a cardinal horror movie sin in that it all feels too safe. In other words, it’s not scary. This latest sequel erases the rest of the canon in favor of being a direct follow up to John Carpenter’s 1978 original. Almost by fiat, this is surely the […]
Interpreting ‘The Shape’ of Halloween (R)

Originally conceived as The Babysitter Murders, the plot for Halloween is actually about as streamlined as that title might suggest. It features several babysitters, a hulking man with a knife, and some murders. But in the hands of any director other than John Carpenter, we wouldn’t still be talking about Halloween forty years later. It is, in fact, one of […]
First Man (PG-13)

The biopic, as a film genre, is a notoriously difficult thing to get right. The problem with much of history, and indeed a great deal of personal history, is that it’s not particularly cinematic because it’s often so internalized. It’s the problem a lot of faith-based films have. How can you quantify a spiritual experience […]
Venom (PG-13)

When I was a very young boy, I thought Venom was pretty cool. I liked Spider-Man, and I liked dinosaurs, and I imagine this is why the idea of a carnivorous Spider-Man held some appeal for me. It is more difficult to pinpoint the source of the morbid curiosity that drove me to the theater this weekend, where I forked over twelve dollars to see Sony Pictures’ Venom under the pretense of “taking one for the FilmFisher team.”
The Old Man and the Gun (PG-13)

Though he has directed only five feature films in a career of less than a decade, David Lowery’s vision of the cosmos is already more clearly defined than most directors achieve in a lifetime. 2013’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, 2016’s Pete’s Dragon, and 2017’s A Ghost Story are all united by a soulful, lyrical quality […]
Barton Fink: The Inferno and the Hypocrite (R)

Writer’s block is hell. You sit, every member of your body frozen, your neurons refusing to fire, your fingers refusing to type — and all the while, the awful blankness of the empty page declines to cease its sneering taunt. You lose sleep, lose sanity; your mind becomes a barren desert, a dry and weary […]
Memento: Truth vs. Happiness (R)

After seeing Inception for the first time in the summer of 2010, Christopher Nolan quickly became my favorite director. Although my enthusiasm has waned over the years, as his films have grown less character driven and more spectacle oriented, I still have a certain fondness for earlier works like Memento.