All Film Reviews

The Lone Ranger: Gore Verbinski’s Unheralded Masterpiece (PG-13)

Part 1: Introduction “I cannot tell if this horse is stupid, or just pretending to be stupid.” – Tonto (Johnny Depp) A similar dilemma faced those who watched Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger when it was released over 2013’s Fourth of July weekend. Was it stupid? Or just pretending to be stupid? Most critics and […]
The Hateful Eight (R)

2015 was a banner year for westerns. The genre, once one of Hollywood’s most profitable and now one of its least – the financial disaster of 2013’s unjustly reviled extravaganza The Lone Ranger was the final nail in that coffin – seemed doomed to fade into obscurity. However, rather than living on solely through the occasional indie […]
Macbeth: Post-traumatic Stress and the Pre-Christian World (R)

Shakespeare wouldn’t be Shakespeare if we did not have reasons to argue about him. Part of what makes his plays so enduring is their ability to tolerate the conjunctions “both … and …” However, it does make writing about him always a challenge, even though thousands (millions, if you include students) have done so before. […]
The Bourne Atheist: Ridley Scott’s New Soulless Cosmos (PG-13)

This ain’t no Sierra Club. This ain’t no National Geographic Society neither. “Fuck you, Mars,” says Martian Mark Watney shortly after finding himself utterly alone on a foreign planet. Man has been set against nature many times before, especially in 20th century literature and film. At times, man must battle nature. The Old Man must […]
Where’s That Olde Time Religion? The Force Awakens (PG-13)

I suspect I am not unique in claiming to have had serious conversations with friends in the wee hours of the morning wherein real considerations of future plans have been hashed out using the original Star Wars trilogy as a template for a genuine pursuit of truth and goodness. Should I find a Yoda under […]
Creed: Winning the Fight for Relevance (PG-13)

An athlete born in the year (1976, that is) that Rocky Balboa first fought on the silver screen would probably be nearing retirement now, if he or she had not retired already. But Balboa himself (played, as always, by Sylvester Stallone) keeps turning up. This is not without risks of seeming exploitative. Worse, it is not […]
My Life With The Chill Kill Cult: Martha Marcy May Marlene (R)

Where do flashbacks come from? Who delivers the flashback to the audience? Is it the same authorial power which delivers the present tense narrative to the audience? And who is privy to the flashback? If the flashback occurs in the mind of a present character, should the flashback be trusted less than the objectively rendered […]
No Rating

Left Behind: A Good Premise for a Lousy Movie (Not Rated)

Blessed be Netflix, that magical website which allows one to watch terrible movies without feeling guilty about paying for it. After all, you already dished out $8 for the month. The only problem is that sometimes the movies aren’t just bad. They are horrid. Left Behind is a perfect illustration. One will, no doubt, walk […]
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 […]