Crime Films
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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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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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The Dark Knight (PG-13)
It is easy to write about a bad film, but much harder to write about a good one. Pointing to areas that are lacking is easy, but when you cannot find fault in anything, what do you write about? This is, in part, a consequence of the medium: a good film cannot simply be put into words or else it would not be a good film, only a good story
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Sicario: Day of the Soldado (R)
There were warning signs even before the title changed. After the moderate success of Sicario in 2015, screenwriter Taylor Sheridan promised an unnecessary follow-up that in true sequel fashion would be bigger, darker, and meaner than the original. Her character’s arc complete, Emily Blunt was out, and so were director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins. Josh […]
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Solo: A Star Wars Story (PG-13)
By all accounts, Solo: A Star Wars Story is the post-Lucas Star Wars movie that should feel most like a corporate product. In a bizarre paradox, it may actually be the one that feels most human. The other post-Lucas films have been intriguing but haphazard; that Solo possesses a simple sort of dramatic competency should […]
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The Lady from Shanghai (Not Rated)
Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai begins with the sea, roiling and foaming beneath the opening credits. Many films noir are laden with existential anxieties; indeed, fatalism and cynicism are as commonplace in the genre as stylized lighting, bantering innuendoes, and convoluted crimes.
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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 […]
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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.
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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 […]
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Full of Rag Water and Bitters: Blue Ruin (R)
You’re full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin and you spill out -Tom Waits, 9th & Hennepin The star-crossed lovers are dead when the movie begins.There was a story of love, adultery and murder left aside. There were years of trauma skipped over, the dissolution of one family and the rallying and recovery of […]
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Where the Violent Bear It Away: A Most Violent Year (R)
In a decadent society, decency is a sin, and it is one of the few that is unforgiveable. This is a lesson learned by Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), the borderline hero and heating oil entrepreneur at the center of J. C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, although he insists on learning the hard way. Adversity is […]
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A Simple Plan (R)
“The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist,” writes Baudelaire. It is the greatest trick of modernity, beginning with the Enlightenment, as well. And, if the various modern social projects from capitalism to communism had anything in common, it was their motivation to convince all of us that […]
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Nightcrawler: It’s A Free, Free, Free, Free Country (R)
Early in Nightcrawler, Lou Bloom sits with his back against a palm tree, staring at a white sand beach under the California sun. Behind him, a bicycler dismounts and chains up his bike. Bloom smiles. The scene cuts to Bloom pawning the same bike. In any other film, such a scene would stretch our credulity. […]
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John Wick: A Lot Of The Old Ultraviolence (R)
My qualms began with the poster. The show hadn’t even started. The film is called John Wick and the tagline is, “Don’t set him off.” The latest Keanu picture sits at the end of a long line of pun-titled actions films, like Max Payne or The Dark Knight. The title brings together the identity of […]
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The Judge (R)
Light is a universal symbol of truth. Though we associate it with warmth and openness, light carries a burden of pain as well. Stare into a floodlight and your eyes will water. Lasers—concentrated beams of light—can burn and cut as well as repair. Sometimes a light is so blinding that it obscures all but itself. […]
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Gone Girl (R)
For a film which depicts one of the more grotesque murders in recent cinematic memory, the most terrifying moment in Gone Girl is nothing more than the film’s hero being asked a few seemingly mundane questions about his missing wife by a pair of bored cops. Shortly before noon, on his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick […]
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Pulp Fiction (R)
Nobody ever goes to the bathroom in movies. As strange as amateur comedians seem to find this, it’s entirely reasonable from a storytelling perspective. It may not be completely realistic, but good stories seldom are. Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is probably the most famous exception to cinematic convention on toilet usage, with no fewer than […]
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Joe (R)
Joe Bageant tried to summarize rural Southern life with his book title, Deer Hunting with Jesus. With his new movie Joe, David Gordon Green presents the South’s Goth image, one that might be described with a title such as Deer Hunting, but Jesus Couldn’t Make It This Weekend. All of the classical tropes of a […]