Drama Films
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American Beauty (R)
According to the book Thinking Fast and Slow, it doesn’t take much for us to think something is good. A psychologist ran a study at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University that placed Turkish words (or Turkish sounding words) in the newspapers of each school. For several weeks, words such as kadirga, saricik, biwonjni, nansoma, and iktitaf showed up on […]
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God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness (PG)
When a movie studio produces the third installment in any series and that longed-for beast — that monetary white stag — the franchise, promises to emerge, they face a watershed question: numerals or subtitles? Historically, the dilemma has proven a little more complex than two roads diverging in a yellow wood. While some (recently, the […]
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Eighth Grade (R)
The irony that I usually write about horror films or coming-of-age stories for this site has not been lost upon me. In that respect, it feels like Eighth Grade is the perfect intersection of the two genres, as it surprisingly captures the very accurate, cringeworthy horror that going through eighth grade is actually like for most normal […]
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Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (PG-13)
Mr. Fred Rogers, the star of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, not only challenges the concept of love, but what it is to express it. Mr. Rogers believed that everyone had God-given intrinsic value that made them lovable and capable of loving one another, whereas most people feel or are told that in order to be loved they […]
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First Reformed (R)
Though Paul Schrader, writer and director of First Reformed, has had a long and storied career, he is best known for writing two very different works before the age of thirty. The first is the critical text “Transcendental Style in Film,” in which he noted a bridge of form, if not content, between the Calvinist […]
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Tully (R)
At first glance, Tully looks like another film that makes parenting – specifically motherhood – seem mundane and miserable. There are plenty of moments in the film where kids are kicking the backs of car seats and babies are crying, but Tully says there is another truth about motherhood that gives the mundane a meaning. […]
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Downsizing (R)
At the beginning of Downsizing, we meet Paul Safranek (Matt Damon). He dropped out of med school to take care of his mother in his cluttered childhood home. They talk about the recent breakthrough of miniaturizing people, which can shrink a person down to five inches tall. Apparently, this process will save the world from […]
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The Passenger (PG-13)
“I used to be someone else, but I traded him in.” In Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy posits that although modern man understands the world around him better than ever, his failure to understand himself renders him desperate to escape himself. Percy cites modern fiction’s common use of amnesia as a plot device as […]
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Phantom Thread (R)
Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the very best American filmmakers working today, and quite possibly the most interesting. His mastery of the craft is nearly unparalleled, placing him on that elusive, immortal plane where the likes of the Coen brothers, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg currently reside. Yet what sets him apart, even among such esteemed company, is how perplexingly eclectic he is.
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Lady Bird (R)
There are a great deal of moments in Lady Bird that made me feel as though I were looking into a mirror, nostalgic for a past that was incredibly close to Lady Bird’s. Those moments weren’t always the funny ones, to be perfectly honest. Those moments weren’t always the funny ones, to be perfectly honest. I distinctly remember squabbles with my parents, feeling as though I were independent enough at seventeen not to need their approval.
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American Graffiti (PG)
American Graffiti is arguably George Lucas’ masterpiece, not necessarily because it’s any more or less culturally significant or cinematically innovative than Star Wars, but simply because it’s Lucas’s most personal film. Here is a piece of his life, adapted into an ensemble piece that explores his own personal sense of nostalgia in a surprisingly bittersweet and grounded way.
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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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Dunkirk: The Better Part of Valour (PG-13)
There is an unspoken understanding among filmmakers that war is hell and that war films must convince their audiences of it. And it isn’t a controversial notion. The guy who exits the theater nodding sagely and remarks, “Man, war is hell,” can’t expect much pushback from his buddies. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk contributes to the genre […]
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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (PG-13)
Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story feels nothing like any other Star Wars film. At first, that’s jarring, even off-putting. Once you settle into its particular rhythm, it’s exhilarating. There is no opening crawl of yellow text setting up the story. There are no Kurosawa-esque wipes to transition between scenes. The story isn’t […]
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Jackie (R)
The aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is shown twice in Pablo Larraín’s Jackie. The first time the camera glides along behind the motorcade before swooping stylishly overhead to offer a brief, obscured glimpse at the President’s dead body slumped over in his wife’s lap. Then it is over. The presentation is slick, […]
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Snowden: Propaganda and the Mundane Beasts It Makes (R)
Oliver Stone is one of the few directors whose auteurism is his ideology. While he has hit a few correct notes (mostly in the Adagio for Strings sequences of Platoon) there is very little about his directorial style—no signature montages or lengthy tracking shots—that say “Oliver Stone” the way that his completely misinformed takes on […]
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A Gritty Goodness: The River Thief (Not Rated)
The typical hero of a faith-based film measures their own satisfaction with the ending by the metric ton. If you stuck a teaspoon in the ending of the average Christian film, you’d pull it out dripping with enough sweet goo to give everyone in the world a mouthful of cavities. We don’t merely like redemption. […]
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God’s Not Dead 2: First World Problems (PG)
If courage is a mark of greatness in film making, God’s Not Dead 2 is deserving of more than a few laurels. It takes real guts to give a movie called God’s Not Dead 2 a theatrical release date of April 1st. If the release date is analogous to riding a motorcycle without a helmet, […]
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Captain America: Civil War (PG-13)
This is the zenith of Marvel’s storytelling method. Over the past eight years – a time period winkingly referred to in the film – the studio has built an intricately interconnected “cinematic universe” through thirteen feature films. This model has drawbacks and benefits, both of which I discuss at length in my essay on The […]
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Spotlight: For the Sins of the World (R)
In The Brothers Karamazov, Elder Zosima addresses the monks at his abbey a few days before his death. He urges them to love one another and then reminds them that, though they have dedicated their lives to God, they are no more righteous than those who live outside the monastery walls. He says, “When [the […]