Reviews
Coming Soon (see all)
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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, […]
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Searching (PG-13)
It’s incredibly difficult to make thrillers and horror films that revolve around technology. Those genres thrive off providing audiences with a universal experience they can relate to, and technology is constantly advancing to the point where a film may be of its time for a brief moment before looking dated in the future…
In Theaters (see all)
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Cold War (R)
Paweł Pawlikowski’s austerely beautiful Cold War begins with villagers performing a folk song about a man standing at his lover’s door, begging her to “open up.” This sense of longing courses through the film: to watch Cold War is to feel oneself hovering on the threshold of something mysterious, inaccessible, and slow to open itself […]
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The Favourite (R)
According to Hegel, every major historical event repeats itself twice; according to Marx’s notorious addendum, the first time is a tragedy, the second a farce. Most things happen twice in The Favourite, but director Yorgos Lanthimos reverses the rhythm so farce gives way to tragedy, or else layers the two over each other until we cannot tell […]
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Mary Poppins Returns (PG)
Although it’s somewhat of a cornball statement, and it’s certainly not applicable to this modern era of the House of Mouse, there really is some kind of Disney Magic. You’d have to go back several decades at this point to see that magic in action, but there was a time when Walt Disney Pictures knew […]
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Aquaman (PG-13)
When FilmFisher’s managing editor Timothy Lawrence asked me to review Aquaman, I groaned. I had only seen one DC film since Man of Steel (which I loathe), and that was the Marvel-esque Wonder Woman. I have heard tales of how Batman v. Superman, Suicide Squad, and Justice League are incredibly awful. Therefore I was not […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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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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 […]
New on DVD / Bluray (see all)
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Leave No Trace and the Gift of Fellowship (PG)
“It was a rough year.” This sentiment always begins its annual excursion as December comes to a close; in that tiresome week’s span during which Christmas is behind us and the short-lived joys of new year’s resolutions are ahead, there’s little to consider but the disappointments and shortcomings yielded from the last twelve months. And now, […]
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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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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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In the Mouth of Madness (R)
Last month, I had the pleasure of attending a horror triple feature at the Egyptian Theater that was a part of an ongoing series known as “New England Nightmares.” To be perfectly honest, New England has always been the perfect setting for ghost stories and horrifying haunts. It is a landscape where an original way […]
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Blade Runner 2049 (R)
Though it has now haunted me for nine months, when I first saw Blade Runner 2049, I did not find it very impressive. The Blade Runner of 1982 is a mad miracle of a movie and a hard act to follow. Though it would not likely be considered a very good film by most conventional metrics, it is […]
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi – An Explication (PG-13)
Although I have waited till now to publish any written thoughts on the film, it is fairly common knowledge in various circles of the internet that I do not much care for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The number of fishes above might also indicate this, though I have found it difficult to settle on a rating for the film, because my thoughts and feelings on it are mixed – conflicted, one might say.
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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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Annihilation (R)
Like Alex Garland’s first film, Ex Machina, Annihilation is a tense, well-paced story set in an oppressive environment and haunted by an uncanny terror. The score is dissonant and unsettling, the rules that govern the world are mysterious yet coherent, and its horror scenes are truly chilling. Lena (Natalie Portman) is a former soldier turned […]
Older Films (see all)
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Vox Lux (R)
“That’s the thing about pop music,” a young Celeste muses, “I don’t want people to have to think too hard, I just want them to feel good.” And yet, that line of thinking is a trap, a great deception that allows the artist to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes. Young Celeste, after all, […]
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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 […]
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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: […]
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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.
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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