Reviews
Coming Soon (see all)
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Light from Light (Not Rated)
The central question of Paul Harrill’s gentle chiller Light from Light is the same one ghost stories have been asking for centuries: is the house haunted? Richard (Jim Gaffigan), who’s begun experiencing strange phenomena since his wife passed away in a plane crash, suspects it may be. Shelia (Marin Ireland), who works a normal desk […]
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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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Godzilla vs. Kong (PG-13)
Say what you will about Marvel movies: when Captain America and Iron Man came to blows in Captain America: Civil War, at least the filmmakers played it as a tragedy, not a gladiator match. The use of “v.” instead of “vs.” in the title Batman v. Superman made it sound more like a Supreme Court […]
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The New Mutants (PG-13)
It may be three years late, but The New Mutants is finally here. Getting to watch what is now officially the final X-Men film made under 20th Century Fox’s banner was nothing short of surreal because, at one point, I really thought it might never be released.* Last summer, I wrote about how Disney absorbing 20th Century […]
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Tenet (PG-13)
One suspects that Christopher Nolan became a filmmaker because film is a uniquely time-based art form. In Inception, minutes of waking life translate to hours of dream time; in Interstellar, an astronaut boards a spaceship shaped like a clock and travels into a black hole that stretches hours into years. Nolan is fascinated by time, […]
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The Invisible Man (R)
In the early days of cinema, just after the introduction of sound, many of the cinematic genres we’re familiar with today were crystallized by particular studios who focused their efforts on certain niches. Universal Pictures had the horror market cornered with their adaptations of late 19th century literature, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and HG […]
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JoJo Rabbit (PG-13)
Parodying Hitler is nothing new. Charlie Chaplin played him in The Great Dictator (1940), long before Look Who’s Back (2015), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Mein Führer: The Really Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler (2007), and the countless memes that subtitled Hitler’s bunker tirade in Downfall (2004). Before the U.S. had entered WWII, mocking Hitler for two […]
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1917 (R)
When I was about 13, my father rented (from an establishment called Blockbuster) an odd little film called Rope. He is an Alfred Hitchcock aficionado and had discovered that this was one of Hitch’s lesser known films, which he had yet to see. In the days before IMDb and easy internet access, information like this was […]
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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (PG-13)
An early scene in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a fitting metaphor for the film as a whole. Finn (John Boyega) and Poe (Oscar Isaac), fleeing TIE Fighters in the Millennium Falcon, escape their pursuers by “lightspeed skipping” – a dangerous maneuver (or so we’re told, though it goes smoothly enough for our […]
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Black Christmas (2019) (PG-13)
Further proof that studios think that any intellectual property is better than having no intellectual property, Black Christmas, the second remake of the original film, actually doesn’t benefit from its namesake since it bears very little of that infamous, incredible proto-slasher from 1974. The idea to update what was an incredibly socially relevant and quite subversive […]
New on DVD / Bluray (see all)
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Light from Light (Not Rated)
The central question of Paul Harrill’s gentle chiller Light from Light is the same one ghost stories have been asking for centuries: is the house haunted? Richard (Jim Gaffigan), who’s begun experiencing strange phenomena since his wife passed away in a plane crash, suspects it may be. Shelia (Marin Ireland), who works a normal desk […]
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The Irishman (R)
Roger Ebert once said that “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” In other words: length is not indicative of quality, but together, the two get along just fine. Few names are as ubiquitous with lengthy runtimes as Martin Scorsese, who, since the 1970s, has been making films that […]
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Marriage Story (R)
When I saw Marriage Story lately, I intended it to be the first in a double feature. After the film ended, however, I was so overwhelmed that I canceled my ticket to the second film and drove straight home, though I also considered turning around and seeing Marriage Story again that same night. A conventional […]
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Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal (Not Rated)
The premise of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal, a five-part animated series that aired nightly this past week, sounds like something that might have been cooked up by middle school boys during a slumber party: “Dude, wouldn’t it be awesome if a caveman teamed up with a T-Rex?” And yet, it is probably the most interesting cartoon […]
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Chernobyl (Not Rated)
HBO’s Chernobyl is the best thing I’ve ever seen on television. Yes, I know about Breaking Bad and The Wire. My assertion, from a position of respect, is that those shows indeed did it well for a longer stretch but, nonetheless, did not reach the heights of storytelling excellence delivered by Chernobyl. It seems logical […]
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Tolkien (PG-13)
The best film about J.R.R. Tolkien is still The Fellowship of the Ring. I use the word “about” because Fellowship gets at the purest elements of his legendarium and his soul. The Elves are still mysterious and dangerous, the world feels big and ancient, and the Shire gets a lot of screentime. I truly believe […]
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Mid90s (R)
Mid90s begins with a push, or rather, two. The film opens on production company A24’s logo, which has been fashioned by skateboards. A kid subsequently runs across the screen, shattering the logo. In the very next shot, the camera peers down a hallway for a few quiet moments until the silence is shattered by another […]
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The Mustang (R)
If The Mustang were a song, it would have been written and recorded by Johnny Cash. The fundamental elements are all there: Love, God, and Murder. It is the story of a convict who is placed in a very unique rehabilitation program: a rehabilitation program that uses horses. The old man who runs the program […]
Older Films (see all)
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Arsenic and Old Lace (Not Rated)
“What’s your favorite film?” It’s the question every cinephile delights to hear, yet also dreads. Delights, because finally someone made this social function less awkward — and besides, who doesn’t want to extol their loves before others? Dreads, because who can pick just one movie?
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Green Room (R)
The recent trailer for the now delayed Dune reminded us that “Fear is the mind-killer.” This mantra is particularly appropriate for the tumultuous year of 2020, as well as the regular Halloween season. As we enter haunted corn mazes to be scared by costumed spooks or social distance at home and watch scary movies, we experience […]
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Fright Night (R)
Here is a terrifying thought: we can’t outgrow monsters. Once they have been breathed into existence, there is no willing them away. They are eternal, the necessary evil that allows us to define better what goodness might look like. Their most frightening feature? The ability to adapt and survive and always find a way to feed off […]
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The Birds (PG-13)
“Consider the birds of the air,” Christ tells us. The birds neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, yet our heavenly Father feeds them, and so the birds remind us to depend on God, in faith, for our provision. Man is good at finding ways to provide for himself, though. Faith is something of […]
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Nosferatu the Vampyre (PG)
Twilight aside, the most ubiquitous images of the vampire hail from the black and white era: Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, he of the endlessly parodied accent, and the elaborately gothic sets and shadows of F.W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu. Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of Murnau’s 1922 film is an odd beast, though. As Dracula, Klaus Kinski is […]
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I’m Thinking of Ending Things (R)
I once had a math teacher tell me that any book that has to be read more than once to be understood isn’t a good book. At the time, I was not sure I agreed with her. If you asked me a few years ago, I would definitely have disagreed. Today, I am not so sure. To […]
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The Master (R)
Those who admire the films of Paul Thomas Anderson are no strangers to the labyrinths his thematic puzzle boxes construct — one could probably watch Magnolia half a dozen times in the span it would take to unravel all of its mysteries — and yet, The Master lingers tantalizingly even above this, the most oblique […]
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Gran Torino (R)
Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is a tall, white-haired, racist veteran of the Korean War trying to make sense of a changing America. The enjoyment he once found sharing his neighborhood with white folks has morphed into abjectly watching Hmong immigrants invade the homes around him. Faithful dog on one side and case of Pabst Blue Ribbon on the other, Walt is the weathered remnant of an America gone by.
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