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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Captain Marvel (PG-13)
Somewhere in Captain Marvel, the heroine (Brie Larson) sits down to chat with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). Earth has been invaded by shapeshifting aliens, and to prove he isn’t one, Fury rattles off a string of backstory details and character quirks. He then asks the good Captain to do the same, but instead of […]
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Alita: Battle Angel (PG-13)
Alita: Battle Angel knows exactly what kind of film it is. At one point during its two hour runtime, surprisingly brisk for a big budget Hollywood blockbuster these days, Alita (Rosa Salazar) straight up offers another person her heart. She goes so far as to remove it from her mechanical chest, holding it in her hand […]
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Vice (R)
When the 2019 Academy Award nominees were released in late January, many people were excited about who and what was being considered for an Oscar in the different vital and sometimes overlooked categories that make filmmaking possible. But of course, the highlights are the nominees for Best Picture, representing the best movies had to offer for […]
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The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part (PG)
The LEGO Movie is the best American animated feature film of the last decade. The LEGO Movie 2 is not. It’s not even the second best – that crown probably goes to Toy Story 3 – but I would put it in my top five. Stylistically, the sequel is just as strong as any of the other LEGO releases, which is […]
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Roma (R)
One of the greatest strengths of film as an art form is its innate ability to create a sense of empathy. The most affecting films are the ones we relate to most closely, not necessarily because we sympathize, which is merely to feel sorrow for a misfortunate without ever truly understanding the deeper connotations behind it, […]
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Bohemian Rhapsody (PG-13)
Strip away the controversy surrounding Bohemian Rhapsody, and all that’s left is a typical awards-bait biopic that’s not as bad as you’d feared. Nor is it as good as you’d hoped; it just sort of exists, with the occasional inspired moment and plenty of dull passages to fill the space in between those. In many ways, there […]
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If Beale Street Could Talk (R)
Born out of the same unobtrusive intimacy as Barry Jenkins’s previous offering, Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk is a visually lush and poetic laudation of the mysterious and transcendental thing that is love. It’s a celebration of love’s redemptive propensity and its healing properties. Yet more than that, If Beale Street Could Talk is […]
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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 […]
New on DVD / Bluray (see all)
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A Star is Born for the Fourth Time (R)
The Bradley Cooper-helmed remake of A Star is Born marks the fourth time that this story has been told through celluloid. Each film follows the same basic plot: a rocky romantic relationship between a talented man and woman. The woman rises to fame partially because of her connection to the man. And then the man […]
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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 […]
Older Films (see all)
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The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (R)
It’s a well-known fact: the cinematic year of 2007 was one for the ages. Those fortunate enough to live through it remember the year fondly; those who, like myself, thrived at that point on a steady diet of Veggie Tales and Disney’s Homeward Bound, admire it from afar in wistful retrospect. In perhaps the best […]
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The Kid Who Would be King (PG)
The inexplicably long-titled The Kid Who Would be King (was there no easier alternative?) opened at the end of January this year without any fanfare from 20th Century Fox. It’s no surprise that the film sunk like a stone at the box office. The marketing campaign just wasn’t appealing, there’ve been countless films about Arthurian legend, and, worst […]
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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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Sorcerer (R)
There are two extremes when it comes to film criticism: Romance and Reason. Those of a leftist temperament almost always veer too far into emotional fancy; those of the right tend to get bogged down with intellectual analysis. The truth is that film, like most forms of media, is a rough and ready mixture of […]
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Split (PG-13)
Whether you love him or hate him, you simply cannot deny that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is a singular voice, something of increasing rarity in modern American cinema. Once celebrated, there was a dark period for Shyamalan where his name elicited groans rather than excitement from the general public. In some ways, that’s unfair, since […]
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BlacKkKlansman (R)
Back in the summer of 1989, Spike Lee lit a joint that critics said was sure to cause riots and incite anger among young African American males. With a boombox in its hand and a “fight the power!” on its lips, the director’s third feature film polarized audiences, with some hailing it as one of […]
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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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